Building a case for employee advocacy: a basic overview

Mobile screen showing Social

Marketing, in the broadest (unofficial) definition of the word, is the facet of a business that involves amplifying a message across a channel to reach a target audience.  Employee advocacy is a relatively new form of marketing that follows this same basic principle but adds a wrinkle; for marketing teams, employee advocacy involves leveraging the personal & professionals networks of the employees themselves to amplify that message.  The beauty of this concept is that for marketing (or for recruiting purposes, talent acquisition) professionals, the message is controlled and both the channel and the audience already exist in an immediately accessible place.

The rise of social media has allowed people to connect and share information from trusted sources at unprecedented rates.  The keyword here is trusted92% of consumers say that a recommendation from a friend or colleague is the single most powerful determinant of their purchasing decision (https://getambassadors.com).  Applying this data to marketing makes it easy to infer that content shared to an individual’s network carries more weight than the same content seen by the same people posted by a company/brand.  There are mountains of data supporting the notion that posts from employees on social media get more engagement/re-shares than posts from a company – but we’ll leave that at the door for now.

For a marketer, asking employees to post thought leadership content or content relevant to the company on their personal social media networks is a huge challenge for a number of reasons which is why employee advocacy platforms exist to make the process both simple & fun for employees to start sharing and for marketers to be able to measure the results to build a case for social.  Bottom line, people trust people and people are actively communicating with one another on social media sites; with employee advocacy software, marketing professionals now have the means to capitalize on this previously untapped potential to grow brand awareness and remain top-of-mind for prospective clients.

This article was written by Alex Riesz, Sales Development Representative at ClearView Social.

Want to get more of your professionals sharing to social media? Download our free strategy guide, “10 Ways To Get Your Employees Sharing To Social Media