Building Your Online Presence Through Employee Advocacy

May 16, 2019

Employee advocacy is one of the key ways to help your social media channels thrive. Encouraging your employees to share your company’s social media posts will help drive engagement and also help extend their reach, as the network algorithms reward those posts that are more popular, thus extending the chances of your posts being seen by more people.

Encouraging your employees to share your posts is a free and simple way to help build your online presence. In this blog post we’re going to run through some of the ways you can encourage your staff to share your social media updates and some content ideas for your posts too.

In the meantime, in case you’re wondering if employee advocacy is important for your business, read these key facts, that we’re sure you’ll agree, could make a major difference to your social media campaigns:

• Employees have an average of 1090 social connections (and growing)
• Employees have 5x more reach than corporate accounts
• Social followers of your employees are 7x more likely to convert
• 84% of people trust recommendations from friends, family and colleagues over other forms of marketing

(EveryoneSocial.com February 2019)

What is organic social media?

Organic social media refers to posts that appear on social media channels without any form of boosted (paid for) distribution. So organic refers to posts that appear ‘naturally’ within a social media feed and does not involve any payment. For small businesses, it is not always possible to pay for marketing on social media, so looking at ways to increase the reach of your organic social posts can be extremely beneficial in helping you to stand out from your competitors.

Why organic social media?

The main purpose of organic social media is to build a community of loyal customers and followers. As the algorithms develop and become more sophisticated, the chances of your posts being seen is lowering. In a keynote speech from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, he stated that he wants to “engage users on the platform”. This approach is being mirrored across the board and posts are being rewarded by all of the big networks for promoting a positive user experience. As a result, if your followers engage with your content, the algorithm will allow more of your users to see your posts, but only if the content is deemed ‘engaging’.

Paid promotions continue to be one of the most lucrative and successful ways to be seen in the social media space. However organic social media posts also have their place in social media strategy, offering the chance to build your profile without incurring any initial costs.

Organic social media is a cost-effective and long-term marketing solution that can be used to develop your brand and maintain your brand presence. Establishing a robust social media presence is essential to your brand and forms a good basis for paid advertising, (if you decide to go down a route with a budget). Having a social profile full of healthy content will demonstrate your company’s credibility as well as being used as a tool in which to nurture your audience with content that leads to engagement and eventually loyalty. And as social pages are ranked in Google search, it’s another good reason to keep up with healthy posting across the channels you have chosen.

Employee sharing tips:

• Firstly, add social media buttons to your website and all internal and external correspondence – pretty much everywhere you can! Without telling everyone you’re being social, no one will know or easily be able to follow you on them.
• Ask your employees to like / follow all of your social channels.
• Continue to encourage your employees on a regular basis to share company content as much as possible, explaining that it’s a voluntary social sharing scheme and not mandatory. You don’t want to ‘force fun’ onto your staff!
• Give the okay that it’s ok to be ‘social’ at work and explain the benefits of sharing company updates to them – it can help them to develop and build their own personal brand and increase their own networks; help to boost brand awareness for the company and the company’s talent acquisition; drive harder and faster revenues; as well as help employees’ own career growth and thought-leadership reputation.
• Encourage your employees to have active, up-to-date profiles and to connect with one another.
• Share your content calendar with employees. Your calendar lists the dates and times of posting, so you can give them a heads up for potential sharing options.
• Offer an incentive to your employees for shared posts with the most engagement.
• Lead by example – encourage the management and executive teams to share posts.

Content ideas for social media posts:

• Promote your own products and services – be proud of your brand!
• Share blog posts, they’ll help you become an authority in your field and should be interesting enough for both your followers and employees to want to share.
• Share snippets from the company’s culture and company events – any pictures involving members of staff are bound to be shared by them!
• Sharing industry news and statistics, a piece of industry research or inspirational quotes can show your brand to be a thought-leader.
• Share curated / third-party content, videos and podcasts – you never know, someone might return the favour and share or ‘create a conversation’ with some of your content.
• Ask questions, get to know your followers, which will in turn provide instant engagement.
• Share product / company videos – it will help your brand be informative and interesting.
• Customer reviews and testimonials – helping to create confidence in your brand and company.
• Provide quick tips and advice – these have great sharing potential.
• Sharing answers to some common questions will again showcase your brand as an authority in its field.
• Share industry infographics and links to free resources – information that will be useful to your followers and staff.
• Company recruitment / new hires / welcome posts and accomplishments – great for employee sharing.
• Promote email signups – think of ways to cross-channel promote and make your reach extend further.

Your organic social media strategy should not be ignored and is just one cog in your brand’s marketing engine, it can in fact work incredibly well alongside your paid social and email marketing efforts. Allow your employees to become brand ambassadors for your business and you will reap the many rewards!

If you need any further support with your social media strategy, get in touch with a member of our team today. Or apply for a FREE AUDIT of all of your digital marketing channels, including social media.