Employee advocacy

The employee advocacy or defense of the employee, is about awareness programs designed to mobilize and train employees to defend their company and their brands on social media, and, in fact, to be true brand ambassadors .

Employee promotion programs consist of encouraging them to participate in communication efforts and share valuable content from your company on their own social networks.

Advantages of having an employee advocacy program

Involving employees in a promotional program shows that you have faith and trust in them to act as agents on behalf of your company.

Nothing promotes the loyalty of your employees more than allowing them to share information, both content created by the company and quality content from third parties, on their different social networks.

The social media managers of your company can take care of quality and content, so that it is in accordance with the policies and values ​​of the organization.

Among the benefits of employee advocacy are:

1-Employees become promoters of your industry

By allowing your employees to defend your company on social media, you show that you are interested in building their personal brands.

Again, this lets your employees know that you trust them to promote the company on their networks.

If you don’t believe in the overall vision and culture of your company enough to allow your people to promote the company without feeling threatened, it’s time to reassess your priorities.

Make the necessary changes to allow your employees to become the most valuable defenders of your brand.

Discover how to achieve brand advocacy and increase sales:

2-Provide customers and prospects with real and meaningful interaction

Another advantage of having an employee advocacy program is that the employees’ friends and colleagues on social media know your employees on a personal and professional level.

More and more people consult social networks before buying a product or service; your networks are a valuable resource for them.

Consumers trust social networks because they know that they will not receive responses or recommendations from a bot trained by the company.

As individual employee networks begin to view them as industry experts, others can have confidence in employee recommendations and insights. This is good for your employees and for your company.

3-When employees post on social media, you get a different view than your company does

This is a great reason to harness the powers of your employee advocacy program. Employees don’t have to play by the same rules as corporate social media accounts when interacting with personal social media.

It’s true that employees should be careful about disclosure standards, but employee disclosure takes nothing away from a true employee advocate if they have built themselves up as an industry thought leader among their peers.

Tips for creating an employee advocacy program

Here are 4 tips to encourage your employees to become brand ambassadors and talk about the company independently on social media.

1-Train employees who are new to social media

Some employees do it very well and know the codes of the different social networks. But this is not the case for all. Some are newbies and need help. Offer them a guide for the proper use of social channels, help them to use correctly LinkedIn or Twitter, for example, the two most professional social networks.

You can also help them optimize their profile by updating their bio, their experiences and having them participate in a shooting for a suitable profile photo.

Lead by example by sharing the content yourself on your social accounts to encourage employees to become brand ambassadors.

2-Create content

To be successful in your employee advocacy program, the company must, of course, create quality content. Otherwise, employees will have nothing to share.

The content must be attractive to your employees, otherwise they will not want to share it. Make content that creates value for your audience, but also for your employees. They should be proud to stream this content.

3-Curate content

Also think about curating external content by sharing it. Industry news, for example.

conclusion

Give your employees the opportunity to become digital ambassadors for your brand. This has a positive impact on the image of the company.

It is true that creating an employee advocacy program is hard work, but always remember to keep the aforementioned benefits in mind as you work on these advocacy efforts. In the end, everything will pay off.