Is Employee Advocacy on Social Media Effective?

Best bang for the buck!

Isn’t everyone looking for that? No matter if it is buying a house, travel deals or social media marketing, people want to know where to focus their efforts on the biggest return with the least financial output.

The official question asked which started this article was “Where do we put our best efforts on social media with the least financial commitment?”

We wish we could give you a blanket answer that would be applicable to all of our clients, however, this is a very specific question that really depends on the current condition; future goals and expansion plans for your particular company.

That being said, there is one powerful tactic we implement that is extremely effective. It applies to companies that have some sort of team, whether they are employees or contractors.

The tactic is called Employee Advocacy. Using Employee Advocacy for social media means having your employees help disseminate, share, like and interact with all of your business content via social media.

Why is Employee Advocacy Effective?

In our experience, employees tend to be comfortable sharing the company business content on LinkedIn or Twitter. When company business content is posted on the company’s social media platforms, employees know they can also share the information, and that it is appropriate to share the information on their own social media platforms.

They know they are not going to damage the company by sharing the information because the information was originally shared by the company. In order to help promote the company. They are sharing their business content on LinkedIn or Twitter, Facebook, whatever makes sense to them.

In my experience, Twitter and LinkedIn have been the platforms that people are most willing to share business content on. And a good thing about it is employees, contractors, whoever it is that is officially on your team that’s going to help you promote your company via social, is that it makes them feel comfortable. They can feel confident about their actions, like “I know that I can share this information, I am not going to damage the company, I know it’s appropriate, I am not going to get in trouble for it.”

Employees Promote the Company Brand and Their Brand

By using company content, employees have a huge source of preapproved content that is appropriate to share, like and re-post. As the content is shared via the employee’s social media accounts, not only are employees promoting the brand of the company, they are also promoting their personal brand.

As the company succeeds, so does the employee.

To us, one of the most interesting benefits of this approach is as much as the employees work for you, they also are working for themselves and they are want to  ensure they are improving and working on their personal brand, therefore they are keenly aware of maintaining a professional and active social media presence, which in turn benefits the image of your company.

All Company Employees Have Appropriate Content to Share

No matter what level an employee is within the company, if they are able to share some industry or company information with their network, as that network builds, they are going to be that much more empowered to take care of their personal brand, take care of their career journey and have the skills to participate in social media from a business point of view.

And of course, there is an app for that! Hootsuite has a free employee advocacy resource kit which contains a white paper and all kinds of information to help get your employees on board with sharing company-related information. Hootsuite also has an app that really makes it easy for large companies to approve the content and support employees posting the content on social media.

So, you can have your cake and eat it too! Use employee advocacy to share your company content on social media while reducing your financial commitment.

Jen Kelly is a marketing consultant in Toronto and CEO of New Initiatives Marketing Inc. (NIM) serving growing businesses in Canada and the USA. NIM is the team to call for marketing execution excellence. For companies that don’t have a marketing department, we become your marketing department. For companies that have an existing marketing team and are challenged adding capacity and skills to their team due to a head-count freeze, we act as your marketing team’s right-hand, supporting the skills needed on a monthly basis. Contact us today for a conversation about your company’s marketing needs.