Employees: Your Company's Most Powerful Social Advocates

If you post regularly on social media, and your employees aren't engaging with that content, you're missing out! When your people like, share, repost or comment on your social posts, it expands the reach of that content and proves your company’s culture and quality. A strong base of employee advocates is a sign of a company with engaged people who believe in the product or service enough to recommend it to their followers and connections.

How does employee engagement on social media put your company at an advantage?

In our experience, we’ve found four main benefits to having active employee advocates:

1. Brand Awareness: You’ll gain brand awareness and visibility beyond what you would reach organically.
2. Recruitment: You will recruit qualified candidates for job openings. Good people beget other good people, so if you want to attract a similar caliber to your current employees, chances are your people are friends with the kind of candidates you’re looking for.
3. New Business: When more people advocate for you, your brand reaches new eyes and ears, including prospective clients, customers, and talent that would have never otherwise heard of you. And because someone in their network is promoting your products or services, there’s already a level of established trust.
4. Engagement: When a crowd gathers, other passersby get curious and check it out. The same principle goes for social media. If your post has substantial likes, shares, and comments, others are more likely to investigate.

So, you’re sold on engaging your employees on social. Great! But how do you do it? Mandate employees to like everything you post? No way! You want it to be as organic as possible.

• Lower the barriers by sending sample social media posts and optimized images. This allows your employees to plug and play on social. It’s important to make it as easy as possible for people to share new content or information about a job opening, blog article, upcoming event, etc.
• Create content that doesn’t suck. If you’re producing interesting articles, videos, podcasts, etc., then your employees might actually be excited to share (or brag) about the cool company they work for.
• Add social sharing icons to blogs and videos. This makes it beyond easy for your employees to share with just a click of a button. You want to make it as simple and as fast as possible for ANYONE that comes to your site to share your content.
• Set the example from the top. If your leaders regularly share on social, others will likely follow suit. 
• Engage with prospective clients. Encourage your team to help in the sales process by liking and following your prospects. 

Give it a try, and if your employees still aren’t willing to engage, maybe there are some quick changes you can make to your approach.

Need help building a strategy to engage your employees to be social media advocates? Connect with us today.