Reading Time: 6 minutes

Having your employees on your side is important. And it starts with making them feel included.

The truth is that your own employees are some of the easiest people to recruit to your company’s social media pages. Most of them will quickly accept your invitation, not least of all because they know the other people who frequent the page (their colleagues).

But being easy to recruit is not the only reason you should get your employees engaged with your social media campaigns. It turns out that companies in many different industries are getting departments far beyond sales and marketing involved in their social media efforts, and for good reason.

Check out why you should get employees engaged with your social media, and how much the adoption of employee advocacy programs has increased across various industries…

Why do you want your employees engaged with your social media?

According to an article on Inc.com, Employee advocacy results in “5x increase in web traffic and 25% more leads.”

Here are a few of the ways companies benefit from employee engagement with their social media accounts:

  • Employees can help with recruiting efforts.
  • They can help your business generate leads.
  • Social media engagement improves team relationships and job satisfaction.
  • You can repurpose employee’s social media use to be productive rather than distracting.
  • Prospective clients are more likely to trust your employees than your executives.

The majority of employees at your company are viewed as regular people, especially if they don’t work in the marketing or sales departments. That makes prospects less wary of their intentions because they aren’t actively running a marketing campaign or trying to drive up sales numbers as part of their paid position.

In fact, the Edelman Trust Barometer shows that brand promotion done through an employee is twice as likely to be trusted compared to promotion from the CEO.

Take a look at this chart that surveyed which forms of advertising people trust the most:

Image source: Nielsen

You can see in the advertising chart from the Nielsen Company that the most trusted form of advertising has consistently been recommendations from people the prospective customer knows.

How many employees do you have? How many people does each employee know?

Chances are, the connections of all your employees adds up to a lot of people. And if your employees are happy in their jobs and involved in your company, they may be likely to recommend your products and services to people they know, even if they are not in the sales department.

The thing is that you have to let your employees know both that you encourage them to share information about the company and what they should be spreading the word about.


.

Employees are a marketing source that’s always on. You have access to your current employees’ attention more than any other audience. That attention, along with the trust people have in their opinion of your company, makes them a valuable channel for your marketing messages.

Managing your online reputation is crucial because job applicants, customers, and your competitors check out your company on social media.

What increases employee engagement?

Now, just because employees are available and trustworthy in the eyes of people they know doesn’t mean they will automatically be on board with being a social media ambassador for your company.

So how do you get them to engage with your marketing efforts?

First, take a look at this research on employee social media checking behavior:

Image source: PostBeyond

As you can see in the graph, employees are already checking their social media while they are at work. You might as well use that to your advantage and make their time on social media more productive for them and for the company.

You can try sending company email newsletters with social share links as a simple way to start. Many companies eventually switch to a more formalized social advocacy program for employees, with goals, metrics, and specific software.

DrumUp offers an employee advocacy platform that helps to get more social engagement from your employees.

According to PostBeyond’s Employee Advocacy Guide, “As with most marketing campaigns, the more effort and strategy that goes into a program the better the results.”

Employee advocacy in various departments

In a primary research survey conducted by PostBeyond and Golfdale Consulting, it was found that 33% of surveyed US and Canadian employees agreed that relevant content would encourage them to share. A third of your workforce sharing your marketing content is decent leverage–for free.

And you don’t have to limit brand advocacy to certain departments. Here are ways that various departments can utilize employee social media engagement to the company’s benefit:

  • Sales – Social selling to improve closing rate
  • Marketing – Increase market reach and drive more traffic to the website
  • Human Resources – Utilize social recruiting and improve employer reputation
  • Communications – Build brand trust and humanize the company

In the sales department specifically, customer relations have a lot to gain from employee ambassadors. According to a study from Forbes, “72.6% of salespeople engaging in social selling outperform non-social media users, and exceed quota 23% more often.”

Human resources departments can also make a big difference for your company by utilizing social media. Recruiting the right people requires you to present yourself in a good manner online because that’s the first place applicants are going to go to find out about your company. And referrals are one of the top sources of external hires.

On average, employees are going to have 10 times more connections than your brand channels. Let that sink in for a moment…

That means that even your employees outside of the marketing department can make a significant contribution to your marketing campaigns–all without any extra effort on their part because they would have been sharing on social media anyway.

Employee advocacy in various industries

According to the Institute for Public Relations, adoption of employee advocacy programs has spread across industries. Whereas highly regulated industries, like financial services, legal services, and healthcare were holdouts only a few years ago, they have now joined other industries in forming employee advocacy programs.

Here are a few examples of companies in various industries that have adopted employee advocacy programs:

  • Volkswagen pilot tested an employee advocacy program in 2017.
  • The video game publisher Electronic Arts started the EA Insiders program that generates tens of thousands of social shares each month to a network of over 1.1M.
  • Kelly Services staffing agency realized that they could “outpace [their] corporate marketing channels 10x” if they harnessed the power of their employees.
  • Coupa, a tech company, says that “Instead of fighting employees’ desire to be on social, we’re choosing to embrace it.”
  • The e-commerce company Zappos “keeps a leaderboard that lists the top performing employees in social media” in order to inspire employees to participate in their employee advocacy program.
  • Starbucks got wonderful participation in their employee advocacy program by calling their employees “partners”.
  • Yorkshire Building Society, a 150 year old financial institution, realized that there is an intangible value you can provide to people that technical jargon simply cannot fill.

Social media platforms were always meant to focus on users over brands. And as consumers fight to regain freedom from intrusive advertisements, it’s the one-on-one connections of people that are going to keep your brand alive on social media.


Save time managing your social media accounts

Are you still managing your social media accounts directly from Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn? Make your life easier by managing all your social media in one place, schedule posts, repeat posts, curate content and more. Try DrumUp now, it's free, forever.

Social media as a marketing platform is not going to go away. But the methods are changing. And your employees are the people who can maximize your results.

Good business practices have come full circle

It’s funny how business advice comes around full circle. Making happy employees a priority has been good business advice.

Right now it can definitely benefit you to keep your employees invested in the company’s success. Social media platforms want to keep their users. And users are always going to want more interaction with people, not pages.

Image source: Unsplash

In truth, your employees and their authentic connections are more influential than the most famous influencers in your industry. They know more about your brand than any influencer will. And they care more about your brand because their job literally depends upon your company’s success.

It may seem scary to let your employees loose on social media. But the truth is that you’re more likely to receive positive connections from your employees than negative ones.

You need your employees more than ever

According to SalesForce, Facebook “recently updated its algorithm to limit content from brands and emphasize posts made by users’ friends and family.” That makes sense for their users. But as for companies trying to utilize the platform, it means that you depend on your employees now more than you ever have. Because your official channels are simply not showing up in users’ news feeds.

The bottom line is that you absolutely have to continue creating content and publishing posts to your company social media channels. But it’s going to be your employees who have the most impact on the success of that content.

Turn your employees into your social ambassadors with DrumUp’s employee advocacy and engagement platform.

Image source: Reshot