If you want to increase your company’s online presence and outreach, employee advocacy is the best way. Employee advocacy tools are used to share content with your company’s employees in order to increase social media interactions. Employee advocacy can also be an excellent tool to improve your company’s employer branding.
This article will, therefore, explain the following:
- What employee advocacy is
- Some examples of employee advocacy
- Employee advocacy platforms for different needs and how to best use them
Employee advocacy
Employee advocacy is the practice of empowering employees to use their social media accounts to promote the business they work for and share company content.
Why should companies use employee advocacy?
- To attract talent in the form of new employees.
- To build stronger relationships with present employees by empowering them.
- To generate more sales.
It is an excellent way for a business to achieve its online visibility and outreach goals. Companies become 79% more visible after using employee advocacy.
Employees can do this by:
- Getting involved in company activities
- Sharing company messages and posts on their social media
- Creating posts about the company they work for via personal stories and authentic messages about the company
Benefits of employee advocacy
What are the benefits of employee advocacy? The table below shows this.
| Benefits to the business | Benefits to employees |
| Build brand awareness. | Enhance their portfolios and build confidence. |
| Increase online engagements. | Networking opportunity. |
| Attract new talent. | Develop relationships. |
| Build connections with current employees. | Build connection to company’s management and other employees. |
| Increase sales. | Gain a better view of the company’s goals and purposes. |
Employee advocacy examples
There are two ways in which employees can participate in employee advocacy programs.
- Businesses can directly post the content on their social media platforms, which employees then share.
- Employees can instantly publish the content.
There are a variety of ways to use employee advocacy. Here are some examples.
- Images
- Information and text
- Encouraging employee posts
- Company blogs and news
Images
Images are a great way to engage external talent and potential customers. Having an image for your employees to share often is an eye-catching way that can make social media users stop ad read the post.
Information and text
Information and text posts are another way businesses can encourage and promote their company. Employees must use keywords that inspire their posts to make them exciting and readable.
For example:
Excited to start work on this next project.
This post could contain details about what the project entails.
Or, also:
Had a fantastic day at today’s training program.
This post could contain details about the tasks involved in the program.
Encouraging employee posts
Furthermore, companies can reach a larger audience by encouraging employees to make their posts.
Social media posts by employees are much more authentic and trusted by potential new employees. Therefore, this aspect of employee advocacy is exceptionally crucial.
Company blogs and news
Company blogs and news posts are also great ways to share content on social media. These posts can attract external talent and potential business partners or even customers.
Employee advocacy software
The problem with employee advocacy programs is that they can be challenging to set up, manage and keep track of. Therefore, there is software that allows businesses to set up and monitor their employee advocacy programs.
This software increases organic reach, creating authentic tracked posts to ensure employees share content.
Employee advocacy platform
There are a variety of employee advocacy platforms that businesses can use to push their online presence.
These platforms often also link to other social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, making sharing content directly from the platform easy.
Here’s a list of some of these platforms:
- LinkedIn Employee Advocacy
- Dynamic Signal
- Smarp
- Oktopost
- Sociabble
- EveryoneSocial
- Post Beyond
- Hootsuite Amplify
- Bambu by Sprout Social
Many of these platforms offer competition and gamification. This means that businesses can make their employee advocacy programs more entertaining and challenging for their employees by incentivising them to post and share content regarding the company.
Let’s explore our favourite tools more in depth.
LinkedIn employee advocacy tool
LinkedIn has an employee advocacy tool that can be used to monitor your employee advocacy program and see the results of the program.
Our article, LinkedIn Employee Advocacy, details how the program works.
Amplify employee advocacy
Amplify Employee Advocacy is a tool created by the social media management platform Hootsuite. This platform allows businesses to share content with their employees that employees can then share on their social media accounts.
The platform is also an app, making it easy to use on mobile phones. Businesses can share company announcements, marketing campaigns, company initiatives and much more on the platform to create a library of potential posts. This tool allows businesses to keep up with trends and information across various departments within the company. Social media managers within the company can also remind employees which posts to share on their social media channels.
In addition, leaderboards show which employees share the most content, allowing businesses to turn employee advocacy into something more fun and competitive, making it more worthwhile and rewarding.
This app is integrated with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Bambu employee advocacy
Sprout Social is a social media management platform that has established Bambu Employee Advocacy. This app allows businesses to enforce employee advocacy easily. There is a main board that all employees can see with up-to-date information about the company, which can help direct employees regarding what to post.
Features of this resource include:
- The ability to share content, news, and events with all employees.
- The option to suggest how the material will be shared (i.e. what caption to include, what hashtags to have, and whom to tag in the post).
- Notes can be added to the primary material board.
- Tracking the content shared by employees to see how well it performs.
- Prioritise certain items, so the employees know which posts should be shared first.
- Integrated with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Employee advocacy is an effective strategy to enhance a company’s online presence, brand awareness, and increase sales by empowering employees to promote their workplace via social media. Utilising employee advocacy tools, businesses can create, monitor, and manage a program that encourages employees to share content that is authentically their own, increasing the program’s effectiveness. The strategy not only benefits businesses in attracting talent and increasing visibility. It also provides networking opportunities and a better understanding of company goals for employees.
