Employee Advocacy on Social Media: What, Why & How to Do it Right

by Gaurav Agarwal Founder of ImaPRO - A Digital Marketing Agency.

What is Employee Advocacy?

Employee Advocacy is a way of promoting an organization by its employees. It is generally done in the social media by the employees of that organization posting good points of the organization in their pages or relevant groups which are read by their friends and the group members thereby making a number of people aware about the positive points of the organization even in just one post. This helps in establishing the brand image, increasing referral traffic, generating new leads for marketing, and sourcing potential hires. Apart from using social media, Employee Advocacy can also be done by gifting T-shirts bearing the company logo or some of its brands. These shirts when worn do direct publicity for the company. Likewise, if the employees are awarded or given incentives for what they do, the employees involuntarily promote the interests of the company by speaking some words in favor of the company.

Why is it required?

It is always good to have a brand image in peoples' minds whether about the company or the products it produces. It knocks the minds of the people whenever they go to buy such products. But since today information spreads like fire, the volume of good information that is to be spread by way of Employee Advocacy on social media must be great.

On the one hand, it gives the company an edge over its competitors as the words spread very fast on social media. On the other hand, it nullifies the effect of any bad information that is spread about the company or its products. It is also useful if the company decides to downsize its strength as it gives the employees the chance to publicize their profiles online, develop meaningful relationships with the existing and existing contacts, and progress in their careers.

How to do it right?

If you want to start Employee Advocacy but don't know how to go about it, then you must follow the following steps:

Set the goals what you want to accomplish. This ensures that the focus of the program is right.
Explain what benefits your employees will get. This ensures good advocacy from the employees because of incentives.
Train your employees what to post and whatnot. This ensures that the promotion takes place exactly as per the plan.
Make a person in charge of the Employee Advocacy program. Deputing a person in charge of the program and announcement of incentives and awards for the top performers make the campaign more interesting and bring out the best from the employees.
Launch the program. As the basics of the plan are laid out, it is now time to launch the program.
Maintain the program. The most important part of the program is to continue until the very end of it with the presentation of the awards and the incentives.

But before going for an Employee Advocacy program, you must make sure the workplace culture is alright, attend to the employee grievances and try to sort them out. This will make sure that the employees will publicize about the positive points of the company and not mention the negative points of it.

Just as social media marketing grips the whole world with a strong force, small countries like Bahrain are also not spared from it. The huge advantage that employee advocacy has brought to the marketing field has taken Bahrain by storm. Social Media Bahrain company IMAPRO has created a huge impact in the digital marketing field by using various innovative techniques like Employee Advocacy on behalf of the clients.

In fact, Employee Advocacy is just another type of advertisement used to increase brand awareness and generate marketing leads. But here is a different dimension that is added to the campaign. It is the involvement of the employees, who are the most important assets of an organization. The engagement of the employees is measured by the number of clients who respond to their posts or share their posts with other clients and the actual number of clients who are directed to the website and/or do some transactions, if possible.

The program needs to be started with a small amount of money and with the most loyal employees of the organization. Gradually as the other employees become aware of and start taking interest in the Employee Advocacy program, they can also be joined in the program. Soon, awards and incentives are to be announced so that the interest of the employees grow instead of diminishing. Appointment of an in-charge further boosts the interest. Thus, with a little or almost no investment, a huge promotion campaign can be conducted by the organization which increases the awareness, leads and employee engagement. This makes the organization more cohesive as a unit and improves the employer-employee relationship to a great extent.

No employee should be forced to enter into the campaign as some may not like to use their personal id to be used for the promotion of their company or its products. They may not be able to post under duress the same sort of publicity as the company wants. The interested employees should be given some guidelines like do advocacy without denting your profile, identify who can see your post, do not share financial data of the company, and say that you are not the company spokesperson, administration persons are to be contacted for any type of query.

There are many Employee Advocacy tools available online which you can use to prepare the advertisement content. Some of these are Bambu, Dynamic Signal VoiceStorm, Everyone Social, Falcon, GaggleAmp, Hootsuite Amplify, Influitive, LinkedIn Elevate, Peoplelinx, PostBeyond, Qubist, SMARP, SoAmpli, Sociabble, Social Chorus, Sprinklr, Trapit, and Tremolo. Check out which one is right for your current posting. Use it to the fullest and post your content like the giant of Social Media Bahrain IMAPRO, who is very adept at using these tools for the preparation of their content they use in running Employee Advocacy for their clients.