Employee advocacy is a powerful strategy for raising brand awareness in social media. While bloggers, thought leaders, and social media celebrities have an established following that can trust their views wholeheartedly, your employees can give the online audience a peek at your company culture. Furthermore, employees are approachable sources of information that can help prospects in case they have any questions regarding your products or services.
However, why employees rather than a centralized account for your business? According to a study by Cisco, employee posts can generate 8X more engagement than branded content from the company. Furthermore, their social media accounts usually have 10X more reach.
However, successful employee advocacy takes more than just asking your employees to post stuff online. You also need to develop a harmonious company culture, set policies that control what employees can post, and help them extend their social reach. Furthermore, you need a creative campaign that can give your employee advocacy program some traction.
Here are ten companies that did employee advocacy right:
1. Starbucks
One of the commendable tactics in Starbucks’ brand advocacy strategy is that they refer to employees as “partners.” This simple decision granted employees the sense of belongingness and accountability for their social media activities.
A crucial ingredient in their employee advocacy program is the comprehensive social media guidelines they made widely available to their partners. They also built dedicated social media accounts for their partners, which now has almost 44 thousand followers on Twitter and over 340 thousand likes on Facebook.
2. AT&T
AT&T’s employee advocacy program was dubbed “Social Circle.” Its main goal is simple: identify employees who are most active on social media and use their accounts to help promote the company. They also did not implement strict rules and allowed employees to use their personal voice.
Although the plan is as straightforward as it gets, it worked very well for AT&T’s particular position. As a big company, over 2,300 members volunteered to spread behind-the-scenes information and news about the firm.
3. IBM
IBM is another major enterprise that benefited from their sheer size when it comes to employee advocacy. However, part of their success is due to their Redbooks Thought Leadership Program, which involved helping their staff improve their blogging and social media skills.
In exchange, participants were asked to contribute to the Redbooks blog, whether it is about their personal experiences or insights about the company’s products and services. Today, the content is available via a desktop browser or the Redbooks mobile app.
4. Bluewolf
Bluewolf is an international IT consulting firm that truly valued employee advocacy. In 2012, they launched #GoingSocial, which encouraged employees to build their personal social brand. Take note that, for shared content to “feel” more authentic, they should come from a channel with an individual personality.
Throughout the campaign, employees had access to tools and video tutorials that helped them establish their online presence. Given today’s cloud technology, implementing a similar strategy as Bluewolf’s #GoingSocial is more than doable to startups and SMEs.
5. Zappos
Zappos takes pride in having a free, tightly-knit culture. This culture shows in the way employees or “Zapponians” can tweet about their day-to-day operations. It does not matter if it is a costume party or employees grouped together in a meeting. As long as it is about the employees, it deserves a spot in the EyeZapp — Zappos’ official Twitter page for employee advocates — with the hashtag #CompanyCulture.
As a result, the Zappos can attract not only customers but potential employees who wish to become part of the company culture. To inspire employees to participate, the company also keeps a leaderboard that lists the top performing employees in social media.
6. HPE
HPE’s employee advocacy strategy is unique due to their use of EveryoneSocial — an employee advocacy platform. It is a service that helps businesses unlock the power of employees in extending their social reach. With EveryoneSocial, the company was able to easily curate, manage, and publish content in their chosen social media channels.
To help fuel their advocacy program, HPE offered incentives and guided employees on the proper way to interact with social media platforms. Gamification, in particular, is one of the effective tactics that increased the employees’ drive in advocating for the brand.
7. Vodafone
As a company built around connecting people, you would expect Vodafone to know how to connect the online audience with their growing company culture. However, their employees didn’t know what they can and cannot share at first. That is why their priority was to establish a social media policy that allowed employees to share Vodafone-related content.
Apart from the approach of letting employees use their personal accounts, Vodafone also occasionally feature the skills of employees in their corporate blog. One example is when they talked about the astrophotography skills of their resident expert.
8. Reebok
The success of Reebok’s employee advocacy program revolved around encouraging employees to share their passion for fitness and then incorporating a provocative hashtag — #FitAssCompany. As a result, the company can easily track the content that employees were sharing and evolve their approach over time.
Reebok also valued the openness within the organization and encouraged employees to be authentic. However, to keep the brand relevant, they wanted employees to focus on sharing fitness activities such as weight-lifting, running, and cycling.
9. Sprint
Sprint’s take on employee advocacy is through the Social Media Ninja Program. It started with 50 volunteer employees who can share company-related content in social networks they prefer. With the help of an editorial calendar and topic suggestions by the management, employees were able to communicate and develop a consistent brand.
Today, over 3,000 employee volunteers always engage with the online community to maintain brand awareness. When it comes to rules, Sprint only has a few reminders such as don’t promise anything they cannot deliver and avoid giving out speculations.
10. Dell
Through Dell’s social media employee training program, over 10,000 employees are now engaging the online community and posting brand-related content responsibly. To inspire more employees to join, they will be granted the title “Dell Certified Social Media and Community Professional” upon completing the program.
Conclusion
Employee advocacy may not be a new concept, but creative ideas are not always easy to come by. Hopefully, the companies above gave you some inspiration for your employee advocacy program. The next step is to focus on developing your company culture and sharing them with the online community through your loyal employees.
Originally published at www.everyonesocial.com on December 13, 2016.
