What is Employee Advocacy and How Can It Help Me?

This article is taken from our original blog post entitled ‘What is Employee Advocacy and How Can It Help Me?’ — you can view the original post here. In this version for Medium, we’ve edited it to give you just the juicy bits. Enjoy!
Here’s the definitive guide to understanding what employee advocacy is and how it can help your career.
Employee Advocacy taps into all stages of the customer journey and the employee journey on a personal level. In essence, it serves everyone in different ways.
In this article we’re going to focus solely on you, the employee. Whatever your role is, you’ll learn exactly what employee advocacy is, how it works, and importantly, how it’s going to benefit you.
What is it?
Employee Advocacy empowers you and your colleagues to become brand ambassadors, by motivating you to share interesting content within your own social communities. You may not be a part of the PR team, you may not even be a part of marketing or sales, but you are a powerful PR machine.
Consumers and customers trust you more than they do your company’s PR team — as good as they may be! According studies from Nielsen 92% of people are going trust your recommendation over your company’s own corporate social media accounts and ads. That makes perfect sense when you think about how important word of mouth or a recommendation from a friend is.
You’re also more popular than your company, congratulations! Just kidding, it doesn’t work quite like that. But according to studies from the MLS Group, employees combined are connected to 10x more people than their employers online. Better than that, your posts will likely get over 500% more reach too. Your team has the potential to unlock a huge untapped market for your company.
How does it work?
You’re a brand advocate in many ways, from delivering good customer service, giving good advice or just by being amazing at your job. The foundation of Employee Advocacy lies in the content that your company distributes online, which is why it’s commonly seen simply as a marketing tool, mistakenly I hasten to add.
The basic explanation for how it works is that you and your colleagues extend the reach of company content by sharing it with your own online networks, where it’s relevant. Employee advocacy programs start with the company first creating the framework for you to feel safe and motivated about sharing content. This isn’t necessarily by setting rules like in your staff handbook, but more an agreed program giving you the specific tools for the task.
Different audiences have different interests. For example, if I’m the head of sales for Nike’s basketball shoe department (dream job), my online networks probably won’t appreciate me posting content about Nike golf clubs. Creating a framework is important for sharing goals and removing any anxieties about your employee advocacy program.
How you share and with which networks depends entirely on your audience and your own personal gains. For example, I tend to share one or maybe two posts a day that are related to my industry or interests (marketing, tech news, company content). 95% of the time I share this with my professional LinkedIn network, and my Twitter followers (because these are also mostly professional) where I know it’ll provide real value.
How does it benefit you?
OK now for the best bit, the benefits. Employee advocacy programs are engrained in company culture because they can include practically anyone and everyone. The best examples of employee advocacy programs include gamification and rewards to employees who participate. That can be a trophy, a donation to your favourite charity or any other prize that you’ve agreed with your program champion. There are other ways you can have fun with it too, like splitting into teams and competing for bonus points in challenges.
With 84% of companies using social media for recruitment, it’s important to boost and nurture your own personal brand, advocacy can be the way forward in doing so.
Boosting your online personal brand will open a lot of doors, whether that’s more sales conversions, better engagement on your marketing content or even if you’re looking for a new job. You may think that sharing content as a brand advocate just helps boost your company’s profile but actually as your social accounts fill up with valuable content and as your network grows (which it will), you become a trusted expert.
Check out our article on rocking your LinkedIn profile.
According to a study from Hinge, 47% of advocates have developed new skills, with a growing demand, social media being one of them. With these skills and keeping track of the engagement of your shares, you’ll have much better leverage for salary negotiations or even promotion talks. Think of your professional social accounts as your CV but supercharged!
86% of employees who act as advocates credit their social media activity as having a positive impact on their career. Sound good? If so, you need to learn more about employee advocacy and share it with your team. It may be a positive step for your company, but it will be a giant leap for your future career prospects.
Think you’re ready to unlock the social power of your personal accounts with your company? Download our free white paper now.
