How Employee Advocacy Creates Authentic Brands

Whether or not your company is active on social your brand is; competitors, customers and employees are all talking about you. Don’t let these outside forces steer your brand reputation! Use employee advocacy to own, manage and build your company’s brand on social. Employee advocacy programs can have many positive outcomes both internally and externally, but this blog will focus on the brand building benefits achieved through employee advocacy programs.

Boost Reach and Awareness

Leverage your employees to drive impressions and boost the reach of your brand messages. When an employee shares a piece of branded content, it will (on average) reach 561% further than on your branded channels. This is because the average employee has 10 times more contacts and is widely considered to be a more trustworthy source.

Gain Trust

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, an employee campaigning for a brand is twice as likely as the CEO to be trusted. To further that, only 15% of adults trust a company’s social post whereas 70% will trust the messages they receive from friends and family.

Create Consistency

Engaged employees (aka brand advocates) are already advocating for the company and sharing on social. While this is a win – and should be encouraged – their messages may be off-brand or contain outdated information. Building an employee advocacy program allows marketing departments to curate up-to-date, high-value content that brand advocates can easily access and share. Further creating a consistent brand voice amongst a variety of employee groups and networks.

Repurpose Employee’s Social Media Use

The average employee will spend almost three hours a day on social media. Even leveraging a fraction of that time to build the company’s brand could provide significant benefits. Employee advocacy platforms allow engaged employees to easily share pre-approved content as well as inform and encourage less involved employees to join in the social sharing process.

Build Authenticity

It is the authenticity of your employees that builds trust and credibility. Encourage advocacy by allowing employees to share and comment on brand messages and updates. It is also important to note, employees who felt aligned to the company’s brand values and messages were more likely to speak positively and remain loyal to the brand.

Develop Thought Leaders

There are two ways thought leadership will affect an employee advocacy program:

  1. Piggyback off the success and reach of your best and brightest to facilitate brand growth. Companies who leverage their talented industry thought leaders can instantly boost the impressions and credibility of their branded content.
  2. Create future thought leaders through an easy to use employee advocacy platform that allows for one click sharing of high quality, curated content to help grow their network and further your reach.

Employee advocacy programs create a massive opportunity to leverage the reach, trust, and credibility of your employees to build and maintain positive brand sentiment within the marketplace.

Leave a Reply

Ready to get started with employee advocacy?

Request Demo