Employee advocacy and marketing go hand in hand.
The industry often discusses employee advocacy as a marketing strategy.
Us included! 🤝
It’s like all great duos.
You think Scottie Pippen, you think Jordan.
You think Han Solo, you think Chewbacca.
And thus when you think of employee advocacy, you think of better marketing.
It’s a no-brainer 🤷♂️
Employees have the ability to take brand messages further.
Up to 561% further, in fact.
(According to an MSL Group study)
Better reach = better brand awareness = better marketing.
But this fact, and many other employee advocacy stats like it, got us thinking…
Have we overlooked something here?
The Question
Does employee advocacy have a role to play in internal communications?
It sounds like a contradiction, right? 🤔
The very nature of social media is external, after all.
But consider this…
For any other company you want to keep up with.
You go to social media, right?
You follow their pages and you connect with their employees.
Brands know that that’s where their audiences are.
So it makes sense to reach them there 💪
Well, why not apply the same logic to your own workforce?
We’re not suggesting that all internal communications, no matter how sensitive, should be posted on social media for the world to see.
Far from it.
But if brand messages can be shared and amplified by employees who are connected to other employees, then, by default, more of your workforce will see your brand messages.
Not every employee will open (or read) internal emails.
And not every employee will frequent your company intranet.
But you’d better believe they’ll be scrolling 👏
Here, we believe, is where the opportunity lies.
You don’t want average internal comms, you want to reach as much of your workforce as you can in the most effective possible way.
Employee advocacy is not going to be the new internal communications.
But is it bridging the gap between internal comms and external comms?
That is, reaching a greater amount of your workforce via external channels.
We decided to find out.
The Data
So, that was our hypothesis.
But we decided to put our money where our mouth is, so to speak.
And did the research 📊
We analyzed over 1,000 social posts on LinkedIn that included company-centric content.
This could be a link to a blog post, a behind the scenes photo of a staff meet, or even a promotion announcement.
We then looked at the difference between posts shared by senior leadership (VP or above) and posts shared by non-senior leaders.
In total, we analyzed 400 posts from senior leaders and 599 posts from non-senior leaders.
Here’s what we found 👇
In total, a staggering 35.61% of interactions on all posts came from co-workers.
And interactions from co-workers increased when the post was company-centric.
Plus, company-centric posts engaged an average of 22.64 co-workers.
What’s more, senior leaders drove considerably higher co-worker interactions 📈
Co-workers made up for 37.5% of the interactions on senior leaders’ posts.
Clocking it at an average of 27.14 co-workers in total.
That’s some hefty executive influence!
These numbers tell us three things:
One: An external platform like LinkedIn can serve as a powerful “internal” communications channel.
Two: Senior leaders’ presence on social media is vital to effectively convey brand messages.
Three: Employees are seeing and engaging with their co-workers on social media.
So, what’s the opportunity here?
If 1 senior leader’s post can generate 27 employee interactions, then we have a ratio of 1:27.
Using this 1:27 ratio, a company with 250 strategic social ambassadors could engage as many as 6,750 co-workers on social media.
Similarly, non-senior leaders were able to generate interactions fom 22.64 co-workers, giving us a rounded-down average of 22 and a ratio of 1:22.
Using this ratio, 500 non-senior leaders acting as ambassadors could engage 13,500 employees.
Adjust the numbers to suit the size of your organization, but the opportunity is clear.
Employees are viewing company news on social media that’s shared by their co-workers and actively engaging with their posts.
Adding employee advocacy to your internal communications strategy could amplify the impact of existing internal communications programs.
Where to start?
If you’re new here.
And you’re not sure who we are.
Or what a DSMN8 (disseminate) is 🤷♂️
Well, we provide the tools that help you take your brand messages to the next level.
We’re the #1 ranked employee advocacy platform that brings all of this activity together.
We house employee advocacy all under one brilliant roof.
Allowing employees to easily locate and share the latest company news.
While integrating with your existing comms tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Ready to get started with employee advocacy?
Prefer to speak with us first?
No problem.
Schedule a call with one of the team.
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Lewis Gray
Senior Marketing Manager and Employee Advocacy Program Manager at DSMN8. Lewis specialises in content strategy, growing brand visibility and generating inbound leads. His background in Sales lends itself well to demand generation in the B2B niche.
