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Employee Advocacy

What is Employee Advocacy?

By Lewis Gray17/06/2022March 6th, 2024No Comments
Employee Advocacy Defined

If you’re here…

It’s because you’re at the start of your employee advocacy journey.

And frankly, that’s awesome.

Prepare to have your mind blown.

And to rethink the way you promote your company on social media.

…as you realize the potential of your employees’ influence!

I’m almost a bit jealous!

It’s like when you’ve binged a whole series on Netflix.

And LOVED it.

And then your friend says they’re going to start watching it.

You get a bit excited for them and get a big feeling of FOMO.

Anyway, I’m getting way too ahead of myself.

I’m just reminiscing about the days I spent bingeing Game of Thrones.

But I get just as excited about the benefits of employee advocacy 🔥

So, let’s get into it!

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What is Employee Advocacy?

Employee advocacy is the promotion of an organization or its products/services by its employees.

An employee advocate creates positive exposure for your brand by sharing content or “advocating” for products or services.

These engaged and motivated employees are able to amplify your company’s online presence by sharing brand messages with their own professional and personal social networks.

Employee advocacy takes a number of forms.

But let’s look at some examples 🙌

If one of your colleagues shares a blog post from your company on LinkedIn.

That is employee advocacy.

They’re promoting a piece of company news to their network.

(or a piece of thought leadership!)

Here’s our VP of Marketing, Jody Leon, doing the most! 💪

Jody Leon Employee Advocacy Example

If you share a behind-the-scenes photo from a company away day on Instagram…

That is also employee advocacy.

You are promoting your company culture.

And elevating your company’s employer brand.

(depending on the nature of the photo anyway!)

Here’s Gymshark’s Chief Brand Officer, Noel Mack, showing us how it’s done! 👇

Noel Mack Gymshark Instagram

When you think of brand advocates

You might think of bringing in external people or influencers.

However, unlike traditional influencer marketing…

Employees aren’t being paid extra to do it.

Employee advocacy is simply an employee sharing company content with their network 👍

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Why is Everyone Talking About Employee Advocacy?

Employee advocacy has been a trending topic in marketing for years.

So why is EVERYONE talking about it now? 🤔

Well, when 2020 hit.

And the pandemic came along…

Brands had to adapt.

Networking and marketing shifted to a 100% digital strategy.

As a result…

Companies quickly realized the role their employees could play.

Plus the advantages of their employees having a social media presence.

So, naturally, they began to leverage this.

Employee advocacy had been popular.

Now, it’s become ESSENTIAL 👏

Research and Consulting firm Gartner predicts that by 2023…

90% of B2B marketing strategies will include scaled employee advocacy programs.

Grab a comprehensive guide to employee advocacy and employee influence to learn all you need to know! 👇

Does Employee Advocacy Work?

To put it bluntly…

Yes 😎

But why?

These days, people want to hear from people.

Not brands.

On sites like LinkedIn especially!

We’re more likely to follow a company’s employees than the company itself.

Buyers want transparency and authenticity now more than ever 👏

A message from a “regular” employee has a much more authentic and trustworthy feel to it than a message from the company.

It’s not all about authenticity.

Trust in brands is declining year on year.

The Edelman Trust Barometer 2022 found almost two-thirds of people are inclined to distrust organizations.

In fact, 76% of people say they’d trust a message from someone they know over any form of branded content.

But that’s only half of the story.

Sure, it’s more authentic, more trusted, and it’s what buyers are looking for.

But what does all of this translate to in terms of marketing, HR, and sales benefits?

On average, employee posts receive 8x more engagement.

Plus, in terms of reach…

Brand messages were found to reach 561% further when shared by employees.

A piece of content from an employee could travel the world while the company post was still putting its shoes on!

You can learn more about the performance benefits with our free employee influencers guide.

A great employee advocacy program will:

🔸 Amplify company messages through employees’ networks.

🔸 Offer an “inside look” at life at the company.

🔸 Allow your employees to position themselves as experts and thought leaders.

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Do You Need an Employee Advocacy Platform?

Well, strictly speaking, no.

Not to begin with anyway.

But, speaking from experience…

Scaling an employee advocacy program is really, really, really tough without a platform 😰

Plus, without an employee advocacy platform in place, you lose the ability to monitor the performance of your employees’ social media efforts!

Sure, without a platform you can measure things like total content impressions, engagement, and employee follower growth in a spreadsheet, for example.

But what about the really good stuff?! 😱

You want to be able to track things like clicks, and determine which content is generating more engagement. What’s resonating with your employees’ networks?

Not to mention the fact that monitoring metrics manually becomes extremely difficult with any more than about 5 employees, as it requires them to manually enter their data.

(Shameless plug alert 🚨)

An employee advocacy platform like DSMN8 allows you to centralize all of your company content, so that employees can easily locate the latest and most relevant content to share.

You can even offer pre-approved captions for them to use when sharing, to ensure that everyone stays on brand while removing the need for employees to stop and think of something to say.

We know how busy people can get! 👍

You can also incentivize people to share with gamification.

Leaderboards within the platform allow you to highlight top performers and congratulate your most successful employee advocates.

(for example, by most clicks generated or the most shares)

Plus it will start a friendly sense of competition among your employee advocates!

Most importantly though, our analytics suite allows you to measure the advocacy program’s performance as a whole.

Measure everything from clicks to CPC and earned media value (ROI) in real-time.

If you had to get budget sign-off for employee advocacy, you’re going to need to demonstrate the ROI!

If you’re ready to get started with employee advocacy…

You can grab our free (tried and tested) guide to getting set up to generate the best results 👇

Ready to get started with employee advocacy?

Book a demo!

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.