CASE STUDY

Turning in-active employees into Social Media Influencers with over $109,378 of impact!

Summary

An ROI of 8x plus increased brand awareness, website traffic and conversions.

All while driving a positive change in company culture?

It was all possible by leveraging Unit4's greatest asset… their employees!

Most of Unit4’s employees have a social media account on LinkedIn and/or Twitter. We also knew they were connected to the people most critical to the organization; customers, prospects, partners and potential employees.

The challenge?

Get inactive employees active on social media and stay active.

With DSMN8, Unit4 managed to encourage employees to start social sharing and build personal brands, while also promoting the organization.

Ensuring a win-win for both parties.

Client

Unit4

Headquarters

Utrecht, Netherlands

Company Size

2,600 Employees

The challenge

As communication, networking and business moves to an ever more digital and remote working world, Unit4 knew its employees would be central to helping navigate these changes and ensure business success.

Building a personal brand enables employees to showcase industry knowledge and expertise, leveraging social-selling and one-to-one relationships across social media. In turn, this helps increase organization awareness, sales opportunities and showcase company culture.

It’s an approach that would drive efficiency and impact like no other.

Yet there was a problem…

Many employees were currently inactive across social media.

Unit4 needed to engage leadership, sales, marketing and recruitment teams to share company-related content. Yet when they listened, they heard “I’m too busy”, “I don’t know what to post” and “I don’t feel motivated to post company content”.

Key Fact: Organizations typically see just 2% of employees sharing and creating company-related content. Introducing an employee advocacy program can see this increase to over 30%.

We can’t underestimate the impact of this initiative and technology on our business. It has fundamentally changed our culture and attitude. Employees are now empowered and enthusiastic, seeing their networks grow and having more conversations than ever before. All for the mutual benefit of their professional reputation and that of Unit4.

Emma KeatesGlobal Head of Communications

The solution

To solve this, while maximizing scale and impact would require a whole new approach and technology solution.

After a thorough review of employee advocacy solutions, Unit4 selected DSMN8 – for its advanced features and passionate team. Confident that the partnership could take results to the next level.

The evaluation focused on four essential requirements; relevancy, ease, motivation and analytics.

DSMN8 allows you to target content to each employee based on interests, department, location or language. Ensuring a highly relevant, custom content feed that refreshes for each individual and their specific tastes. Meaning there would always be something new and exciting for users to share with their networks.

We learned that time had been a barrier to employees building personal brands and being active. So we needed to make sharing easy. This is where DSMN8’s powerful automation feature came in!

Unit4 Case Study | DSMN8 Screenshot

Employees can opt-in to ‘automatic posting’ based on set criteria they choose – alerting the DSMN8 system to the content they want posting on their behalf, eliminating time-poor employees excuse of being ‘too-busy’ to post, as they were now able to maintain an active social profile on ‘autopilot’.

To help increase adoption further, the DSMN8 platform features leaderboards and a points-based gamification engine. Showcasing top-sharing individuals and the most popular content. This helps motivate individuals to increase activity, grow their network and improve their impact even further.

Tracking employees’ influence requires DSMN8’s central analytics dashboard. This allowed the team at Unit4 to monitor, learn and understand the true results of employees efforts. Metrics including active users, shares, clicks and content published were now visible with performance data such as reach, cost per click, clicks per share and comparative media spend.

Unit4 could now compare employee activity against paid advertising or email campaigns, attributing an ROI directly to this program.

Key Fact: Integrating an employee advocacy program with existing business processes and goals can improve user adoption by over 30%.

Onboarding and rollout were also critical to the initiative’s adoption and success. Unit4 initially leveraged 100 employees from the extended leadership team. Getting them to lead by example as advocates and promoters within their teams.

After this initial one week period, the program was opened to all 2,600 employees. A tutorial video was created for employees logging into the tool, and a Q&A session organized to answer employee feedback and questions.

After two months, employees were reminded again about DMSN8 and the program via a company-wide presentation at their Sales Kick-Off, titled “say goodbye to ineffective social selling”.

Key Fact: 64% of Unit4 users are using DSMN8’s automation functionality.

The impact?

In just four months, 1,252 employees (48% of the organization) joined the program and started using DSMN8 regularly, sharing 17,124 pieces of company-related content; a 171% increase prior to the initiative!

Over this time, employee activity generated the equivalent impact of $109,378 in media spend. That is how Unit4 would have had to pay to get the same results through paid advertising! Resulting in 30,041 clicks on employee shares, 4,321 website visits and 41 website conversions at just $0.44 per click.

That’s 92.7% less per click than what Unit4 typically pay to advertise on LinkedIn!

The initiative worked.

Educating employees about social selling and the importance of building a personal brand increased employee confidence on social, inspiring previously inactive employees to become ‘social media influencers’.

Unit4 employees fully embraced the program, its impact and choice of technology partner, with 64% even choosing to have content shared to their networks automatically through DSMN8.

Collectively, we successfully engaged the target audience of global leadership, extended leadership, sales, marketing and recruitment, plus interest from outside these areas within Unit4 also wanting to participate.

“The platform is easy to use and pick up, enabling me to build my network, have more conversations and identify more sales opportunities.” – Neil Georgeson, Global Head of Business Development – Unit4.

Senior stakeholders at Unit4 were so impressed with the program’s impact that they also invited over 200 external partners to join. With the goal to further improve the communication and knowledge of Unit4 amongst vendors & consultants.

Additionally, the program now forms part of the organization’s DNA and onboarding process for all new starters.

Key Fact: Engaging new joiners as part of the broader company onboarding program increased active users by over 55%.

By using DSMN8, the organization also benefited from employees seeing the latest company-related content available, improving internal communications and enabling Unit4 to disseminate information in a way employees find easy to access and digest.

In summary, this initiative and DSMN8’s innovative technology enabled Unit4 to reach and communicate with audiences more effectively and measure impact like never before, all through the people who know the business best: their employees.

37
Pieces of

Content shared

The average number of pieces of content shared by an employee.

Number of

Content clicks

The average number of clicks received on each employees’ posts.

1.8
0.44
Comparative

Cost per click

The cost for each click generated by employees activity.

Return

On Investment

The return on investment just 4 months into the programme.

8

This initiative has given employees who didn’t know-how, the knowledge, confidence and inspiration to become active social influencers.

Savana ter BurgCommunications Manager

Learn more

We help brands empower their employees to Curate, Create and Share on-brand content. Your employees will have access to both a desktop and mobile application where they can effortlessly share your content across social, messenger, email and SMS, boosting your organic reach while keeping them up to date with company news and industry trends.

Interested to see how you could turn your employees into motivated social influencers like Unit4 and super-charge your content efforts with DSMN8’s employee advocacy solution?

Get Started