Despite the many benefits of employee advocacy, only 20% of employers implemented an employee advocacy program on social media in 2022. This is a missed opportunity, as sales reps using social media as part of their sales techniques outsell 78% of their peers, according to Forbes. Few companies are equipped with the right tools and resources to include employee advocacy in their content strategy. But, today’s employee advocacy platforms make it possible for any company to implement this element in their content strategy.
An employee advocacy platform simplifies the process of organizing and distributing company-related content from your team to their followers. These tools make it easy for your employees to share. This results in more leads, more applications on job posts, more event registrations, and more eyeballs on your content.
Social media posts shared by employees get 8x more engagement than posts shared only on company pages. Learn how to get started using an employee advocacy platform in your content strategy to see a measurable difference in results.
The power of employee advocacy content
Employee advocacy (EA) is the practice of featuring employees’ voices, experiences, and testimonials to promote the company and brand. Harnessing your employees’ perspective in your content strategy nets a number of benefits for your brand’s outreach efforts.
Increase reach and visibility
By encouraging employees to share on their personal social media channels, your brand is able to reach new audiences who may not follow your company profiles.
Improve credibility
Employee advocacy holds similar weight as influencer marketing. Recommendations from your employees carry more weight than those from the brand itself, which can lead to more organic engagement.
Enhanced brand reputation
Employee advocacy can mitigate any negative customer reviews or bad news stories that may impact consumer trust in your business.
Cost-effective marketing
Especially when using an employee advocacy platform, this strategy tends to have high ROI, since it leverages existing employees rather than requiring new paid media.
The key to making employee advocacy a cornerstone of your content strategy is to use the right platform. Otherwise, it’s often too resource-intensive. It can also be difficult to manage a coordinated employee advocacy effort that produces results.
How an employee advocacy platform can improve your content strategy
An employee advocacy platform can streamline the mechanics of running your social media campaigns. These tools make it easy for marketers, recruiters, and employees alike to plan, post, and measure content shared on behalf of the brand.
Clearview Social is a prime example of an employee advocacy platform equipped with a full suite of features to accomplish your marketing and recruiting goals. Here’s how our platform makes it easy to leverage your team members in your content strategy.
Discover content
Often, the most time-consuming aspect of a content strategy is figuring out what to share. Clearview Social provides tools to help you efficiently find fresh, high-quality content to share with your audience and team. The Clearview Social platform includes:
- A Chrome extension, to help you flag content to include later in your content calendar, as you browse the web.
- An RSS feed, which allows you to easily link any webpage with RSS (this includes most blogs) and see the latest pieces from your industry that might be relevant to your brand.
- Content partnerships to help you source high-quality blogs and articles in specific verticals.
- A “suggested content” function that allows your employees to suggest potential content across your brand’s social media platforms.
Each of these features makes building a queue of content related to your company faster and easier. Along with the native content your marketing and recruiting teams create, you’ll have plenty of material to continually feed your social media outreach.
Send prompts to your team
Without employee advocacy software like Clearview Social, the process of encouraging your team to share social media content about your brand could look something like this. A marketing professional sends dozens of emails each week to the entire company. Each email contains post copy, a link, and maybe an image. The employee then needs to log in to their LinkedIn or Facebook feed, copy and paste that content, and hit send. If they even make this effort, it could be at a random time of day—too early or late to get much attention.
Clearview Social sends a roster of potential content to employees at once. Each team member can then share approved content with one click. Moreover, users can pick and choose the pieces they want to share, share everything with one click or opt into auto-sharing with no action required. It’s that simple.
Automated posting
Let’s go back to the part where an employee could be sharing a post at a random time of day. For your advocacy to be truly impactful, Clearview Social figures out the best time to distribute each post. PeakTime™ is our smart scheduling algorithm that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to find the best times for your LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook posts to get the most attention.
Likewise, Virtual Assistant allows a designated admin to post content to an employee’s social media profile without the need for them to approve every post. Employees can activate or deactivate this feature at any time in their user settings. This allows your team to maintain their privacy, and still advocate for your brand.
These and other features in the Clearview Social platform reduce the manual effort required from your team to continually feed content to your key audiences, helping to improve your content strategy with minimal effort.
Gamification
Some employees may be reluctant to share content on their social media channels. This is where gamification and leaderboards can provide a little extra incentive. Clearview Social makes it easy to run contests that empower and reward employees for participation in your social media content strategy. Measure key metrics like shares, clicks, earned media value, and Social score to see who the top participants are in your program. Recognize top performers with company swag or gift cards to get your team sharing and having fun in the process.
Track your analytics
A solid content strategy isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it process. You’ll need to measure what kind of content is working, which distribution channels are getting the most traffic, and who among your company is having the most influence.
Clearview Social’s social media analytics can show you all this and more. See how many employees shared your company posts, how many clicks these shares received, and how much that traffic would be worth if you bought it in Google. Plus, keep track of the number of employees who have signed up for your employee advocacy program and shared content to see if your strategy is resonating.
Create a content strategy with an employee advocacy platform
How does employee advocacy fit into your overall content strategy? Employee advocacy helps you reach your overarching content goals. Whether you’re seeking to sell more products, increase brand awareness, build trust with consumers, or recruit new employees, employee advocacy can help.
The trick to integrating employee advocacy into your content strategy is to find the right match between your audience, your goals, and your message. For instance, if you are looking to recruit new employees, you might choose to use employee-generated content on LinkedIn, not Instagram. If you want to build trust in your brand using employee testimonials, Facebook could be a good option. Start by focusing on encouraging your team to post one or two platforms, and grow from there.
A formal employee advocacy program can increase employee engagement, reduce marketing costs, and lead to more meaningful social media outreach representing your company in its best light. And, an employee advocacy platform makes managing these formal programs easy.
With state-of-the-art employee advocacy software, tools, and professional team members, Clearview Social can help your business cultivate powerful social media campaigns that use the perspectives of employees to boost both themselves and the company.
Contact us to book a free demo today to see what we can do for your business.