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As originally seen on Forbes
Nobody doubts the importance of marketing on social media. 59% of the world has a social media presence and is spending at least one hour of their day scrolling. But the constant question I get asked is why aren’t more employees sharing company content?
Why isn’t every company running an employee advocacy campaign and encouraging employees to share company content to social media?
Company pages alone aren’t cutting it.
The average company page on LinkedIn has 1000 followers. That’s a pretty decent amount, but what does the actual audience look like?
Who is following this company page? While I wouldn’t describe them as a basket of deplorables, they aren’t exactly ideal clients either.
First off, we have your employees. They already work for you; they aren’t really potential clients, so that’s not really valuable. Second, we have friends and relatives. These are people that have relationships with your employees already. Your parents and siblings that followed your company out of loyalty are certainly friendly to the business, but most are not likely to be future clients. Even if they do become future clients, it’s their relationship with your employee, not the LinkedIn page that is going to bring in the business.
Third, recruiters and random vendors. People who want to sell the firm services. This group is not trying to send you business, they just want to grow theirs. In addition to these groups you may have the odd reporter or current client poking around, but these are a small minority. So how do you reach the right audience? How do you connect with people who could use your services but are not yet aware of you? The answer to that is your employees.
The average user on LinkedIn has 930 connections. About the same as a company page, right? But what happens if you get twenty employees sharing? You have close to 19,000 people seeing your content.
I call it the spiderweb effect. The more people you have sharing, the bigger spiderweb you have. Company pages limit the amount of people who can see your content, but when you have employees sharing, it’s near limitless.
, just one of many employee advocacy softwares, tracks how many clicks their clients have gotten, since the company was founded in 2013, due to employee advocacy: 13,675,492. (This from just 200 companies) Remember, these clicks are from employees sharing to their individual social media accounts, not company pages.
Another way to calculate the effectiveness of employee advocacy is to look at the earned media value.
Earned media value (EMV) is an estimate of what you would have paid for the same amount of exposure using pay-per-click advertising. This shows the true value of employee advocacy or at least fairly straightforward comparison of what Google, Facebook or LinkedIn ads would have charged for the same level of exposure.
For example, the 13,675,492 clicks generated by Clearview Social users would have cost more than $57 Million, so this becomes the EMV of those clicks.
Would generating millions of dollars in free exposure be useful to your business?
When you have employees sharing company content and commenting on those articles, you’re gaining a better reputation for your firm online. You’re creating a legion of experts with high Internet presences that all bring back awareness and ultimately business to you.
Getting an employee advocacy program up and running isn’t even that hard. There are plenty of software options available to you, or you can send the content directly to your employees. Haven spoken to thousands of companies about employee advocacy, I can tell you through experience that the companies that use software perform dramatically better because they have a streamlined process with very little friction.
With and other similar products all you have to do is put your company content into the software, send it directly to your employees inboxes, and employees click a couple of buttons to schedule our their entire week of shares. Whether or not you decide to use software, don’t wait to get your people sharing. It is a huge untapped resource inside every single company.
What has worked for you company when it comes to employee advocacy? Find me on LinkedIn or tweet me @adriandayton, I’d love to feature your success.
As originally seen on Forbes