Employee Advocacy is Growing: How to Harness the Power

Employee advocacy helps businesses extend and increase their digital presence. It can help you nurture relationships and influence key people, such as customers, prospects, current and future employees.

When employees use their personal profiles on social platforms to promote the business they work for in an authentic and value-added manner, they are helping to drive brand awareness, improve brand reputation, while driving traffic back to their profiles or company website.

The following stats reinforce why employee advocacy is growing in popularity, and highlight the key benefits across a business:

- 03 billion people are on some type of social media (Statusbrew)

- 98% of employees use at least one social media site for personal use, of which 50% are already posting about their company (Weber Shandwick)

- A recommendation from a friend or family member makes 83% of Americans more likely to purchase that product or service (Convince & Convert)

- Employees who participate in a social employee advocacy program organically grow their social networks by 10%+ per year (EveryoneSocial)

- 2% surveyed recognised employee advocacy contributed to expanding their professional network and 76% believed that it helped them keep up with industry trends (Hinge Marketing)

- Content shared by employees receives 8x more engagement than content shared by brand channels (Social Media Today)

- Peer-to-peer marketing is the leading driver behind 20-50% of all purchasing decisions (McKinsey)

- An employee advocacy program costs 1/10 of paid advertising (EveryoneSocial)

- On average, an employee advocacy program involving 1,000 active participants can generate $1,900,000 in advertising value (Kredible)

- 73% of salespeople using social selling as part of their sales process outperformed their sales peers and exceeded quota 23 percent more often (Aberdeen Group)

- According to IBM, when a lead is generated through social selling or employee advocacy that lead is 7X more likely to close compared to other lead gen tactics (Gartner)

- Sales reps using social media as part of their sales techniques outsell 78% of their peers (Forbes)

- 91% of B2B buyers are active on social media (SuperOffice).

Really encouraging stats, right? One of the benefits of an employee advocacy program is the improvement of communication and collaboration between employees across the business. But how do you do this? Activation goals!

One of the common pitfalls is to solely focus on the benefits for the business – but this will lead to a poor uptake and performance. So, what’s in it for your employees? Build a two-way dialogue and empower your employees, show them how this program can benefit them, their network, sales, personal brand and most importantly their careers. Here’s how you can do this:

- Review and update profiles so they are true to the individual employee

- Consider what content and subject matters are relevant to them and their network

- Help them develop a richer network of their desired audience

- Feedback what content and subject matters are performing the best for them

- Introduce gamification to encourage adoption and usage

- Ask them what subject matters are key right now from their network.

This requires collaboration and clear communication, and the results are beneficial for both the business and employee.

Ready to empower your employees and their advocacy program?

Blurbs is a single voice that can be heard be everyone in the company. It can push all your content to your employees, letting them share it with their networks across any social channel, all powered by one easy-to-use tool.

Everything you’ll need to efficiently manage your content and social strategy is available at the click of a button – from analytics, permissions and reporting – and you can see exactly what each employee is sharing and how that is being received and shared in their social networks and channels, enabling you to refine and develop your content strategy.

See for yourself in this video, and get a demo booked with our team to get started.