As a company who values engagement on social media you may have an employee advocacy program running in your organization. Firstly, kudos for making a great decision on keeping employees informed, creating, and sharing no matter where they are working!
And hey if not, maybe you are researching how employee advocacy can benefit your company and teams. No problem, and glad you are here exploring too!
Perhaps it goes without saying, employees are the lifeblood of your organization. So keeping them engaged, feeling valued, and connected will make productivity and work much more united.
Although you may have a specific use case for your strategy and platform, there are many employee advocacy campaign ideas you might want to implement to make the most of your efforts.
And while getting employees to share company, third-party, and user-generated content to social media is the cornerstone of a platform, there are other ways to drive organic engagement and results from your team too.
Employee Advocacy Campaigns For Maximizing Engagement
There are plenty of social and internal campaigns you can run in an employee advocacy platform.
If you are enterprise-wide with your program, all these campaigns might be interesting to you and will engage various areas of your company.
But if you are focused on key areas only, maybe just marketing or communications, then some campaigns might make more sense than the others.
Hopefully these ideas will help you see the value of employee advocacy. You’ll learn how these campaign tips can be used internally in your own program, or for considering other unique ways to leverage EveryoneSocial to achieve your organic engagement goals.
1. Amplify company news or blog posts
At a basic level of employee advocacy, the most common need is for marketing and sales to amplify reach and results of company content. This could be company blog posts, latest press releases, or third-party content where your industry or company is discussed.
Often, your employees are not aware of all the latest content outside of the marketing or sales department. Even then, depending on how big those departments are it’s easy for employees to miss the latest or know what is publicly posted.
The easiest employee advocacy campaigns involve organizing company content and letting your team know what’s available, what you might encourage to share, etc.
We’ve discovered that the average employee has 1,000 social connections, a conservative number for many employees who are already actively engaged on social media. Let’s say you have 1,000 active users in your platform and 500 of them typically share content. Well, that expands your content reach by up to 500,000!
While it’s okay to suggest some social copy to go along with these posts, remember to encourage employees to add their own thoughts and commentary. The last thing you want is an army of employees all saying the exact same thing or spamming their networks.
2. Celebrate new hires or employee wins
A large opportunity is to drive more employee recognition and appreciation. Since a platform like EveryoneSocial is the central community to gather employees, it’s a great way to celebrate your team.
A simple HR campaign is to include new hires and encourage others to connect or follow their social accounts. In a remote work environment, EveryoneSocial makes it easy to rally around new hires, put a face to the new co-worker, and give them a warm welcome.
Similarly, highlighting current employees’ work and results is a great way to validate teammates on EveryoneSocial and keep everyone updated on the latest wins. This allows employees to comment, celebrate, and show support for their co-workers.
Additionally, these employee appreciation posts can be perfect for sharing on social media to showcase your team and culture. Employee recognition and employer brand; two birds with one stone!
Sharing employee wins or company initiatives, is the best way to build trust among audiences, new potential business, current customers, and attract top talent to your company.
A great stat from Glassdoor, up to 79% of job applicants use social media in their job search.
Extra Tip: You can create a group specifically for new hires, onboarding, or other important links that employees should have access to.
3. Engagement to company posts
While encouraging and enabling employees to create or share specific content is key to any employee advocacy platform, there is another way to amplify your company content.
At EveryoneSocial, we call this feature the “Engage” option which is a great way to drive attention to content posted on branded accounts.
Remember, social algorithms consistently evolve, but signals like social comments, likes, re-shares, etc. can boost who sees the content in their feeds.
For example, say your marketing team posted something awesome to the company LinkedIn page. In order to get more company followers seeing that post and get it trending in any hashtags you use, you’ll want to boost engagement.
An easy way to do so is grab the specific LinkedIn company URL, write some commentary as to why you’re looking for engagement, and ask for employees to take a minute to interact. Now it takes them directly to the post where they can comment, like, re-share, or any combination of engagements that will ultimately boost your brand’s exposure.
Within EveryoneSocial, an “Engage” button will appear for content linked to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram. But links can be supported from other platforms like Quora, Pinterest, etc.
This makes it easy for employees to see important branded posts they might be missing and keep employees updated with push notifications, email notifications, pinning the content to top of feeds, or using the internal email newsletter feature to include that post.
4. Employee-generated content campaigns
Companies or executives are sometimes wary of user-generated content (UGC) or personal branding posts from employees, also known as employee-generated content (EGC).
What if they create or share the wrong thing? How does their content help our brand?
If you are worried about employees or distrust them, then your company has a hiring problem. Certainly some simple guidelines should be in place, but employees are already posting about their work and company.
In the decade of EveryoneSocial’s existence and customers, there has not been any negative content created or shared by employees.
When everyone’s work-related social engagement is centralized and made transparent, professionalism reaches new heights as colleagues hold each other accountable on social media.
As far as the impact on the branded, well there are tons of stats related to UGC, here are a few:
- Consumers find UGC 9.8x more impactful than influencer content when making a purchasing decision.
- UGC posts shared to social channels see a 28% higher engagement rate than standard brand posts
- 79% of people say UGC highly impacts their purchasing decisions.
Your organization can run social campaigns specific to something your company is doing. Maybe like a “How We Work” campaign, that encourages employees to take a picture from the EveryoneSocial mobile app or their desk, and upload for others to share.
Another example is let employees suggest content, articles, or create content that benefits their personal brand, but also impacts your company. Your teams’ interest and involvement in the program will be much higher when commentary and company news are not locked down.
5. Social listening / competitor monitoring
A huge aspect to sales success is being active in social selling. This concept has been around since social networks began, but even more important for those teams working remotely.
That means more than ever, sales teams are doing more virtual selling than ever before.
A simple employee advocacy campaign is to set up various social listening groups. This can involve a combo of areas unique to the team and individual salesperson utilizing a social platform.
This social selling campaign can include:
- Social listening of your own brand and company. See what people are saying
- Include feeds of competitors to see what they are creating and sharing
- Pull in specific keywords around your industry to have the latest content for sharing
6. Internal feedback campaign
Remember, employee advocacy programs serve more than one purpose!
An additional and important area is the impact on internal communications. EveryoneSocial is perfect for organizing communications, improving collaboration, and getting feedback from your people.
What’s the best way to engage employees? Get them more involved, and ensure they feel their voice is valued – get their feedback and thoughts on specific things related to their company and work!
While every team has their own process for their work and ideas, employees from all areas of the company have great feedback to contribute.
Have a new product feature idea, but want to see what people think? Create an internal post, maybe include a video or picture and ask for feedback. It can show up at the top of people’s feeds when they login, you can pin the post, mark as important, create push notifications so people are alerted, etc.
Then employees can leave comments with ideas or their thoughts and tag colleagues to contribute too.
Doing this kind of employee advocacy campaign gets more people involved in company initiatives, gets them engaged, and makes them feel part of the community where everyone’s input matters.
This can lead to some great company innovation, knowledge sharing, and a tightened work culture.
What Companies Run Employee Advocacy Campaigns?
For many of the employee advocacy campaign ideas above, these are simple ways to get started and drive immediate engagement.
Remember, this is just scratching the surface of unique campaign ideas you can run in employee advocacy software.
We’ve found that being creative and really letting employees get involved, makes a world of difference between results, interest of employees, and atmosphere within the organization.
But the best way to learn and progress your own internal goals is to learn from others. Below are few customers of ours and the results they’ve achieved through their own employee advocacy campaigns.
- Teradata Expands Their Social Reach Over 800,000 With EveryoneSocial
- How Micro Focus Uses EveryoneSocial to Engage 3,000+ Employee Advocates
- EveryoneSocial Helps Empower Sleep Health And Sales At Mattress Firm
- How American Family Insurance Empowers Their Brand Advocates Online
