Today social media is even more relevant to business’ success than ever — and we’re not just talking about company TikTok and Instagram accounts.
Employees’ social media presence matters, too — even more than corporate handles.
After all, brand messages reach 561% further when shared by employees vs. the same messages shared via official brand social channels.
And with the number of social media users projected to reach 4.4 billion by 2025, that’s a lot of untapped power when it comes to social media in the workplace.
Enter EveryoneSocial, the pure play employee advocacy solution that transforms employees into influencers by making it easy for them to create and share content that’ll improve employer brand, increase leads, and much much more.
But before you get onboard, consider these six reasons why activating your people EveryoneSocial might not be a good fit for your company.
1. Building employees’ personal brands is not part of your company culture
Did you know that content shared by employees receives 8x more engagement than content shared by brand channels?
We’ve found that companies with the strongest culture also foster and encourage employees to grow their personal brands. Customers like Adobe and Dell have a strong presence and are regarded as industry authorities on social media, thanks to their employees sharing workplace experiences and personal interests via EveryoneSocial.
But if your company wants to maintain a monolithic brand sentiment and anonymous voice on social media, then employee influencers won’t be useful to you.
If your people aren’t given license to represent their employer on social media, then your advocacy platform would quickly collect cobwebs.
However, keep the following in mind:
- Earned media (press, word-of-mouth, peer-to-peer referrals) drives 4x the brand lift as paid media.
- Peer-to-peer marketing is the leading driver behind 20-50% of all purchasing decisions.
These are some compelling numbers, and while maintaining brand authority seems like it’s achieved through singular broadcasting, here’s the reality: People relate to people — not faceless billboards or impersonal content.
Just remember that empowering employees doesn’t mean your brand will become incoherent and fragmented. In fact, it’s the exact opposite.
Passionate employees humanizing their employer (by sharing and creating content that is relevant to their personal brands) results in a stronger corporate brand.
2. Social media isn’t a priority or valuable to your organization.
This makes sense only if your organization is allergic to people and money (surely such places exist, but examples escape me).
I’m stumped trying to identify which businesses wouldn’t benefit from engaging on social media since even heavily regulated industries like finance and healthcare reap its benefits. But if you can think of any, I’d honestly like to know! Please message me on LinkedIn with your findings! 😉
With 76% of individuals saying they’re more likely to trust content shared by “normal” people than by brands, it’s really hard to make a case for not participating in social media conversations.
I hope we someday onboard the proprietor of a lemonade stand as even the smallest business benefits from employee advocacy engagement.
That said, thanks to the magic of network effects (perhaps the 9th wonder of the world, after compound interest) we’ve seen that larger programs always return better results.
The bigger the employee advocacy program, the easier it is for admins to optimize what’s working best, thus garnering big returns faster.
While your current organization is likely closer to the enterprise scale than the lemonade-stand scale, we understand that social media has yet to be discovered by many executives.
And frankly, executives on social media have a huge impact on workplace adoption of (undeniably valuable) advocacy programs.
If a CEO gets on EveryoneSocial, it’s a giant greenlight for everyone else to do the same.
If your organization doesn’t currently prioritize social media, broach the subject with your C-Suite directly; chances are they’ll be receptive to your observations.
Let us know if you need any assistance providing information for such a conversation with your company’s leadership. We’re always here to advocate for advocacy!
3. You’re not interested in increasing social or brand reach via employees.
Maybe your official brand accounts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok already perform astoundingly well. If that’s the case, congrats!
However, I’m sorry to be a buzzkill, but chances are your success is anomalous and will probably short-lived.
There are so many stats on why word-of-mouth and peer-to-peer advocacy outperforms official brand channels and ads, but consider the importance of word of mouth for hiring, marketing, sales, and retail.
EveryoneSocial is built for go-go-gadget increasing your reach for solutions in marketing, HR, employer branding, frontline enablement, and channel partner cooperation.
If you don’t trust your employees to advocate for your brand, that’s either a company culture issue or a hiring problem.
If you believe in your employees though, give them the tools to take their personal brands and — and the company brand — to new heights (and new lengths of reach!)
Keep in mind though that empowering employees to use social media at work doesn’t mean it’s time to implement automatic sharing.
You don’t want employees spamming social networks with the exact same content — that’s a waste of everyone’s time.
Not only are such content-relaying social strategies the exact same as boosting official brand channels (from the perspective of the end user/audience), but the employees forced into sharing are ineffective because their posts lack what’s most important: authenticity.
Exploiting employees’ networks for company spamming is an unsustainable social strategy, to say the least. It’s like burning your furniture to stay warm; don’t do it.
Audiences see right through this. Plus, it can foster negative brand sentiment.
The solution? Employee-generated content. So connect employees to their respective audiences and let them represent their brand as it relates to their own interests and connections!
4. Building an internal workplace community isn’t a priority for your company.
Community and internal comms go hand in hand. Just consider the numerous reasons that internal communications are important to your organization:
- Keeps your people more informed
- Helps build your organization’s work culture
- Increases employee engagement
- Creates transparency and trust among the entire company
- Provides more opportunities for people within the company to learn, be trained, and feel connected
- Creates an environment open to feedback, debate, and discussion
- Improves overall employee experience
Perhaps these reasons are new to you, or simply haven’t been prioritized yet.
But with most companies allowing for permanent remote-work schedules and establishing a central hub for hosting original company content and user-generated content (UGC) isn’t just the trend — it’s of crucial importance!
There’s no doubt that your employees and colleagues create engaging authentic content that can help establish your brand as an authority within its space on LinkedIn and elsewhere.
So the key to creating momentum with UGC is to have all the right internal comms tech in place, and from there to encourage engagement that will substantiate your workplace community, even if your company is decentralized.
After activating employees on an advocacy platform like EveryoneSocial, workers in any location — remote, HQ, and satellite-offices — will be able to participate in their company community.
Your organization will be better equipped to create an internal meeting place from anywhere employees are working. Employees of all departments can:
- Create content for internal consumption
- Share ideas and knowledge from their day to day
- Stay informed of the latest company news and content
- Engage in co-works content (liking, commenting, or tagging others)
Same goes for frontline and retail workers — even if they don’t have a company email address, they can be active and stay informed with EveryoneSocial.
5. You don’t want to save money on paid ads.
Your company likely spends thousands on paid ads each month. In fact, in 2021 alone, businesses spent more than $100 billion on sponsored social posts, follower campaigns, and more.
And you’ve no doubt noticed that despite that big spending, your ads’ effectiveness continues to decrease over time. Yikes.
If you want to keep spending big bucks on ads for continually decreasing payoff, be my guest. But there’s another option: empowering your employees to that promotion for you.
After all, what are you more likely to trust: a sponsored brand post from a company promoting its product or honest posts and tweets from the company’s employees touting just how well the product actually works?
Doubtful that employee social sharing can compete — and even beat — paid ads? We’ve got the numbers to back it up.
By empowering their people to promote company news and content, EveryoneSocial customers generated more than $200 million in media value in the first half of 2021 alone.
So it makes sense (and major cents) to budget for EveryoneSocial instead diverting more money into paid ad campaigns.
6. You don’t have internet, you still use Netscape, or you dislike puppies.
Currently, employee advocacy requires the internet, not Netscape, and sometimes our pets (you never know when a VP-of-whatever is a fan of your LinkedIn puppy post!)
In all seriousness though, we can understand why you might not want to buy EveryoneSocial if social media has no place in your company.
But assuming you’re operating in the 21st century with the rest of us, chances are your brand is at least partially digitized, if not fully socialized online.
Trusting employees to be the face of the brand is for sure a prerequisite for achieving success with whatever advocacy platform you decide to implement.
Of course, a social media policy is also very important and can help employees gain clarity on where the boundaries are in terms of ideal content and what to avoid as well.
Many brands have effective social media policies for their employees, and if you’re considering advocacy, seeing what’s already effective can assuage any concerns about activating employees for social engagement.
Lastly, take a look at our customers and see for yourself how EveryoneSocial empowers high-growth brands.
