Every company wants to amplify its marketing messages, recruiting efforts, and sales reach, but many fail to tap into their most powerful asset: their own people.
It’s called employee amplification, and it works because the best influencers for your company are the very ones who work there.
“Brands have a huge opportunity to amplify their brand message and visibility by allowing employees to take part in the amplification,” says Melonie Dodaro, founder and CEO of Top Dog Social Media.
Let’s take a look at exactly what employee amplification is and how you can harness its power.
What is Employee Amplification?
Employee amplification is the process of increasing brand reach through employees’ personal social accounts, and it’s incredibly effective. When workers take the initiative to share company content with their own networks, it increases the content’s visibility exponentially.
Why? Because individual employees have ten times more followers than company pages, which increases brand reach by 581%.
Plus, employee-shared content is more authentic and trustworthy than brand-shared content. In fact, 76% of people say they’re more likely to trust it — after all, it’s coming from a real person instead of a faceless corporation.
It’s no surprise then that employee-shared content receives eight times more engagement than company posts.
So how do you tap into the power of employee amplification and get your people to magnify your brand messaging through their social networks? Read on!
7 Effective Ways to Encourage Employee Amplification
EveryoneSocial makes it easy to activate employee influencers in just four steps, and once your people are primed for posting, take these steps to amplify their voices.
1. Ensure employees know the brand.
Your people are more likely to post about their employer — and share the kind of news and updates you want out there — if they understand exactly what your brand stands for, its mission, and its values.
Here at EveryoneSocial, we used Donald Miller’s best-selling book Building a Brand Story to craft our own narrative. Our CEO, Cameron Brain, then made a series of short videos explaining the how and why behind the brand and shared it with the company.
The result? A team of informed, engaged employees who not only understand EveryoneSocial’s brand, but also actively share it with their personal social networks.
And we’re not just talking about our product and consumer-facing brand. Today, employer brand is essential to attract and retain top talent.
People want to know what it’s like to work for your company — not just the benefits, but the culture, too.
And when your people are out there posting about how much they love working for you, it’s a sure bet that your brand looks good — and that you’ve got a brand story other people want to know.
2. Tell employees what’s in it for them.
Sure, employee amplification benefits the company, but that’s not going to be the most motivating factor for your people.
That’s why it’s so important to educate employees about how participation in your employee advocacy program benefits them.
What exactly is in it for them?
They can build their personal brand, expand their network, enhance their credibility, establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry, and more.
Calculate Your Employee Advocacy ROI 📈
Get a custom, shareable report highlighting the ROI you can expect to generate from employees sharing and creating content.
3. Create killer content.
If you want your people to share and amplify your content, then give them stuff they actually want to share.
Such content takes a variety of formats, including blog posts, videos, graphics, and more. And it’s not just the type of content that matters, but also its quality.
Which would you rather share: an article full of expert insights and practical tips that’ll actually benefit your LinkedIn followers? Or a company press release? (Unless that press release is truly compelling, I’m betting it’s the former.)
Another surefire way to get employees to share company content? Feature them.
Highlight your people’s accomplishments, ask them to create a video about their work experience, introduce a new hire, or showcase your Customer Success team in a sitcom opening.
4. Tap into your power users.
Not everyone is going to jump aboard the employee amplification train, but you’ll definitely have some early adopters.
So identify the people who are already sharing company news and posting about their work experience and highlight their achievements in the company newsletter, on Slack or in your advocacy platform.
You can also make them EveryoneSocial admins or moderators, giving them the ability to create groups, share and approve content, and more.
In other words, let your top employee influencers lead the way in employee amplification.
5. Provide prompts.
It’s important to offer social media training and educate employees on your social policy; however, many people will still struggle with what exactly they should post.
Give them guidance by providing weekly prompts, such as posting about their workspace, their pet, their favorite thing about working for the company, and more.
Senior Social Media Manager Desiree Tizon does this regularly for EveryoneSocial employees, and it’s been incredibly successful. In fact, the posts our people make based on her prompts is some of our most engaged content.
6. Make it super easy.
Your people have plenty to do on a day-to-day basis, so suggesting they assist in your employee amplification efforts understandably may not be a high priority.
But you can increase the odds they’ll participate — and that they’ll actually enjoy sharing company content — if you make it ridiculously simple.
The best way to do that? EveryoneSocial.
Our platform organizes all your content in a central location so that people have a steady stream of relevant items to share at their fingertips. And they can post it to their personal social channels with just a couple of clicks.
Plus, users can push that content to Slack, Teams, internal newsletters, and more instead of doing it manually or relying on multiple technologies.
And EveryoneSocial admins can alert employees to new content and mark those posts for engagement to get everyone liking and sharing it at once.
7. Foster some healthy competition.
Finally, make your employee amplification efforts a game by setting up a leaderboard, so your people can see who’s climbing the charts in social shares … and who’s falling behind.
EveryoneSocial makes gamification a breeze, and often a little competition is all it takes to get employees engaging.
However, you can further fuel employee amplification by offering a weekly or monthly award for participation.
Instructure, for example, occasionally gives away iPads and other prizes to employees at the top of the leaderboard — a strategy that’s helped the company grow content shares by 3,800% in just two months.
EveryoneSocial is Key for Employee Amplification
Ready to grow company content shares, expand your marketing reach, improve sales results, maximize your recruiting efforts, and more?
Your organization can reap all the benefits of employee amplification when you activate your employee influencers and make social sharing easy with EveryoneSocial.
