Do you know how many of your company’s employees are on social media? What’s your best guess? 10%? 30%? 50%?
(Scroll to see data on ten companies and request an audit for your company. 👇)
Without fail, most marketers DRASTICALLY underestimate the number of their company’s employees who are active on social.
I recently spoke with a Fortune 100 tech company that has more than 310,000 employees. Its team — people who’ve spent most of their careers in social — estimated they had maybe 100,000 employees active on social.
Our audit found more than 300,000 employees who are active on social and engaging with their content. Over 95% of ALL their employees. 🤯
Why were they so wrong? Because it’s hard to perceive gradual change, and social media has changed a lot over the last 10 years. I’m not talking about features — I’m talking about user GROWTH.
Take LinkedIn as an example. When we launched EveryoneSocial in 2012, LinkedIn had around 90 million users. Today, it has close to 1 billion users, a >10x increase.
Who are those 1 billion users? Employees. Some of whom work at your company.
Why is this important? Because, at this point, every single person you want to reach is on social media, and the most efficient, effective and AUTHENTIC way to reach them is through your people, by enabling them to share your content and updates.
People trust people more than brands. They want to engage with people more than brands. The algorithms prioritize content posted by people over brands. The list of reasons goes on and on.
But, as I said, most companies have NO IDEA how many people they have active on social, which means they have no idea of the value they could be generating from an advocacy program.
Let’s look at 10 companies that our team recently audited.
On average, 86% of these companies’ employees are on social — they have profiles, they’re logging in, and they’re sharing content and engaging. Furthermore, our data estimates that these employees have a collective network reach of over 2 billion!
Think about that. 🤔 When employees across these 10 companies share content, their posts are seen by a lot of people. In fact, the outcomes they generate from sharing over a single year (impressions, engagements, clicks, etc.) are equivalent to $1.4 billion in ad spend. 😮 Those are some serious ad dollars these companies could save if they activate their people as advocates.
So this is what we’re talking about: The opportunity to build a scaled, high-value advocacy program is literally 10x what it used to be. If your company is like those that we’ve audited, it’s likely that 9 out of 10 of your employees are on social, doing the things you want them to do as advocates TODAY.
The only thing you need to do is activate them in a platform such as EveryoneSocial.
As marketing leaders focus on efficient, organic, authentic ways to reach customers, buyers, and other key audiences, advocacy isn’t something they can afford to ignore. For most companies, advocacy represents quite possibly their BIGGEST, untapped pool of marketing value.
