Think how wonderful if your product reached 250000 people on Facebook within few minutes of posting spending nothing on an ad. It’s really a great moment for any company. This is what we call Social Media Employee Advocacy. Let me tell you it in detail:

What is Social Media Employee Advocacy?

Social Media Employee Advocacy is the method of promoting an organization by its employees on social media. A social media employee advocate is someone who creates awareness for his company and recommends the company’s products or services to his friends or relatives on social media.

Employee advocacy is the original term of social media employee advocacy, where an employee promotes its organization online or offline or both.

Also Read: How to write content for better social media reach & SEO? 

Benefits of Social Media Employee Advocacy Program

1. When their friends (employees) share content, users can consider it as authentic, not as promotional
2. Skyrockets your social media reach.
3. Leads generated by employee advocacy are more likely to convert.
4. Your employees can grow as industry experts when you curate the best articles for them to share on social media, which in turn encourages employees to perform better on their core job.

Also Read: Social Media Marketing Certification Course only $10 (Limited Time Offer)

What Should You Give Employees in Return?

If you’re on the organization side, meanwhile you’ve thought about what the company should give employees in return. At first glance, employees might consider your advocacy program as just a boring corporate mandate in disguise. This is where you should be focused enough.
If you implement it as a mandate, you can’t expect any enthusiasm from employees to work on it.

So you should answer to their question “Why should I share company content on my social media?”

Here are some benefits that you can offer to your employees:

Career growth:

Sharing industry-specific content on social media helps your employees look as industry experts. It can boost up their career. Convey this to them well.

Incentives:

You can give incentives to employees who are your top advocates. You can offer top performers who garnered a higher engagement a gift card, other gifts or a bonus.

How to Create Social Media Employee Advocacy Program?

Here are five steps to creating a successful social media advocacy program.

1. Set your goals

First, you should understand why you’re jumping into employee advocacy program.

• Are you creating it to raise brand awareness?
• Increase product (or service) sales? Hire top talents?
• Improve search engine rankings through the increased social media presence?

Whatever it may be, you should have set clear goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) to see if your efforts are really paying off.

2. Choose the right tool

In fact, if you’ve got a right tool to manage your program, you will be able to better analyze its performance.

Here are some top tools to manage your employee advocacy program:

• GaggleAMP (gaggleamp.com)
• SocialChorus (socialchorus.com)
• PeopleLinx (peoplelinx.com)
• Trapit (trap.it)

3. Establish Guidelines

You’re doing the program, not for fun or to please employees. So make sure your employee advocacy efforts are on task and on target. Set comprehensive guidelines for what the employees should do and what should not do.

4. Train Your Employees

Just telling your employees to share the posts doesn’t bring the expected outcome. Tell them best practices of sharing posts. Train them to use the software you’ve chosen. The better they understand how to use the software, the better will be the performance from their side.

5. Monitor Progress

Once you’ve launched the program, your job is not done. In fact, the real and more important job you have to do is from here.

It is important to ensure that they are posting nothing inflammatory or discriminatory. And also track which employees posts are getting a higher engagement and driving leads.

Praise their efforts. Zappos creates a leaderboard to show the effort of employees who have garnered the most social media followers.

Special Note:
Because of mutual connections, users may see the same post again and again. It may annoy them and further lead them to report the post.

So make sure you create multiple images and titles for every single post: A Facebook post of FuGenX, a mobile app development company, tells you how you can do it.

FuGenX republished the same post with a different image and title. The title was “These Mistakes You Shouldn’t Do in Mobile App Development If You’re a Startup”.

So even though users had seen it a few hours back, they can’t easily come to know it as the same post that they had seen a few hours back when it is published with a different image and title.

Conclusion:

Social Media Employee Advocacy is a powerful marketing program not just for B2C businesses, even for all sorts of B2B businesses, including mobile app development companies in Mumbai, New York and everywhere, as well as data analytics companies, who are leveraging it to a full extent. LinkedIn is a recommended platform for them.