7 Steps to Foster Employee Advocacy in Your Company

One of the best ways to corporate marketing is by encouraging employees to become advocates.

The people with the potential to be your best advocates already work for your company, and in today’s connected world, the most powerful way to bring them into play is with social media networks. On average, when employees share anything with their social networks, each one reaches 20X more people than a typical brand sharing with the same number of people.

Foster an Advocacy Culture

As happening as this may sounds, getting employees who are already burdened by a full day of work to embrace the employee advocacy concept will take a lot of effort. Some employees will only participate because they believe in the company’s mission, but most will require incentives before taking that extra effort.

Employee Advocacy Program Components

7 components are important to run an effective employee advocacy program.

1. Leadership

The company’s leadership must be welcoming towards the idea and lead by precept and example. Otherwise, the program is doomed from the beginning.

2. Objective

In whatever form, the employee advocacy program must be in sync with the company’s objectives.

3. Champions

Don’t try to engage everyone at the same time. Roll out the program in slices. First, target those within the company who are most enthusiastic supporters and try to get them on board. Their actions will influence others to join in.

4. Training & Governance

Training on program objectives, policies, and employee advocacy tools used is necessary to keep the program from becoming little more than a compulsory work exercise.

5. Content Creation

Some company’s share existing content, either their own or third-party media, although, the real power of employee advocacy is expressed not by sharing a lot of content but creating it, and one of the best ways to do this is through blogging

Make It Easy For Them-

Giving company bloggers topics to write about, helps them bypass the brainstorming part.

Offer Incentives-

Unless your employees do not get any benefit from blogging, it’s going to be really hard to get them involved. So you should think of ways to incentivize them in both ways tangible and intangible. Money will often work, but so do gift cards. You could also make blogging a part of the employee’s job description.

Flatter Their Expertise-

Most of your employees won’t be professional writers, so allow them to blog about topics that they like. Not only will this help to improve their quality of content, but also allows them to demonstrate their expertise.

6. Content Sharing

Most of your employees will already be participating in one or more social networks, so encourage them to like the company Facebook page, follow the company page on LinkedIn, Twitter account, YouTube channel, and so on. When they see a post or status update appear in their feed, they can share it with their friends and followers, thus they are amplifying the company’s voice using social advocacy tools.

7. Measurement

If you don’t have time to measure the effectiveness of your employee advocacy program, don’t even bother to start it.

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