Employee advocacy is the mechanism by which a company or brand mobilizes its employees to become its ambassadors not only in their professional life but also in their everyday life, especially on social media.
We also talk about employee ambassadors.
Such a program can be geared to promote its brand to potential customers or its employer brand to potential candidates. (Source: Marketing Definitions)
Generally speaking, employee advocacy will make it possible to humanize the communication of a brand via its employees and to improve internal communication.
This approach requires the provision of content to enable employees to relay the right messages.
Employee Advocacy is not without Marketing Content
The success of such a system obviously lies in the content strategy. Not every ambassador will be interested in the same type of content. Their areas of expertise or even their hobbies are to be taken into consideration when deciding what content to send them.
On the other hand, they will not all be inclined to share the same type of corporate content:
- Job posting
- New product announcements
- Company events
- Contents of “Internal Life”
- Blog article, white paper…
Assistance: One of the keys
Social networks are far from being obvious to everyone, even if we are from generation Y, Z or younger. Advocacy provides a framework and encourages you to support all your employees in learning how to use social networks in a qualitative way. The system allows the company to be a force for proposals and to take the lead in order to reduce as much as possible the possible errors when employees speak on the web.
A lot of things are generally done to accompany employees on social networks: training, user charters, coaching, good practices, seminars of all kinds… These are very good things, which can compensate for a certain lack of methods.
But the reality is that mistakes are often due to a lack of practice, a lack of habits, or a lack of perspective on communication. Not everyone has an innate sense of the formula or sees the value or impact of a publication.
Think long term
An advocacy strategy is thought out in advance and built over time.
Beyond the reciprocal interests mentioned, it is the whole structuring and coherence of the digital communication that an advocacy strategy allows developing. The positive impacts will take some time to be felt, whether your objective is more HR-oriented (employer brand, loyalty, recruitment…), marketing (notoriety, brand visibility…) or business oriented (increase in sales, detection of prospects…). But once your strategy is launched and made sustainable by solid foundations, your only regret will be not to have done it sooner!
Employee Advocacy: What are the dangers and opportunities?
This mainly depends on how a company approaches Employee Advocacy issues. Without control, a company is exposed to both good and bad…
If employees represent a “dormant” potential, they are not required to represent, embody or even value the company as a leader, are led to do so.
Before exploiting these new communication opportunities, it is necessary to channel employees through a structure adapted to the company. The first step is to ensure that the potential for influence does not run counter to the interests of the company.
In a second step, the aim is to ensure that this potential serves the best interests of the company? Branding, social listening, digital activation, recruitment strategy… the levers for optimizing your Employee Advocacy strategy are numerous!
To find out how you can optimize your Employee Advocacy strategy, here is the Vanksen study Employee Advocacy: making your employees your best ambassadors.
At Dialogfeed, we have a smart use case with ACCOR Hotels. We have set up a giant social wall displayed on a giant screen in their beautiful central cafeteria place in the worldwide HQ in Paris, with a mix of our solutions: SocialFeed & SignageFeed. In this case, content employees are involved and highlighted in the daily news display in the building, mainly with Instagram & Yammer.
(C) graphics from socialtoaster.com
