Why LinkedIn Is The Perfect Platform For Employee Advocacy
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- Employee Advocacy
LinkedIn is a powerful platform that many businesses are using nowadays to their own advantage. Employee advocacy is something you should be encouraging actively across your business not just online but offline too.
With 90% of B2B social media marketing strategies incorporating scaled employee advocacy programs, it makes sense to do the same for your business.
Employee advocacy is a growth opportunity to help bring together an army of influencers aka your employees to help promote the business. While LinkedIn is a B2B platform, it’s a great way to build brand awareness and drive traffic to any linked social media platforms on your profile.
If you’re looking to explore employee advocacy and you’re wondering why LinkedIn is the best platform for it, then read on.
Employee advocacy is where employees will expose their own social networks to any brand messaging and marketing campaigns you share. This may be by engaging with the content published or alternatively creating their own content to support the existing messaging you’re trying to communicate.
Effective employee advocacy helps promote your business and can also save a lot of money on marketing campaigns. However, it’s important that you’re doing it correctly for it to be successful.
Employee advocacy relies on employees who are happy within their roles and are keen to promote shared values that the business has. The more employees who jump aboard as advocates for the business, the better.
What are the advantages of employee advocacy? For growth hacks as a brand, employee advocacy is one of the most productive and there are many benefits to using this method. Here are just a few perks when you use employee advocacy for your brand and business on LinkedIn.
Employee advocacy influences the quality of engagement and reaches for the post itself. You may even find that the quality of these metrics improves beyond anything that paid-for posts would attract.
Employee approval is likely to sway those looking at your business or brand for the first time. They may find themselves compelled to pick your product or service over competitors because it’s backed by those within the company.
The connection feature on LinkedIn, adds a certain level of trust and authenticity that helps those businesses that are utilising the impact of employee advocacy on their platform.
Just like on any social media platform, when you post on your company-branded profile, you’ll get the organic reach that the LinkedIn algorithm provides. However, when employees are engaging with your post through any of the following, it boosts the potential reach you’ll receive:
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
The reason for this is that LinkedIn now sees the content as being high-value and therefore worthwhile for more people to see. The more employees engage with the post in some way, the more your organic reach is likely to multiply as a result.
With employees creating content themselves and sharing the company’s own content, you’re helping create an army of industry experts. These experts are all part of the business, which only strengthens your organisation’s reputation as a result.
Building credibility as a brand is important and employee advocacy is the perfect way of doing this effectively.
What makes LinkedIn so special for employee advocacy? With 82% of B2B marketers reporting they find the best success on LinkedIn, it seems to be a great platform for businesses to advertise and promote themselves to other individuals and organisations.
LinkedIn differs from a lot of the other social media platforms as a more professional and formal networking site. With over 810 million members, it’s considered one of the top platforms for professionalism.
With LinkedIn, you’ve got a platform that’s full of influential people and people who can be easily influenced. The platform provides the opportunity for anyone to create content and to share it amongst their professional contacts.
Every employee who gets involved with an employee advocacy campaign will have their own set of contacts who’ll engage in their content. With every employee having their own individual reach, it accumulates in a huge reach overall that might not always be so easily achieved with traditional marketing methods as a business.
Employee advocacy is highly effective if it’s done properly. With that being said, there are a number of ways to implement this method of marketing, one being on LinkedIn. If you’re looking to introduce it within your own organisation, then here are some helpful tips to do so successfully.
What do you want to achieve from employee advocacy? The challenging part of running a marketing strategy such as this one is making sure your employees are all talking about the same topic, at the same time.
That’s why it’s important to start setting your company’s goals so that employees who become advocates, talk and share the right content. For example, you may want to acquire new sales for a recently launched product or service.
Therefore, the content strategy should be focused on employees sharing relevant information on the new product and how they’d use it to benefit them.
To help ensure your employee advocacy is successful, you want to handpick the right employees. Identifying those employees with an engaged following on the platform is a worthwhile step in the right direction.
As you create content for your employees to share and comment on, make your content relevant to them and their experiences within the business. Make sure that the content format is visual and that it showcases your brand in the best way.
Optimising the posts with hashtags, internal links and responding to comments, are all ways to help push the content further.
Social media scheduling is important when it comes to the performance of the content. Social media posts have a lifespan that is short, especially with the amount of content that goes live every second of the day.
Selecting the right employees doesn’t just come down to their engagement and reach via their profiles but who they are within the organisation. For example, if you’re pushing a new product, you may want to choose a handful of salespeople and marketers within the business to be advocates.
With that approach, you’re more than likely to have different groups of people sharing content and reaching a larger audience as a result.
Onboarding is an important step for any business, particularly regarding a successful employee advocacy program.
Educating your employees on how employee advocacy works and how to do it right, is going to hopefully make your program more successful. You may want to create some pre-made templates and structures for employees to follow when they create content as advocates via LinkedIn.
To help reward staff for their hard work in their advocacy on LinkedIn, it’s good to monitor and analyse your programs’ performance.
That way, you get a detailed understanding of what is working well and what might need improvements for future campaigns. By having this data available, as a business, you can guide your employees with further training on how to best optimise their own efforts as advocates.
You can also use this data as a way of rewarding your employees for providing great results. This reward system will only help encourage your employees further in pushing their own content further.
If you’ve been considering an employee advocacy program, there’s no better place to do it than on LinkedIn.
Use this guide as a starting point to introduce an employee advocacy campaign to your business and see the benefits that can come from it this year and beyond.
Sign up for Vulse today and start learning to create content your employees will be happy to promote.
