The concept of
brand
advocacy, where your employees act in a
concerted effort to raise your brand's profile via
social media, is not new. But with
paid reach looking
suspicious, and
organic reach plummeting, you
may want to seriously consider it as a way to increase your online footprint, if you
haven't already.
And employee advocacy can work, though it's not for everybody. There are questions you
should ask yourself before proceeding.
How Serious Are You About Social Media?
Employee advocacy is a commitment. It takes time, money, and people, while carrying
some risks (I'll get to those later). So I'd only recommend it for companies that are
serious about social media.
And before you answer "Of course, we're serious about social media," just read for a
minute. Organic reach is now so low that unless your brand has a huge following, or a
smaller but very responsive following, in my opinion, organic social
doesn't really exist anymore. Not as we used to think of it.
Not that
organic posting doesn't still matter.
Because social media channels are still
search engines. But posting and coasting just won't work anymore for most brands. And
if that's all your brand has been prepared to do and you don't see that changing (and
you're fine with that), don't bother with advocacy.
Plenty of brands make a pretty good living with only nominal social media effort and
maybe you're one of them.
But if you have serious goals or ambitions for social media. If you want to grow to a
certain number of followers. If you consider social media important to you winning
business (and not just a nice-to-have). If you have the will and the resources to
leverage social media aggressively and not just play a leisurely game, then advocacy
might be a good option for you. But there are still other questions.
Who Are Your Employees Connected With on Social Media?
This is the single most important factor that will determine the success or failure of
an advocacy program. Are your employees connected to the target audience? People tend to
have three types of connections on social media -- family, friends, and colleagues.
Are Any of These Connections Useful to You?
If you're a B2C brand that sells something with broad appeal, like candy bars, all of
those aforementioned categories might be useful to you. But if you're a B2B brand that
sells industrial lubricants, you're probably only focused on colleagues, which can make
brand advocacy challenging, for two reasons.
First, when people share content on social media, they usually share it with all
their connections. There are grouping options, of course, but a lot of your employees
won't know how to use them or won't be bothered to, so if your content lacks appeal
beyond the professional, you'll be at a disadvantage.
Second, there's no guarantee that your employees' colleagues are the target audience.
If you're a
B2B brand, you mostly want to reach
people in target industries and trade
media who influence buying decisions. But personal social media networks tend to be
somewhat homogeneous.
Marketing people mostly know marketing people. HR people mostly know HR people. And
sellers are often not buyers. Which means....
B2B Employees Might Not Be Connected to Customers
Unless your employees have worked in a target industry in the past, they may not
personally be connected to anyone presently working in that industry at all. In fact,
they're more likely to be connected to people who work for your competitors, which is
useful for recruitment, and somewhat useful for brand building, but not so much for
sales or
lead gen.
Are You Producing Enough Content?
Brand advocacy doesn't work without
content to
share. Ideally you want employees
sharing content at least two or three times per week, so you should be publishing
content at least at that frequency on your own channels.
Employees won't share everything you share, but bear in mind that there are
third-party content sources out there (i.e., influencers and the media) that you can
also leverage.
And
AI is making it easier for small and smallish
companies to create a steady
pipeline of content than it was in the past.
Is Your Brand Defined and Purposeful?
Employee advocacy is largely a brand building exercise, so it helps if you and your
employees have a clear sense of what your brand is and what it stands for. It also
greatly helps if they are proud of it.
In most instances, the best way to get employees proud of your brand is to have a
clearly-defined mission or purpose (like the world's safest cars). And the best way
to make that mission travel on social media is to have plenty of good content that
illustrates it. If you're already producing it, you're well positioned for advocacy.
How's Your Employee Turnover?
There's a learning curve with employee advocacy, and the longer someone has worked
for you, the more useful they're likely to be.
If people come and go from your company rather quickly, an advocacy program might
chronically underperform. And if your advocacy manager is onboarding newbies
frequently, your program could prove more of a timesuck for them than anticipated.
Is Your Website Easy to Share?
Some of your employees will have their own preferences and interests in terms of
what content they want to share, and they won't always align with your publishing
schedule.
Some will actively seek out content on your website (blogs, product pages,
case studies) to share, especially if your advocacy program is incentivized, so it
will be helpful if the appropriate text and imagery display automatically when they
paste a URL into a social post (i.e., your code and indexing are good).
After all, your employees won't want to look like they work for amateurs.
Should You Invest in an Employee Advocacy Management Tool?
As is usually the case with social media publishing tools, the bigger you are, the
more useful a tool will be.
But an added benefit for advocacy is content tagging, which can help assure that
employees receive more of the content they'll be receptive to, instead of
having to wade through a bunch of content that doesn't interest them or their
connections, which is a useful capability in large companies that have different
business divisions.
Tools also make it easier to gauge success (more on that below) and are very useful
during the starting-out phase. Unless your company is very small, I
couldn't imagine launching an advocacy program without one.
Who Should Run the Program?
Your social media
community manager is the ideal
person. But if you don't have a
dedicated person responsible for all channels, someone else on the content or media
relations team could also do it.
The skills required are an ability to read social data, a gift for diplomacy
and motivation, and knowledge of what's going on in terms of your brand's content
and PR activity.
Can This Job Be Outsourced?
Yes, though in-house tends to be preferable, as it's inherently easier to motivate
your people using one of your own. However, if your social media is already
outsourced, you can have your agency run point on an advocacy program, but you'll
still need a high-level owner within the company to motivate participation.
Must the Owner Be High Level?
Yes, for two reasons beyond the one I just mentioned. One, if you want to
effectively incentivize this project, HR will probably have to be consulted and
your 26-year-old community manager might not have much sway with them.
Two, some employees will be reluctant to participate because they fear their direct
supervisors will consider advocacy a distraction. A high-level patron can help
butter up these department heads.
How Do You Gauge Success?
Employee advocacy is essentially a way to create more impressions and engagement
for your brand, though it may not attract as many followers as you hope (people
tend to follow in the wake of a more direct and relevant engagement).
Try Thinking of Advocacy As Paid Social
If you're using a tool, you can look at advocacy as a paid social activity and
assess it in terms of metrics such as CPC or CPM. If the cost of the clicks and
impressions generated by advocacy are significantly less than those generated by
conventional paid tactics (or against an industry benchmark), it can be
considered successful.
Even Though Not All Paid Clicks Are Created Equal
If you're a social media professional, you might object at this point because
you know that the value of a click generated via advocacy might not be as valuable
as one generated by direct promotion.
If you're a stickler for truth and justice, I'd suggest parsing out CPC/CPM for
paid awareness/branding activities (as opposed to sales or lead gen), since most
of the content that'll be shared via advocacy will be top of the funnel.
If you can do that, you'll be as close to a straight apples-to-apples comparison
as you can get.
What Are the Risks of Employee Advocacy?
This section of the article may be longer than you were hoping for, but I'm afraid
employee advocacy is one of the riskiest marketing or
content marketing
activities you can do, if not the riskiest.
The Wrong Things May Get Shared
The most straightforward risk of employee advocacy is news you don't want shared
getting shared, but this can be minimized by being selective about who has admin
rights for your publishing tool.
Employees May Be Baffled
Another risk is that employees might get frustrated if they find your tool hard
to use on their end, or irritated if they feel your advocacy manager is a pest
(hence the aforementioned need for people skills).
There May Be Friction
There's a real risk of demoralization if your advocacy manager doesn't
have the patience for putting out tedious brush fires and answering repetitive
questions during the employee onboarding process.
And, no, publishing an onboarding manual will not necessarily alleviate this,
since there's no guarantee anyone will read it, and no guarantee it will reach
everybody. So you'll definitely need a manager who has the
temperament to keep smiling, even if they're in pain.
Office Influencers Can Amplify Friction
Employee advocacy isn't just about employees sharing content. Some employers are
actually encouraging rank-and-file employees to create content, and they're known
as
office
influencers.
However, working with them amplifies those just-mentioned friction risks, as someone
already accustomed to creating content in their free time might really chafe at any
training, instructions, or guidelines you have for them.
And don't get me started on the show of it they might make if that friction
contributes to them leaving.
Another risk office influencers create is employee resentment, stirred when they
see some dilettante act like the star of their own movie while on the clock.
Data Can Be Misleading
Another risk of employee advocacy is that your tool or tool vendor might provide
exaggerated/misleading reporting to make themselves look good, hence the need for
someone on your side who can read social data.
Resources Might Be Better Spent Elsewhere
Perhaps the greatest risk of employee advocacy is improper allocation of your
precious content and social media resources. As you've seen previously, the
benefits of employee advocacy are a bit nebulous compared to other paid activities,
so ask yourself if there are other things you could be doing that would produce
more bang for your buck.
What Else You Need to Know
If you're a larger company, be patient. You won't see much difference in your
brand's metrics immediately. Also start with the departments that are most likely
to have social media contacts in the target audience (sales, PR, consultants) and
any other employees who have big social media networks, who can help make believers
out of management by goosing your metrics during the early months.
Training Must Be Ongoing
Remember that employees come and go, so newbies will have to be recruited to
the program periodically, and it's a good idea to send out an internal email to
everyone in the program once in a while to see if any employees have left.
Also keep in mind that not all your employees will be social media savvy, so they
may need training in the basics of being a social media power user, such as post
scheduling and targeting.
Vigilance Must Be Constant
You'll also need to monitor what third-party content employees are choosing to
share, as they won't always have a good sense of what should be shared. In fact,
sometimes they'll make head-smackingly bad decisions, so be prepared.
But There Are Hidden Benefits
Despite what I've just said, advocacy also has benefits that are rarely mentioned
in the brochure. Your employees will become more generally knowledgeable about
what's going on with the company.
You'll also see better sharing of content in other languages than you had before,
and your community manager will become better aware of relevant third-party content,
which means more meat for your branded channels.
Office influencer content can also be fodder for a B2B brand's first small steps
onto whatever short-form video-focused social media channel hip youngsters are
currently on.
And you should see a clear uptick in branded social engagement after a few months
on legacy channels that can't be explained by other factors, if not sooner.
If you don't, something is wrong.
What Companies Are Best Suited to Employee Advocacy?
Consumer brands can do well with advocacy, especially if the products involved are
things that everyone buys, uses, or likes (and it helps if the product is tasty or
otherwise visually appealing).
Startups can also
greatly benefit from employee
advocacy because the personal reach
of your employees will often dwarf your brand's reach in the early days. And it can
be particularly effective if you've got a rockstar CEO to star in your social
content, or if your startup serves a tight-knit enthusiast community, whether B2C
(gamers, makers, sports, crypto, musicians) or B2B (developers, fintech).
B2B brands more generally can do well with employee advocacy, but it'll be more of
a case by case thing. Industries that tend to be populated by lifers (telecoms,
pharma, finance) can do well with it.
Also pretty much any industry leader or Fortune 500 company can make it work
because you'll have sufficient content, produced both internally and in the media.
