A company’s greatest asset should always be their employees. Employee advocates are powerful ambassadors for your brand, attracting both customers and talent. Great perks and cool office space help, but a structured employee advocacy training program can make staff feel part of something larger. Yet it takes more than social media participation from your employees to work. You need a solid strategy and the right tools. So how do you get your employees to amplify your brand?
 

Key principle: being mindful of the psychology behind employee advocacy

Research company Altimeter analysis on employee advocacy showed that 90% of the brands they surveyed were already pursuing or have plans to pursue some form of employee advocacy. Successful employee advocacy begins with staff feeling genuinely happy to participate in sharing. A key principle in employee advocacy is ensuring the ambassador voice sounds both informed and authentic. So how does psychology play a part in making employees feel valued?
 

• Everyone likes to feel like a rockstar - If your staff feel valued, they are more likely to engage. From something as simple as flagging up their social media success stories to rewards, everyone likes to feel special. 

• Document engagement - Employee advocacy platforms allow you to track what’s working on social media. Use it to your advantage to track best staff engagements. Reward brand ambassadors who excel.

• Understanding the brand -Train employees on the brand vision and values, allowing them to become part of the corporate mission. If there are any new launches and developments, make sure staff are on-board and excited.

• The right measurables – Measure meaningful conversations around content and creative use of social media rather than simple shares and reshares.

• Remind them to share – There are easy ways to remind employees to shout about your brand. Employee advocacy tools such as Bambu allow staff to have one-click scheduling from an employee dashboard. 

Why social media is perfect for employee advocacy

Social media is perfect for employee advocacy because it takes little time to post and re-share and can be easy to track. Most meaningful conversations with customers now tend to take place over some form of social media. According to Hinge Marketing, 58.8% of staff in employee advocacy programmes spend over 5 hours a day focused on social media for business purposes. They can confidently answer brand questions and share content which has been created by the marketing department in their own style.
 

Platforms & Tools that Make Employee Advocacy Easier

Employee advocacy software helps companies to engage their employees to share authentically via social media channels. These employee advocacy social media tools allow brands to build pre-approved content for their staff to easily access and share in easy clicks.
 

Our top 5 platforms to carry out employee advocacy:

1. Smarp: A great employee advocacy platform, it has lots of integrations, a great metrics dashboard, and access to a company feed with content for both internal and external usage.

2. Bambu (by Social Sprout): Super easy to use platform, allowing employees to share curated content across a multitude of platforms. Built by social experts, Social Sprout.

3. EveryoneSocial: Users can easily share content from within the app and with friends on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, WeChat, and more. Includes smart integrations such as Salesforce, Marketo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Bitly, and Adobe Analytics.

4. LinkedIn Elevate: Whilst you can’t share outside of LinkedIn here, the platform is known to convert better than others. The dashboard is also available to users, who can track their success.

5. Oktopost: Oktopost is a great employee advocacy tool and so much more; it also features social content publishing, analytics, and integrations with marketing automation tools and CRMs.

Software to monitor and report employee advocacy result:

Rewarding great engagement and listening to employee feedback can be actioned through effective employee engagement software. It must have great UI, reporting, customer service, and scientific backing. Dashboards need to be easy to use and interpret with mobile support and real-time reporting. Platforms such as WeSpire aim to create a cohesive employee experience which is metrics-driven.