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What is a Social Media Employee Advocate?

Sounds fancy, right!

At its core, employee advocacy is the promotion of an organization by its staff members. And a social media employee advocate is someone who utilizes their social media platforms to:

• Generate positive exposure and raise awareness for a brand 
• Recommend a company’s products or services to their friends and followers
• Be a credible spokesperson for the company and represent the best interests of the company 

But as much as your employees may love working at your company, they might not want to blast their personal social networks with a sales pitch. Your employees’ social media pages exist for them to be social: to share content on their pages that is personally relevant to their interests, values and aspirations. 

That is why the goal of your company’s social media should be – in part – to create content your employees are proud of, part of, and excited to share. 

If businesses want their employees to be social media advocates, you need to create content that is:

1. Employee Generated (blogs, project highlights, work, etc.)
2. Educational or Inspirational (thought leadership, authority, helpful, etc.)
3. Creates Human Connection (company culture, behind-the-scenes, client relationships, the who and why of what we do, etc.)

As a business owner, you know that your team is the heart and soul of the company.  And if your employees are anything like ours here at MC2, you recognize that they regularly go above and beyond their everyday responsibilities to take your business to new heights.

Here’s the thing with organic social media: You need your employees’ help! You can’t do it alone.

Your employees have the ability to advocate for your organization and help your company become a social media powerhouse – a conversation engine. People trust content and recommendations from those they know. In fact, people are far more likely to read a post from a friend about a brand than that same post from the brand itself.  

When your employees engage with your business pages and company social content (share, comment, like, etc.), they help your organization:

• Improve organic reach and get more social shares
• Increase traffic from social media to our website and blog
• Lower overall marketing costs through organic reach

The data doesn’t lie. We did some online research and compiled a list of strong stats on the power of employee advocacy:

• Content shared by employees receives 8x more engagement than content shared by brand channels 
• Brand messages reached 561% further when shared by employees vs the same messages shared via official brand social channels 
• Employees have 5x more reach than corporate accounts
• Social followers of your employees are 7x more likely to convert
• 84% of people trust recommendations from friends, family, colleagues over other forms of marketing.
• LinkedIn found the employees of a company tend to have 10 times more followers than the company itself.
• LinkedIn found that while only about 2% of employees reshare their company’s social posts, employees are responsible for 20% of overall engagement.
• Job seekers and potential recruits say current employees are the most trusted source of information about a company; they also rank social and professional networks as the most important resources in their job search.
• Leads from employee advocacy are 7x more likely to close than other forms of leads

Not sure how your employees can become social media advocates? Here are 7 ways your employees can help improve your organic reach.

Employees can:

1. Invite
   Increase page followers by inviting friends and family to “like” the company Facebook page.
2. Share & Repost Posts
   Improve visibility by sharing and reposting Facebook and Instagram content, allowing their social network to see your company’s posts.
3. Share Pages
   Expand followers by sharing the company page with their network on LinkedIn, as well as with Facebook groups they have joined, pages they manage, in events they plan to attend, as a private message, on their newsfeed/timeline, or directly to a specific friend’s page.
4. Twitter: Retweet, Comment & Like 
   Enhance engagement on Twitter by retweeting, commenting and liking company posts just as they would on Facebook.
5. Tag Themselves in Photos & Tag Friends in Comments
   Grow reach by tagging themselves in photos, and by using the comments section of Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to tag friends who might be interested in your company’s posts.
6. Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIn: Like, Comment & Reshare Stories 
   Use the comment and like buttons on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn to increase organic engagement, and use the Instagram repost app to share content on Instagram stories and as posts.
7. Save Image, Copy Text, and Post to Your Own Page
   (P.S. Your employees are superstars if they do this!) Beat the social media algorithms when they create a copied post on their personal page, tagging your company and using the content from your business page verbatim. This is truly the BEST way your employees can be a social media employee advocate! 

At a loss for words? Not sure where to start? Our team here at MC2 can help. Launch your social media strategy and employee advocacy program today!