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Approaching the idea of employee advocacy can be a lot to wrap your mind around. It involves a lot of planning and support to get advocacy off the ground. While the initial set-up requires plenty of forethought, once a program is in place (especially when using an employee advocacy platform), it’s quick and simple for employees to advocate.
Getting a six-pack in just eight minutes a day might be a challenge, but in just eight minutes a day, you can become a stellar employee advocate. Here are some quick and easy things you can do every day to advocate:
It might go without saying, but if you want to be an advocate, you need to put your voice out there and talk about your brand. Social Media Today calls advocates trusted “insiders.” After all, who else can deliver a closer view of a company’s best qualities? Twitter is a great place to advocate for your brand as it only takes a few seconds to tweet something compelling. It could be something as simple as talking about a new product or service your company is offering. If you helped bring that product to market, why wouldn’t you want to show off all your hard work? And even if you weren’t personally involved, it’s always nice to give your coworkers a virtual pat on the back.
2014 is the year of Google+, so it’s important for you to fully engage in brand advocacy there. Photos are especially effective on this social media site, so think about sharing an image of your office, at a company event, at lunch with coworkers, or anything of the sort. You could even share a fun fact about your workplace along with the photo. The key to effective advocacy is a personal, authentic touch. Don’t be afraid to be real.
The best employee advocacy programs make it easy to keep track of who is talking about your brand all across the web. Use a social listening platform to monitor social media for company-related hashtags and usernames. This way you’ll see immediately when someone has asked a question about your company and, if you are qualified to answer it, you can leap into action right away. Answering a customer’s question often only takes a few minutes and can make all the difference in his or her impression of a company. Remember: it’s a lot easier to retain a customer than it is to acquire a new one, so making this extra effort as an advocate can go a long way toward solidifying your brand’s reputation.
A major part of brand advocacy is building a reputation for your company as a thought leader. Individual employees can be viewed as thought leaders as well by sharing interesting and informative content on a regular basis. This usually involves a combination of sharing content created by the brand and content that is created by others. Content sharing and content curation should be rolled into your daily employee advocacy tasks. The good news is that it’s very easy to do.
A quick search through your current social feeds should present at least one piece of content worth sharing. You can tweet a link to this content, pin it, share it on Facebook, or write up a quick summary and share it along with an image on Google+. Or, if your company has an employee advocacy platform, you can go there to easily share content that has already been curated for you.
You could probably share one piece of content across all of your social networks. Just be certain to customize how you share it for each network’s specific needs and avoid the “mass share” where you post the exact same thing in the exact same way. Doing the latter appears lazy and will lessen the impact of your advocacy.
Employee advocacy is extremely powerful and it doesn’t even take that long to complete. In about 8 minutes a day, you can accomplish several advocacy tasks that set your brand apart from the pack and establish your company as one that cares about its employees.
Russ is Co-Founder and CEO of Dynamic Signal, a silicon valley software company that provides VoiceStorm, a marketing platform that helps top brands partner with and leverage the social reach and influence of their employees, fans and customers to achieve their branding, marketing and commerce goals. A digital media industry veteran, Russ has more than 15 years' experience in the online marketing world. He co-founded and was CEO of Adify (acquired by Cox for $300M in May 2008), was EVP of Corporate Development at comScore (NASDAQ:SCOR) and was among the first employees at Flycast (acquired by CMGi for $2.3B in January 2000).
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