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One proven method for increasing the reach and impact of your Content Marketing and Social Media activities is Employee Advocacy. Employee Advocacy is word of mouth marketing in the digital age. It is the process of encouraging your staff to read, comment and share your company’s content. This advocacy normally takes place online on Social Media platforms; LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook being popular choices.
The benefits are twofold; firstly, the company’s content which includes blog posts, video posts and updates reaches a larger audience. Secondly, employees have the opportunity to build up their personal brands. Given the widespread adoption of Social Media platforms employee advocacy is a low cost method to increase your company’s online profile and levels of engagement.
Employee Advocacy
Employee advocacy is particularly effective for B2B businesses. Before you start an employee advocacy programme you need to assess your employees and evaluate whether they are genuinely fans of the firm and the activities that you are engaged in. In an ideal situation all of your employees will be engaged and committed to the company vision. In reality this may not be the case, if you have disaffected or demotivated employees you should take steps to either re-engage them or remove them from your staff before proceeding with any employee advocacy initiatives.
What does a Successful Employee Advocacy Programme look like?
Training
Before setting employment advocacy tasks for your employees they will need to be trained. Set up a training day to explain the benefits of employee advocacy and then the practical steps they will need to take to put the strategy into practice. This training will be a perfect launch platform to enthuse and motivate your staff and give them the guidance that they will need. During the training you should demonstrate what best practice looks like for employee advocacy and the benefits to them of building their personal brands.
Employee Advocacy in Practice
Encourage your staff to start using Social listening tools such as Google alerts and mentions to monitor conversations about your company and associated brands. They can easily contribute to relevant conversations and / or disseminate useful information. The approach should be for them to deliver value in any communications they make.
Twitter remains a dynamic Social Media platform and using the Twitter search function and relevant hashtags with good traction it will be relatively straightforward for your employees to find conversations about your products and services and then contribute
For B2B businesses, LinkedIn is a very influential platform and the perfect focus for your employee advocacy activities. One of our current clients is seeing tremendous growth on LinkedIn and employee advocacy has been a part of that success story.
YouTube
Not all B2B businesses have established YouTube channels but of those that do many will recognise the power of likes, comments and shares on YouTube and other video hosting platforms. YouTube has very sophisticated viewer analytics and videos on your company channel with more engagement will be presented for viewing more often than those without engagement. Employee advocacy will have a positive impact in this areas.
SlideShare
Slideshare (owned by LinkedIn) is another great platform for employee advocacy. Compared to the others on this list it is under utilised and therein lies the opportunity. Employees should be briefed to follow, share and clip from your company’s content on Slideshare.
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B2B Content Marketing Agency London
Marketing Fundamentals Ltd is a B2B Content Marketing Agency in London that creates Content and manages Social Media for Professional Services firms. We hope you find this information useful.
If you would like our help creating and executing a Content Marketing Plan for your business or organisation give us a call on +44 (0) 845 2264 247. You can also email us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com
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Best regards,
Marketing Fundamentals Team
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