Employee advocacy is a very powerful communications tool. This shouldn’t come across as a surprise. After all, when outside-audiences see that people who spend their days working for a company (and thus know the ins-and-outs of the company) actually like working there and take pride in their products or services, that audience is bound to think more positively about the company. Employee advocacy can be used to meet a number of missions including marketing your products, recruiting new employees, and even earning respect in your industry. With so much to gain, Employee Advocacy truly is a no-brainer, yet many companies struggle with getting employees to consistently share content. We’d recommend instituting employee advocacy incentives.
Say there is a CPG company who is doing well on just about every end of the business, but they know their logistics team is being worked to the bone due to being understaffed. Given this they obviously want to recruit more talent to the company.
The problem is they are having trouble getting the right people for the job. But they know that their employees are friends with plenty of talent on social media. So they decide to start up an employee advocacy program through SocialToaster to get the word out about their open positions and fun work environment.
During the program they found it was easy to get employees to share content through SocialToaster since the employee could connect their social networks through a simple one time process and then share content that was interesting to them to all of their social networks through a single click via their phone. The employees were happy to share but they just needed to be asked and the sharing process had to be simple. Due to the simplicity of the process our employee based programs are seeing shares rates up to 90%.
The company also decided to add incentives to make it fun for employees and to recognize their efforts. For one of clients they knew that many of their employees were avid bikers and environmentalists. So they used SocialToaster to to aggregate all of the social sharing to award fun gifts including several top-line bikes. They used this prizing as a cornerstone for a quarter-long internal content push that focused on showcasing how fun it was to be a part of this company. This way employees not only had the chance to brag a little about how cool their workplace is to their friends, they also had a shot to win prizing that they actually wanted.
For the last major push, the company decided to go all out and award additional paid time off for the employees who were most engaged in the advocacy campaign. Something as simple as an extra vacation day, or even a two-hour lunch break, can go along way towards driving employee participation.
Ready to get started with your employee advocacy efforts? Send us an email, request a free demo, or give us a call at 855.62.TOAST today!