Creating an Employee Advocacy Program

    We are nearing the end of our Essentials of Social Media Marketing journey with Michelle Charello as we explore creating an employee advocacy program. With today's up-and-coming society, employee advocacy programs are starting to become more prevalent. While there are many known benefits, more than half of employees are not given the proper training on when or how to advocate for their brand. There are times when the marketing teams make promoting difficult through social media. Creating an employee advocacy program takes a proper strategy. Steps needed for this to run smoothly include creating an advocacy team, setting goals, educating and training employees, getting employee buy-in, using tools and resources, recognizing and incentivizing and tracking and reporting. With the right strategy in place, the organization and its employees will have a better chance at succeeding.

    Regardless of who it includes, an advocacy team is vital for running and promoting the program. This team would be in charge of tasks such as getting employee buy in, setting goals, recognizing and incentivizing employees to continue to participate and communicating the program. On top of these tasks, this team also is responsible for creating the social media content and sharing it to all employees so they may also share on their social media platforms. Keeping constant contact with employees will help aid in the program's success. Like all programs, setting goals is an essential step. Some common goals programs tend to set include increase revenues/sales, increase engagement, recruit and retain top talent, increase reach, reduce budgets for paid social advertising and increase website traffic from social media. For the program to run smoothly, it's important for the employees to be educated on any company policies or guidelines pertaining to social media. When all employees are trained, it creates a consistent presence across all social media platforms. Training is also important because not all employees will have the same skillset in terms of social media. Employees should be taught on how to leverage social media for the company's benefit.

    After all of the preparation work, it's finally time for employees to become brand advocates online. It may be hard at first to get employees to want to benefit the company on their platforms, so reminding them of all the personal benefits they may receive is a good incentive. Some benefits include network, career and personal growth. Once employees have gotten their feet in the door, it's important companies still provide resources to aid them. With today's technology, there are apps to help create content with very few clicks and even provide analytics on what's working and what isn't. Having employees work hard to promote the company is important, so is recognizing and incentivizing. A simple "thank-you" from higher up officers can go a long way with lower end employees. To boost morale, hosting friendly competitions with promoting is also a good way to say "thank-you."

    Finally, after all the hard work has been done, tracking and reporting on the company's findings is important. Some things to report on include active participation, employee participation rate, top contributors, most engaging posts, organic reach, average engagement rate for posts, sales and many more. Regardless of where you fall within a company, it's important to promote it as if you were the only one doing it. Stay tuned for next week as we continue to wrap up our journey!