The ROI of Employee Advocacy
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Employee advocacy — the practice of empowering and encouraging employees to be brand ambassadors — taps into the collective power of your employees to drive authenticity, trust, and growth for your brand while simultaneously fostering a culture of engagement and pride within your organization.
If you’ve tried to build an employee advocacy program, you know that they aren’t born overnight. A lot of work goes into identifying brand ambassadors, establishing posting guidelines, and training your ambassadors to share their own stories and talk about your employer brand in a thoughtful way.
But when done right, employee advocacy can create an immense impact on your employer brand and the talent metrics you care about most. Keep reading for insights into the ROI of employee advocacy programs that you can experience, too!
Increased Brand Visibility and Engagement
By encouraging employees to amplify your company’s employer brand content and messages, you can significantly expand your reach to new audiences that might not have been reachable through your official channels alone.
In fact, employee networks, on average, have 10x more connections than a company has followers.1 And, content shared by employees receives 8X more engagement than content shared by brand channels.3
What this means: more people will see your employer brand content and are more likely to engage with it when shared by employees vs. your corporate channel alone. Encouraging employees to amplify your company messages on social media is a great way to increase visibility and engagement with your employer brand.
Build Trust with Talent
In addition to increased brand visibility, employee-shared content is also more trusted by the talent audiences you care about most. In fact, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, people are 3x more likely to trust company information shared by an employee than that shared by a CEO.2
When your employees advocate for your brand, it adds a layer of authenticity that can be hard to achieve through other means. When someone sees an employee sharing company information, they see an engaged team member who they can trust.
Talent will believe your company has a great culture when an employee says so, not just your corporate channel.
Strengthened Employee Engagement and Retention
When employees are active on social media, it has a positive ripple effect on company culture, employee engagement, and workplace morale throughout your organization.
Statistics show that employees at socially engaged companies are 27% more likely to feel optimistic about their company’s future and 15% more likely to feel connected to co-workers beyond their core teams.1
By transforming employees into brand ambassadors, you give them the tools to better understand how their work connects to greater company objectives and outcomes. And, to celebrate the work of their colleagues whose work they may not otherwise have visibility into. Both are great for employee morale, engagement, and retention.
What Employee Advocacy ROI Will Your Brand Experience?
Employee advocacy has been positively linked with increased brand visibility, higher brand trust, and employee engagement and retention. When you take the time to train your employee ambassadors to be great employee storytellers, the sky is truly the limit!
Sources:
1 The Official Guide to Employee Advocacy by LinkedIn