The Secret Spice to Kickstarting Employee Advocacy

Employee advocacy, or encouraging your employees to share interesting professional content to their external social media networks, seems to be on everyone’s lips. Looking at the definition, it is pretty obvious that in order for employee advocacy to take off in your organization, you need content that employees want to share. So what if I told you how to know exactly what type of content your employees want to share?

Let Your Employees Suggest Content

The answer is simple – listen to them. There are certain employee advocacy platforms that allow employees to suggest content for everybody to share. Instead of pushing them content you think is nice, why not take a look what type of articles, news, and blogs they would like to share? If they have produced the content themselves, it is even better. That way they can improve their thought leadership status in their networks. Furthermore, authentic posts coming from employees usually gather a lot more engagement than posts by companies.

Measure, Understand, and Adjust Accordingly

Just listening to and empowering your employees is not enough. To get the most out of your employee advocacy program, you need a system that also allows you to measure the engagement levels of posts shared by your employees. By regularly monitoring and cross-referencing the data, you can start to identify patterns that are specific to your organization and industry. You will learn what type of posts get the most engagement in your employee networks, what time your employees usually share, what would be the most opportune time to share, etc. The most advanced employee advocacy platforms also let you measure the data by employee so that you can identify the thought leaders and the most influential people in your organization.

By listening to your employees, empowering them to participate, and measuring the results, you can vastly improve the reach and engagement levels of your social media communications. Employees are probably your most valuable resource in communications as well, so make sure you do everything to get them involved in sharing inspiring content and kickstarting rewarding conversations across social media.

(give your employees a hand / shutterstock)