Your aligned and engaged people are perfectly positioned to become your strongest brand advocates. Sprinklr shares important statistics why an employee advocacy program is such a great talent attraction strategy: “According to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, 52% of consumers would trust information from a regular employee (a jump from 32% in 2009), and 67% would trust information from a technical expert within the company. The report also found that, in 4 out of 5 company-related topic categories (engagement, integrity, products & services, and operations), employees are the most-trusted influencers.

“By setting up an employee advocacy program, you can ensure your employees are enabled with the training, guidelines, and messaging they need to effectively engage new and loyal consumers. As Social Media Today found, “nearly 64% of advocates in a formal program credited employee advocacy with attracting and developing new business, and nearly 45% attribute new revenue streams to employee advocacy.”

These facts and figures are all well and good, but it’s important to have a framework for measuring the success of your employee advocacy program.

Percentage of employees sharing content

Measure this data point to understand how many employees are participating in your advocacy program. Using this knowledge, you can better understand where your share numbers, traffic, and engagement come from.

If this number is low, find ways to reinvigorate and optimise your program for better results. If it’s high, use this information to motivate other employees to join.

Percentage of employees who have participated in past 90 days

“Three months (or 90 days) is an appropriate trial period to see how your advocacy program is performing. If you’re just launching your program, or if you’re thinking of making some big adjustments, it’s helpful to gauge the participation and performance from the past 90 days. This way, you can arm yourself with a benchmark with which to compare future success.

“For instance, by keeping track of these metrics, BMC was able to see how its own BeSocial program significantly impacted the company’s social engagement. In just three months, 850 members had participated and over 30,500 messages were shared, resulting in 12.9 million impressions and over 3,100 website clicks.”

What content is being shared most?

Find out what resonates with your people. Determine which pieces of content do employees feel most comfortable sharing and what they think is most appropriate for their audiences.

If the majority of your engagement came from a few pieces of choice content, you can use that to inform your content-creation strategy going forward, by either creating more of the same, or axing things that aren’t working.  

Engagement rates of content being shared by employees

Of the content being shared by your people, what are your clients and customers responding to? What information are they interested in from your employee advocates.”

“Perhaps blog posts are being shared more than ebooks. Maybe tweets with questions are being shared more than tweets with just headlines and links. It’s crucial to understand how content is performing in these communities because it can tell you if the content is high-value, and which content you should be creating and sharing more. It can also shine a light on the employees who have the most engaged social followings.”

How many people complete your employee advocacy training program?

By offering your people training and implementation guidance, you can increase the chance of your organisation’s success. Measuring the percentage of people who have undertaken this training will give you a better idea of where your reach is coming from (i.e. mostly from people who have been trained?)

Compare content-sharing between those employees who have undertaken training, and those who are sharing content on their own. Then use this data to incentivise more people to participate in your training.

How many people remain and advance in your program

“How effective is your advocacy program at retaining participants? Is there a natural progression between each stage? Perhaps you might need to optimise certain stages of the program. One easy way to do this is to establish check-in points where employees can provide feedback to the social team, and vice versa. The only way employees will be able to successfully complete [or remain in] the program is if they understand each stage and have the tools they need to advance to the next one.”

Total number of participants

Of course, measuring the total number of people participating in your employee advocacy program is key. It indicates how many people are actually adopting your program. If there’s a gap, address the cause and ensure you have adequate communication strategies in place to promote your program.

Employees aligned with your mission, vision, and values are a powerful force to promote your organisation as a great place to work, attract future talent, and personalise your brand. Don’t put a great program in place without measuring its effectiveness. Use data to gain knowledge, promote your program further to your executive team and other employees, and informed make adjustments to maximise the potential of this strategy.

Source

The 7 metrics you need to measure your employee advocacy program

Scott Amerman

Sprinklr

The post 7 ways to measure the impact of your employee advocacy program appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.

Word of mouth is one of your most important marketing tools. Why not use it in your employer branding strategy? Employees aligned with your mission, vision, and values are a powerful force to promote your organisation as a great place to work, attract future talent, and personalise your brand.  

Employee advocacy refers to employees promoting your organisation as an employer of choice. There are a number of ways to go about this, but the most effective strategy is through social media.

According to Hootsuite’s guide to creating an employee advocacy program, “Word-of-mouth remains the top influencer for buyers. Studies show that employees are more than twice as trusted as a CEO, senior executive, or activist consumer. Cisco notes that employees’ social posts generate eight times more engagement than posts from their employers. People are 16 times more likely to read a post from a friend about a brand than from the brand itself. In addition, employees often already have social media profiles. And it’s likely that they’re on some platforms that your brand isn’t.

“Plus, employee advocacy is as effective for small businesses as it is for large corporations…[An organisation of] 20 means a potential reach of 5,000.”

This strategy is beneficial for both employees and employees alike. Aside from promoting your benefits, your people are empowered to shape the type of people attracted to your organistation, and build their personal network and brands.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to launch an employee advocacy program without engaged people with shared vision and trust in your brand. It’s beneficial to start with a strong workplace culture.

As Hootsuite explains, “For employees to become brand ambassadors, they need to love more about their jobs than just their paychecks. In one study, 18 per cent of employees said that corporate culture would increase their loyalty and engagement with a company.

“This is especially true of millennials. In 2016, a Fidelity study found that workers in that generation willing to take a pay cut of up to $7,600 for ‘an improved quality of worklife’.”

Develop authentic relationships with your people to build a high-trust culture. This beneficial in encouraging people to share idea and fosters authentic communication.

Find a way to link your people’s work to your overall mission and vision, and articulate this in a way that helps them understand how their contribution goes towards a higher purpose.

Get your people onside

Why should people participate in your employee advocacy program? Think about the type of things that would motivate and benefit them. For example, they can build their professional brand as a thought leader in their field and gain more recognition on social media.

Hootsuite recommends the following to win your people over:

• • Recognise their work. In a recent study, 72 per cent of businesses said that recognition for high performers had a significant impact on employee engagement. An “employee of the month” program or notice in a monthly newsletter sound old-fashioned, but can still be effective. So can setting aside time in team meetings to recognise certain employees. And certainly, few people are above accepting gift cards, bonuses, and even company swag.
  • Ask employees what kinds of incentives they would like to see. The more engaged employees are in the process, the more they will feel like they have a stake in the program.
  • Ask, don’t mandate.
  • Make advocacy a game. Create a leaderboard to show metrics on who’s getting the most impressions or engagement. Make a hashtag around a new development in the company. Then organise a draw among team members who create posts with that hashtag.
  • Make advocacy easy. Give them something interesting or fun to promote. This could be a new product announcement or a humorous video.
  • Recognise individual talents or accomplishments. Everyone is a micro-influencer in their own right. Perhaps someone is a renowned food blogger, or an expert on all things Apple.
  • Show enthusiasm. Remind your team about the program and give updates on new, shareable content. Enthusiasm is contagious, so play up your brand initiatives and goals.

Set KPIs

How will your people know they’re achieving success? Without an organised process, you won’t be able to track results to inform and tailor your strategy.

“The more you define your specific goals, the more your employees will be able to help. If your goal is to increase awareness, ask employees to post more about the brand. If it’s a new product, create shareable content about that product. If your target is [gaining your] share of voice, seek out and organise employees who use several platforms and/or post often.

“Other goals might include improving organic reach, increasing traffic from social media, and expanding your demographic. For each, look at how employee advocacy can help.”

Define social media guidelines

Employees need to understand both your message, and the best way to communicate it. This will ensure your brand messaging is consistent. (“You don’t want one employee adopting an irreverent tone, while others take a more formal approach.”)

Help them understand the best language to use, how often they should post and how they should respond to comments.

If you already have a social media policy, share it with your people. If you don’t, it may be a good idea to create one. Make your guidelines short and easy to follow!

Set up training and implementation guidance

Your people’s social media competency and following will differ, so ensure you clearly communicate best practices across all areas of the business and levels of seniority.

“Be consistent in offering new and shareable content. This helps employees also be consistent and create new social media sharing habits. Offer a mix, if possible, of fun, shareable content, and industry trends.”

Appoint advocacy leaders

Your leadership team should be leading the charge, however, you can outsource advocacy roles to your people. Some of their responsibilities may include communicating your program’s missions and goals, and creating incentives. These leaders should communicate their messages to a small group of people, who in turn pass the message on.

Proactive advocacy leaders will minimise people dropping off from the program after the initial excitement wears off.

Track results

Of course, with any brand initiative

Summarise your results to demonstrate ROI. Consider the following:

• Top contributors. Which individuals or teams are sharing the most? Which advocates are generating the most engagement?
• Organic reach. How many people are seeing the content shared through your employee advocates?
• Engagement. Are people clicking links, leaving comments and re-sharing content from your advocates? What is the engagement you’re getting per network?
• Traffic. How much traffic did the content shared by employee advocates drive to your website?

Take advantage of word of mouth as a recruitment marketing tool, and your people build their personal brand with great content. Design a robust program, offer training and guidelines,  and measure results. Employee advocates who share your mission, vision, and values are a powerful force to promote your organisation as a great place to work, attract future talent, and personalise your brand.  

Source

Employee Advocacy on Social Media: How to Make it Work for Your Business

Hootsuite

The post How to create an employee advocacy program appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.

In today’s tight talent market, recruiters must think like marketers. Employee advocacy is a form of word of mouth marketing that can net you more, higher-quality candidates by promoting your employer brand and reputation to potential candidates.

Kimberly Whitler reporting for Forbes explains how technology has immensely increased the power of word of mouth referrals. So think of this in terms of recruitment marketing!

“Technology has increased social connectivity making it easier than ever for consumers [or employees] to do your marketing for you. A post that takes just a few minutes for a fan to write will be seen by hundreds of friends who trust them, and it can rapidly travel out to thousands more. Very well-planned messages have been shared by millions within the span of days.”

The strategy Whitler suggests, while aimed at marketers targetting sales, is relevant and important for recruiters. In applying the principles of engaging, equipping, and empowering your people, you can become the most beloved and talked about employer in your field, which will ultimately improve the volume and quality of your talent pipeline. Good word of mouth referrals will generate conversations and recommendations for your organisation.

Rajiv Bhalla writing for Forbes explains that “your workforce [is] a largely untapped brand building resource that can help in creating a more positive perception about your brand without making substantial marketing spends.”

“The process of empowering employees to publicise and promote the organisation’s brand is termed as ‘employee advocacy’. Employee advocacy benefits an organisation across multiple levels. Primarily, it develops brand recognition and increases the brand recall among your employees’ social circle. Secondly, it helps in creating a positive brand perception. Thirdly, and most importantly, it opens access to talented professionals among your employees’ social circles via employer branding and drives social recruiting, thus bringing down recruitment costs.”

The best employee advocacy strategy: engage, equip, empower

Whilter recommends engaging with your people by listening, understanding, and responding to their needs. A present and engaged leadership will be part of and lead conversations around their brand as an employer. Understand what your people love and value in their work and working environment, and provide more of what they need.

Equip your people by giving them things to talk about! It could be through events and activities, insider knowledge, or stories. You may find that great workplaces culture naturally generate conversation.

Empower your people by giving them ways to share and talk about what is happening in your organisation.

“Let them know that they are important to you and that sharing their opinions is important to you. Help them find ways to share within their circles and find ways to help move their conversations.”

What are the benefits for your organisation?

Employee advocacy promotes your employer brand and enhances your brand value in the talent market.

It is a cost-effective and time-saving recruitment marketing solution, as it is a way to outsource your content creation. This takes trust! But by trusting your people, you will also build trust with your target candidates – as candidates are more likely to value the experiences of current employees and gain insights from the types of people they could potentially be working with.

It can also increase the reach of your current job opportunities. For example, Alex Fraser offers an attractive employee referral scheme. Consider implementing one if you haven’t already!

What are the benefits for your people?

By becoming brand advocates, your employees can establish their personal brands and increase their visibility within social circles. They can also learn more about engagement and self-promotion for the projects they are working on.

“The biggest underlying benefit, however, is in career progression. Social media is increasingly being used as a profiling and recruitment tool to evaluate whether prospective job applicants will be a fit for the company’s culture. Candidates who demonstrate a positive attitude towards their previous employers are bound to be preferred during the recruitment process. Brand advocacy, therefore, is becoming a vital tool in the employee handbook for unlocking better employment opportunities.”

Examples of employee advocacy

Be creative when it comes to engaging, equipping and empowering your people to become employee advocates:

• create engaging, relevant posts on social media, and encourage your people to share them and add their own commentary
• write articles relevant to your industry and promote them internally to encourage sharing
• give your people permission to create videos about their roles and feature them in relevant job advertisements and on your careers page!
• host events and encourage your people to take and share pictures.

Opportunities for employee advocacy are only limited by your imagination.

Driving brand advocacy doesn’t need to be complex or difficult. Encourage participation, offer training and opportunities, and be creative in generating shareable content. Let your people share their ideas, and allow them to design and implement brand advocacy programs.

How do you empower brand advocates? Let us know in the comments.

Sources

Empowering your employees to become brand advocates

Rajiv Bhalla

Fortune

Why word of mouth marketing is the most important social media

Kimberly Whitler

Forbes

The post Employee advocacy: the recruitment marketing strategy you need now appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.

Employee advocacy as an employer branding strategy can have a huge impact on your talent attraction efforts. Ryan Erksine reporting for Forbes demonstrates how using video and LinkedIn’s employee engagement platform, Elevate, have worked in tandem to deliver impressive results for Wells Fargo and Delta.

Financial institution Wells Fargo has transformed public perception about what it means to work for them through employer branding. They began by reinstating their commitment to innovation in order to meet the demands of their increasingly online-focused customer base.

Online banking has seen Wells Fargo transition to mobile banking and cardless ATMs, which increased their need for digitally skilled talent. They started hiring less customer service representatives and more software engineers and IT security specialists. However, this was a challenge in itself, with other tech-focused organisations attracting their share of the demographic.

The problem led them to launch a new initiative:

“Wells Fargo started making videos for recruiters to use in their recruiting efforts. The videos highlighted the company’s benefits, commitment to diversity, community outreach and on-the-job training. It was a way for recruiters to show applicants what it means to work at Wells Fargo.

“The videos were a big hit… but eventually we [realised] we can only do so much storytelling ourselves. If we’re not going to leverage the power of our team members, we’re missing out on the biggest opportunity we have to let people know what it means to work here.”

The popularity of these videos led them to film staff members in their everyday work lives, creating employee advocates in the process. The content generated lots of interest on LinkedIn’s employee engagement tool, Elevate, increasingly their popularity with both employees and potential job applications.

Forbes explained how Delta utilises a similar strategy, intentionally creating great content and encouraging their employees to share it. The primary purpose of this is to recruit top talent:

“To do that effectively, Delta needs to project what employee profiles it will find most valuable in six, twelve, or eighteen months and develop a content and advocacy strategy to best attract those roles. We held contests for our recruiters to gamify effective employee engagement activities… Rewriting job descriptions, sharing content on LinkedIn, that kind of thing. It was equal parts social media engagement and gamification of the recruiting role.

“[This strategy] empowered recruiters to become brand ambassadors and armed them with the tools they needed to do their jobs more effectively in a digital economy. Delta’s goal is to give their employees the same competitive advantage.” 

Results were tangible. By fostering employee advocacy, both brands increased their online engagement, attracted top professionals and made great hires.

In measuring their return on investment, Wells Fargo tracked data on Elevate to determine the people engaging with them, whether they applied for a role, whether they were hired, and which piece of content played a role in the process. New hires could then be directly attributed to their efforts.

Employee advocacy is not without its challenges. Organisations looking to replicate these employer branding initiatives must contend with whether to focus on content creation or a distribution platform, as one is not effective without the other. Even though organisations can generate company-approved content, it can still be risky to go from having a small number of brand representatives to hundreds. In the end, these two brands decided the benefits outweighed the risks.

How do you empower employee advocates? Let us know in the comments.

Source

How Top Brands Are Using Employee Advocacy To Rebrand Themselves And Recruit Top Talent

Ryan Erksine

Forbes

The post Which big brands are using employee advocacy for talent attraction? appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.

Transparency and authenticity about products, services and costs are gaining increasingly visibility. But when it comes to communicating authentically about employee experience, companies still have a lot of work to do.

Latest studies reveal only 19% of employees surveyed felt the public image of their company matched reality, and one third of new employees voluntarily leave their position within the first six months.

Sarah Clayton from Harvard Business Review reports:

Employers who deliver on the experience they promise enjoy better recruitment, engagement, employee advocacy, and retention outcomes.

 

Their employees are more likely to recommend their employer as a place to work, to post or share praise about their employer online, and to put more effort into their job than is required.

Clayton recommends:

• being true to your organisation’s corporate purpose and values
• aligning promises and delivery
• encouraging current employees to share stories about their experiences
• aspiring to do better.

Employers who deliver on the experience they promise enjoy better recruitment and engagement #RMMag
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What are your current strategies for crafting and communicating an authentic employer brand? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Source

How to strengthen your reputation as an employer

Sarah Clayton

Harvard Business Review

The post Top tips to strengthen your reputation as an employer appeared first on Recruitment Marketing.