Earned Media: The Secret To Activating Your Employees Online
Social media marketing is a thorough discipline. It incorporates the way your brand speaks and acts online. Now that B2B brands are waking up to the idea of employer brand, it’s essential you bring everyone from your receptionist all the way to your C-suite into the fold.
Your employees are the experience customers have at every touchpoint. They’re essentially small brands in their own right. But there’s a high chance that they’re already active on social media – just not in the ways you may necessarily want them to be, creating risk and the potential for a brand reputation disaster.
Tribal research has found that over 50% of employees who share on social have never read their company’s social media policy. And with Hubbub showing us the ways brands can use earned media to maximise their paid campaign performance, the question is: how do you start helping employees tell their stories in ways that benefit both themselves and your business?
Understand the mindset of your employees
Employees want to know that posting about the company online has benefits for them. They want to know why they should bother, if it’ll make their job easier and why they should invest time learning about best practice on social media. If you can answer those inevitable questions, they’ll be more likely to buy into it.
Shine a light on your most active employees
Identify and spotlight the employees who are most active on social media. Treat them as ambassadors for both your internal and external brand – communicating to other members of your team the ease and benefit of staying active online.
Build a training programme
At Tribal, we talk about ‘training the masses, training the many, training the few’. It involves mapping out your employees’ social media maturities and confidence levels to create learning paths they can follow – allowing you to target training accordingly and maximise the value of their social media presences.
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Use tools to demonstrate success
You need to be able to speak leadership’s language if you want to build a scalable employee advocacy programme. Digital tools help to measure the success and impact of activating your employees on social media – demonstrating how they improve key performance indicators like website traffic, sales performance, job applications and hiring conversions.
A couple of things to avoid...
Not all of your employees will want to be active on social media – and don’t force them to be. We’ve found that most organisations will hit ~15-20% of employees at best, so be sure to manage expectations where necessary.
You also need to respect your employees. After all, they’re the lifeblood of your business. Find ways to highlight their voices, thoughts and insights over using them as a channel for amplifying branded content.
Want to incorporate employee advocacy into your wider marketing strategy? Discover the perfect blend between organic and paid LinkedIn campaigns with Hubbub by Transmission.
At Tribal Impact, we use a proven framework for enabling employees at scale, targeting training at the point of need, and working to reduce any risks involved. If you’d like support activating your employees online, contact us today.
Marketing & Communications Leader | Chair | Non-Exec | Tech MBA |
1yInteresting article. Would love to hear from organisations that are doing this really well and how they've answered those questions for their employees.
CMO l LinkedIn Top Marketing Strategy Voice I Forbes Comms Council Member I International Speaker I Podcaster I Corporate Trainer & Consultant
1yLove this, Sarah! Internal marketing for the win! Invest in marketing the brand to your employees (in the same way we market to our customers), and you're bound to turn them into loyal advocates as well.
Digital Channels Leader Europe West
1yLike! Thanks for sharing, Sarah 😀
One of the most rewarding tasks I have ever been given is the opportunity to be an advocate for my company, #TeamEricsson
Senior HR Manager / Global Employer Branding Leader/ Talent Development / ICF Certified Coach
1yVery spot on, Sarah :)