Why Brands Are Turning to an Employee Advocacy Solution

Whether brands like it or not, employees have been using social media for years. 88% of employees use one or more social media sites for personal use, and 33% of workers voluntarily post content (good and bad) about their employer.

Instead of fighting with their employees over social media, savvy companies are leaning into it. They realize the value of employee advocacy on social media and the untapped resource of their employees’ social networks.

Employee advocacy statistics show that employee advocacy doubles a brand’s social media engagement by 150-300%. By leveraging their employees’ social networks for brand promotion, these companies are increasing brand awareness, building trust, and saving money on digital marketing.

However, it isn’t easy getting employee buy-in for employee advocacy. Getting employees on board requires crafting a strong employee advocacy strategy and choosing the right employee advocacy solution (e.g., platform or tool) for your brand. That’s why employee advocacy platforms, like GaggleAMP, are helping to fuel this employee advocacy trend. Companies know they need a solution to help streamline the employee advocacy process.

In this article, we’re going to discuss how a robust employee advocacy program using GaggleAMP can help companies create tactical advocacy strategies. We’ll also take a look at some compelling case studies that show why businesses are turning to employee advocacy solutions. But, first, let’s briefly go over the pros and cons of employee advocacy so you have a solid foundation of how employee advocacy can be both beneficial and challenging.

Pros and Cons of Employee Advocacy

Employee advocacy sounds simple enough: it’s a marketing strategy where employees spread brand messages on social media platforms. However, in addition to the benefits, there are some challenges companies face when executing this strategy.

Let’s go over the benefits first.

Benefits of Employee Advocacy

When a brand has a strong employee advocacy strategy (and platform), they’re setting themselves up for success. The potential benefits of employee advocacy that they stand to gain include:

• Increasing Brand Awareness.
• Building Brand Reputation and Credibility.
• Attracting New Talent.
• Getting Better Quality Leads.
• Boosting Their ROI.
• Improving Employee Engagement.

With benefits like these, it’s no surprise that brands are implementing employee advocacy solutions.

Challenges of Employee Advocacy

An employee advocacy program, like any marketing strategy, does pose some challenges. The challenges of employee advocacy include:

• Getting Employees to Participate.
• Aligning Your Employees With Your Employer Brand and Messaging.
• Allocating Resources to Providing Clear Guidelines, Training, and Support.
• Monitoring and Measuring the Impact of Your Employee Advocacy Program.
• Providing Feedback and Recognition to Your Employees.

However, notice that all of these challenges can be easily overcome by implementing an effective employee advocacy platform. The right platform can help fix these issues by transforming employees into valuable brand ambassadors, maintaining consistency in brand messaging, improving external and internal communication, plus saving time and money.

Employee Advocacy Examples

Building the case for an employee advocacy program can be overwhelming, especially when stakeholders want to see immediate, measurable ROI results.

But, by clearly explaining the employee advocate role and providing successful employee advocacy program examples, you can show why your company needs an employee advocacy solution.

Some of the best employee advocacy examples can be found in case studies. Here are a couple of employee advocacy examples where using GaggleAMP’s employee advocacy software had a positive impact:

Teachstone

The Teachstone team wanted to be more active on social media but really didn’t know how to go about it consistently. With buy-in from their peers and executive leadership team, Teachstone’s marketing team chose GaggleAMP as their employee advocacy solution.

By quickly activating 75% of their Gaggle Members on social media, Teachstone increased their social interactions and performance two-fold in just 90 days. Feedback from Teachstone staff was positive, too!

Team members appreciated how easy GaggleAMP’s platform is to use. In fact, four in five members were actively participating in activities, which brought the team quick and immediate results:

Not only did the company benefit, but individual team members did, too. Using GaggleAMP’s employee advocacy platform also helped elevate team members into thought leaders. Team members saw this translate into increases in impressions and engagements on their own social channels like LinkedIn. In fact, since implementing GaggleAMP and posting consistently on LinkedIn, the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Teachstone saw her profile views increase by 30% along with high post impressions.

Teachstone also appreciated GaggleAMP’s AI-powered paraphrasing technology. Initially, there was concern everyone would be posting the same message. They love it when they ask their team to share something and they use the AI feature. It gives the team ownership of their voice while maintaining brand guidelines and avoiding duplicating content.

Rackspace Technology

Rackspace Technology is another company that has benefited from GaggleAMP’s employee advocacy platform.

In just six months with GaggleAMP, Rackspace garnered over 4,500 clicks to its website and campaign landing pages, over 22,000 social media interactions, and reached over 60 million people on social media. And that’s not all, the company saves around $100,000 per month on paid social media advertising.

*According to The GaggleAMP Ad Savings Calculator

So, why did Rackspace initially make the switch to GaggleAMP? Their platform (LinkedIn Elevate) was being sunset, and they needed a new one.

According to Rackspace, GaggleAMP stood out from the top three vendors thanks to its ease of use and dynamic activities. There are over 50 different activities on GaggleAMP, giving Rackspace a variety that they didn’t previously have with LinkedIn Elevate. GaggleAMP’s built-in analytics was another winning feature, enabling the company to measure its program’s success with streamlined reports that can be delivered to their inbox on a daily, weekly, or monthly cadence. Finally, the amazing onboarding experience with GaggleAMP was the cherry on top.

Teachstone and Rackspace are two great examples of companies benefitting from an employee advocacy solution. Now let’s take a look at how your business can build an employee advocacy program (or strengthen an existing one) using GaggleAMP.

Employee Advocacy Program

So, you’re ready to take the plunge and build a robust employee advocacy program. Great! One of the first steps is crafting a strategy for leveraging your social media resources and platforms. This strategy will take you from the initial planning to execution, including setting up guidelines and measuring success.

6 Steps To Build an Employee Advocacy Strategy

Here are six steps to craft your own employee advocacy strategy.

1. Define Clear Objectives and Guidelines

What are your company’s goals for using an employee advocacy strategy? First, determine if it’s to increase brand exposure, engagement, leads, etc. For example, maybe it’s to double your social media engagement within six months, increase sales by 40%, increase traffic to the website by 50%, recruit 10-15 new employees by next quarter, etc.

Once those objectives and guidelines are defined, it’s time to choose your participants and social media channel(s).

2. Select Key Employees

Identify who will be sharing content. These employees could be the sales team, marketers, upper management, etc. The goal is to ultimately make them thought leaders which will create authentic engagement and increase brand reach.

3. Choose Relevant Social Channels

While it’s tempting to be active on all of the social media channels (Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube), you’ll be doing your brand a disservice. Instead, only utilize the social channels that are relevant to your target audience.

For example, employee advocacy on LinkedIn is a powerful growth hack. By having your employees engage with a company post (share, like, or comment), you can multiply the organic reach that post receives by the number of employees that engage since their networks will also see that post.

4. Create a Content Roadmap (and Guidelines)

Gone are the days of posting whatever and whenever. Today’s content marketing needs a strategy, and a content roadmap is a great way to help your employees post with intent.

As you develop your content roadmap, consider the following:

• Content Ideas. Ideas can include company news, new product or service announcements, employee spotlights, thought leadership, etc. Be sure to be clear on what content is not appropriate to share (e.g., confidential company information, inappropriate language or images, etc.).

• Content Format. Depending on the social platform and audience, you’ll need to decide which content format performs best (video, text, image).
• Post Optimization. Depending on the platform, follow optimization best practices (e.g. three to four hashtags, adding links, etc.).
• Posting Schedule. Consistency is key and to maintain a social media presence, you’ll need a posting schedule. We recommend posting at least three to four times per week. Ideally, more if you can.

Social media content calendars at GaggleAMP help you

and your employees organize your posts.

5. Select an Employee Advocacy Software

Social media employee advocacy tools play a crucial role in creating an effective employee advocacy program. For example, GaggleAMP’s powerful features can help your brand:

• Build brand awareness through word-of-mouth marketing.
• Promote a culture of sharing and engagement.
• Diversify your employee advocacy efforts with AI.
• Analyze the performance of your employee advocacy efforts.
• Increase employee participation and engagement with gamification and rewards.
• Integrate with your favorite platforms.

6. Measure Success

To ensure that your employee advocacy strategy is working, you need to measure its success. Common social media marketing metrics include:

• Employee Earned Media Value (EEMV).
• Cost per Click.
• Reach.
• Engagement.
• Clicks.

To calculate your employee advocacy ROI, an employee advocacy tool like GaggleAMP makes it easy to measure these metrics with its analytics dashboard.

Review these metrics on a regular basis and make adjustments as needed.

Final Thoughts

Businesses are turning to employee advocacy solutions because they see the value in employee advocacy. They know the power of leveraging their employees’ social networks for increased brand exposure, customer engagement, and potential revenue.

Did you know that more than 100,000 people trust GaggleAMP for their employee advocacy? Ready to see how GaggleAMP can amplify your employee advocacy program? Schedule a demo today.