Employee Advocacy: What’s in it For The Employees?

There are many reasons an organization would want to implement an employee advocacy program, but what are the benefits for employees?

Whether you’re new to social media or already share company messaging on multiple platforms, employee advocacy can help you. If you’re new to social media, you’ll get comfortable sharing content, writing posts, and making connections. If you’re already doing this, you’ll learn what messaging to share, how to leverage your connections and create opportunities.  

For you to volunteer to take part in your organization’s employee advocacy program, you need to benefit from it – not just at your job, but personally benefit as well. We’ll get into what you gain personally from being part of your organization’s employee advocacy program, as well as how employee advocacy makes your job easier.

Personal benefits

Employee advocacy can help you expand your social media presence and build connections in your industry.

Social media is an opportunity for you to showcase your knowledge to peers, but it can be very time-consuming to consistently curate content that’s relevant to your industry, while also doing your day-to-day responsibilities at work. Your employee advocacy program helps you with that by allowing you to pick and choose suggested content you want to share, edit the captions of the content you share on Facebook and LinkedIn, and promote posts on all platforms.

By showing off your industry expertise, you’ll build new connections on social media with industry peers. You’ll notice more people viewing your LinkedIn page and sending you connection requests on LinkedIn. You’ll see more engagement on your posts on all platforms and increase your number of followers too. Your new followers won’t just be anybody. They’ll be people in your industry you actually want to connect with.

By building connections and showcasing your expertise and insights, you’ll work your way up to earning credibility and developing a following. You’ll be a micro-influencer in your industry. We’ve seen many people do this and gain opportunities, such as invitations to speak at events, teaching opportunities, and more.

By expanding your social reach and having a stronger, more influential presence, you will be more valuable to your organization when promoting its initiatives.

Helps you with your job

Employee advocacy doesn’t just help you with personal branding outside of work. It’ll help make your job easier as well.

Employee advocacy steers you in the right direction in terms of promoting specific initiatives that are most important to your organization. By learning what your company wants to promote, you’ll gain a better understanding of your company’s mission. This results in a stronger connection to your organization. By sharing your company's content, you’ll learn exactly what other departments promote, so you’ll understand exactly what’s going on outside of your department and across your organization. This allows for everyone to be on the same page with a better understanding of what you’re trying to do overall.

It also has more concrete benefits that you can measure statistically, such as the number of leads, deals, partnerships, and more. By building out your social media presence through employee advocacy, many of the digital connections you make can turn into leads. They can also become people you make partnerships with whether you promote each other's initiatives, speak at each other's events, post and share each other's content, and more.

Employee advocacy helps employees in a myriad of ways both in and out of the office regardless of the industry you work in or the size of your organization. You can build your platform on social media, gain more opportunities and excel at your career.