Employee advocacy on social media; are you missing out?

We live in a digital world that is constantly changing and businesses (both large and small) have no choice but to get in sync with the current digital trends.  Social Media Marketing strategies that easily increased the sales landscape four years ago no longer apply. Thanks to the changing facebook algorithms and Twitter showing tweets out of order or features like “Moments” are making organic reach negligible.

A couple years back, businesses abroad started tapping into their biggest assets for getting organic reach for their brand i.e. their employees. Employees in most companies through their personal networks hold more organic reach than an individual company holds through the typical communities of “Likes” & “Followers”. Wondering how?

If you are a facebook page admin, you know that today a company, having a Facebook page with more than 100K Likes, posting once a day, does not organically reach more than 10,000 unique people in a week.  At the same time an average user on Facebook has 300+ friends, now If this company had even 100 employees actively sharing these posts, combined they can easily get reach more than 10,000 people in a week.

The concept of employee advocacy makes lot of sense from a marketing perspective because:

• Employees have great affinity to the brand they work with.
• Most of them are already active on social networks and their network would trust the communication from them more than the company itself.
• Employees would love to share content from the company as long as it is quality content and makes them look good in their networks.

If you are still not convinced that this is not the way to go, here are some facts & figures that could change your mind:

• Companies internationally and a few in India have seen more than 11x increase in Organic reach due to Employee Advocacy.
• They have also seen a 5x increase in recruiting referrals coming from current employees.
• Increased Sales through social platforms. Employee advocacy & social selling go hand in hand.

In conclusion, employee advocacy on social media is promising and looking at its continued success in the US since 2012, it is here to stay.  The question is would Indian companies embrace it or the wait and watch will continue. Do share your thoughts below!

The article is written by Gaurav Mendiratta, Founder & CEO at SocioSquare.