The Importance of Leveraging Employee Advocacy on LinkedIn

What is employee advocacy?

Employee advocacy happens when the company’s employees take ownership of the success and growth of their organization and promote its products and services.

The goal of employee advocacy is simple: get more people talking about your product or service with the help of your workforce. 

Employees are the natural best choice when it comes to choosing advocates for your brand because they are the ones who know your company best. They have a stake in the success of the company with whom they share values and goals. Employee advocacy mainly manifests on social media platforms: this is where employees – social media users like me and you – can obtain the best results.

From building connections with potential customers to referring candidates to fill the company’s vacancies to amplifying the organic growth of the company, and much more. This can be done in many ways. However, we are going to focus here on how to do employee advocacy can be like on LinkedIn. 

Leveraging employee advocacy on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the most widely used social media platform among professionals around the globe and, therefore, provides your organization with maximum exposure when it comes to social selling. This also makes LinkedIn the perfect social media tool to build professionally relevant connections to foster marketing and/or sales opportunities.

And since we are talking about employee advocacy, LinkedIn is the number one platform you want your employee ambassadors to be active on in your stead. To enable this, of course, you’ll need an employee advocacy platform. 

There are heaps of employee advocacy platforms out there, but the one you’re looking for should have a series of features studied and build around LinkedIn so as to maximize the efforts and the results. On a more concrete level, these are some functionalities developed by Ambassify that integrate specifically with LinkedIn and allow companies to maximize their employees’ advocacy efforts.

• Sharing links and videos on LinkedIn. The company can ask employees to automatically share content (written or video) on LinkedIn and other social media platforms. Employees who act as ambassadors pre-authorize Ambassify to share content, which makes the social share happen in only a few clicks.
  
  
• Tagging people and companies directly from the platform. When asking people to share your content, you will find that a big challenge is coming up with a text for that specific piece of content. Not everyone is a content creator, right? That’s why Ambassify lets you pre-create captions for any social media post your employees can share, and in it, you can already decide who should be tagged in it.
  
  
• Turning LinkedIn posts into an advocacy campaign. Ambassify lets platform admins turn any LinkedIn post into a campaign directly from the feed. No matter whether you want your ambassadors to leave a comment, like a post, or reshare it, with Ambassify, you can boost posts in a few clicks.

The main benefits of using LinkedIn for employee advocacy

There are many reasons companies make use employee advocacy, mostly on LinkedIn. Some of them may be obvious or much talked about, but for the sake of someone who hasn’t yet launched an employee advocacy program yet, it might be interesting to highlight the main benefits:

1. Expand your audience and reach. Collectively, the overall network of a company’s employees is at least 10x larger than a company’s follower base. This means that an employee post will get to a whole new circle of reach and thus open up the possibility of engaging with a wider public and a new audience, and if you have an excellent strategy and plan, you will be able to target a large audience at once.
   
   
2. Build meaningful connections. While you are certainly free to communicate directly with prospective clients and partners, in terms of business development, connection matters most. Genuine connections are the basis of any successful deal, and nowadays, people turn to social media when embarking on any new business. Just imagine that each time someone shares something of value (positive content related to your product or service), they are also sharing you with their network. LinkedIn and employee advocacy will allow you to strengthen your business relationships and forge new, durable connections.

According to Hinge, 79% of firms involved in a formal program credited Employee Advocacy for the increased brand visibility.

3. Boost brand loyalty and visibility. People trust your employees’ testimonials because they come from a trusted person – not a brand. When your employees share company-related content, they profile themselves as thought-leaders and reliable advocates of the company — they become trusted advisors people want to listen to. As a matter of fact, Hinge's research shows that more than 33% of early adopters of advocacy programs report increased brand loyalty.
   
   
4. Get more engagement through employees. I already mentioned how people trust other people more than they trust brands: that is why employee posts get, on average, more engagement than corporate profiles. They are personal, they're genuine, and they are credible. LinkedIn business itself has shown that employee posts typically see a click-through rate that is 2x higher than when their company shares the same content on their corporate profiles.

Enhancing your company culture through employee advocacy

Encouraging employee advocacy on LinkedIn can also be a way instrument to build and promote a consistent employer brand. Championing a positive culture, shared values, and a unified mission as a company will result in improved employee engagement, position team members as thought leaders within the organization and industry, and support talent acquisition and retention.

LinkedIn reported that companies with employee advocacy programs that promote a positive culture are 58% more likely to attract quality talent.

When you encourage your employees to share company-related content and their experience with the brand, they spread your work culture and present themselves as thought leaders and crucial members of your organization. And, guess what, it comes with no marketing costs associated with it. If you engage with your employees and gain their trust, they’ll want to share your messaging and spread your work culture.

Not only will you organically amplify your brand’s work culture and attract new and motivated talent, but you’ll be able to actively improve your brand perception, like the 65% of companies with an advocacy program that report increased brand recognition.