Why is Important to Turn your Employees Into your Social Media Advocates?

Social Media plays a big role in Marketing today.
Business and companies are putting their efforts into reaching out people to build in order to increase their audience. As we know, these companies are busy getting their brand out there. Therefore many times they forget about the big asset they have, their employees.
Social Media has been misunderstood for many businesses that believe Social Media has been designed to serve a brand. On the contrary, Social Media is a bridge to communicate people not a brand. That’s why is important to turn your employees into your Social Media advocates. Nobody is better than company employees to get the brand out there. We can take as an example A
Dell where their employees use their social media accounts to updates information about the company.

“58% of certified employees engage in Social Media post every week on behalf of DELL”.

“Employees share 6 times more DELL updates on their Social Media outlets than on company accounts”Jay Baer said.
Individual posts made on personal accounts have more impact on people than post made on company account.
According to Nielsen “ 92 percent of consumers around the world say they trust earned media, such as recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising”. Vs. “ 47% of people trust advertisement from companies”
We can see, that your employees are big asset for your Social Media efforts. Your employees have families and friends and these families and friends have families and friends too and all of them have social media outlets. That is a word of mouth in the Internet that carry trust and confidence.

According to the survey by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project “ 71% of internet users adults in USA are on Facebook while 18% of Internet users adults in USA are on twitter”
“Average Facebook user has 338 friends and average twitter user has 208 followers”
Companies can’t waste the opportunity to turn their employees into brand ambassadors. Now you wonder how I can make my employees feel confident about sharing company information on their personal accounts.
Well, first it is important to create a Social Media Guideline that includes points like:

1. 1. You are responsible for what post,/li>
   2. You have to state that you work for the company
   3. Identify on your Social Media Account by your name and position on the company
   4. Respect the audience
   5. Respect copyright and logo of the company.
   6. And other similar things that are common sense.

Having a guideline and providing training is a good starting point to engage your employees to participate on Social Media as your brand ambassador. Hire a coach to motivate your employees so that they involved and participate actively on Social Media talking about the brand. You can also give away some small things as awards. In addition, you can create a contest inside the company to decide who is the employee that publishes the most information about the company on her or his personal Social Media accounts. Organize events for employees like a picnic day at the park and tell them to publish pictures of the event on their Instagram accounts. It will be fun, and this will create awareness of your brand. Use metrics to see results and share with everybody the information. Don’t keep it just for the manager. Make your employees feel as an important part of the company because they are.
According Edelman, 2013. “41% of people believe employees are trustworthy than a company’s CEO or PR department”.
This shows us that employees posting will engage people and earn trust for the brand they are talking about.

I know you are thinking, well it sounds great, but I have a small company and I have a few employees. Use the same pattern for your company. Start with your employees by making them feel happy to work for your brand then they will become passionate about it, and will be natural for them to talk great things about the brand. Let me know how things are going for you in this new project!
“You can’t be the best place to buy if you are not the best place to work”