Every company has a story to tell, and social media is a great outlet to share it.

 

When building your company’s social media presence, it is important to remember that a large part of social media growth comes from having employee advocates. An employee advocate is someone who engages with your company’s content to showcase its initiatives and help create brand awareness.

Guidance for an employee advocacy program must come from leadership. There are simple steps leadership can take to assure their employee advocates are taking steps into the right direction to showcase their company in a positive light. Each platform requires an expressive tone that caters to each platform’s audience. For example, LinkedIn is business focused and professional while Facebook is more personal and community driven, and Twitter and Instagram can be targeted to either depending on the product or service you are selling.

Below are steps that employee advocates can take to showcase their company’s initiatives and help create brand awareness:

1. Employee advocates should keep their profile picture and personal information up to date and professional on all platforms if showcasing the company.
2. Employee advocates can share or “retweet” company posts to their personal pages. However, when sharing posts from their company’s page to their personal page, it is important that they keep in mind what else they are sharing around the company’s posts and that captions are professional and in line with the original content.
3. Employee advocates can engage with their company’s content by liking and commenting on their company’s social media posts.
4. Employee advocates can create posts on their personal page sharing an experience in the office or at an event. It is important to remember to tag the company’s page.
5. Employee advocates can share industry related articles that are relevant to the company’s mission.

To help promote these initiatives, companies can incentivize their employees to become strong employee advocates by offering gift cards, cash bonuses, or extra PTO.

Employee advocates are a great resource to share your company’s story, check back in next month to learn how to use your network of customers to share your story.