How to Unleash Your Employee Advocacy Superpowers

by Gerry Moran

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With great employee advocacy powers comes the potential of great business results.

Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, and Britt Reid all used their superpowers on some level — whether they were wearing their cape, bat ears, or green mask. You are a vital part of your company’s social business strategy. You must use your social media power to make your social business world a better place!

What is Employee Advocacy?

Employee advocacy is creating an organizational culture and formalized process to enable associates to share a brand’s thought leaders, news, and stories. At its best, it is a content marketing strategy that helps a brand reach incremental audiences with a customer-focused story. At its worst it’s sales channel and echo chamber.

Your Brand Needs More Employee Superheroes

  1. When employees share brand messages, they reach a 561% more audience when compared to the official company social media channels. (Source: MSLGroup)
  2. Brand recognition improves by 65% after a company introduces a formal social advocacy program. (Source: Hinge Marketing)
  3. Employee-shared content gets 8x more engagement than content shared by brand social media channels. (Source: Social Media Today)
  4. Marketing converts leads 7x more frequently than other sources when developed through a social advocacy program (Source: Marketing Advisory Network)
  5. Peer-to-peer marketing is the leading driver behind 20-50% of all purchasing decisions. (McKinsey)
  6. A formal social advocacy program costs 10% of paid social program. (Source: EveryoneSocial)
  7. Formal employee advocacy programs can pay for themselves with the earned media value they generate. For instance, a 1000-person program can generate $1.9M in paid media value. (Source: Kredible)

Rethink Employee Advocacy’s Part in the End-to-End Go-To-Market Model

Sandy Carter, the past VP of Social Business Sales and Evangelism at IBM, had stated in a Forbes interview, “A Social Business isn’t a company that just has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. Social Business means that every department, from HR to marketing to product development to customer service to sales, uses social media the way it uses any other tool and channel to do its job. An organization uses social networking tools fluently to communicate with people inside and outside the company. It’s a strategic approach to shaping a business culture, highly dependent upon executive leadership and corporate strategy, including business process design, risk management, leadership development, financial controls, and use of business analytics. Becoming a Social Business can help an organization deepen customer relationships, generate new ideas faster, identify expertise and enable a more effective workforce.”

With great employee advocacy powers comes the potential of great business results.

Gerry Moran

Whether you are trying to empower your employees or an employee looking to harness your social media superpowers, it is vital to understand where to start developing these powers so you and others can be effective internally and externally with your company.

5 Ways to Harness Your Social Advocacy Superpowers

Your company needs your social business superpowers to help them create more revenue and profit. Here are five social business superpowers to unleash to make your work world a better place.

  1. Amplify. Retweet, share a comment and like your company’s social messages. This action will propel their messages to distant universes. Ones they cannot reach with their social channels — your network.
  1. Engage. Enable the power of being everywhere on your company’s behalf. Engage with customers and influencers on social networks. Be a passionate brand ambassador, never turning away from a chance to help.
  1. Convert. Transform social media encounters on a blog, community, Twitter, or LinkedIn Group. Solve a buyer’s need by answering a question or clarifying a point.
  1. Knowledge. Share your keen power of non-promotional expertise. Publish content on blogs, Twitter, and LinkedIn Groups. Let the world know what you know!
  1. Support. Use your super listening powers. Find and answer customer cries for help on Twitter, blogs, and community groups. Offer your expertise or link them to others who can help!

3 More Ideas to Build Your Team of Employee Advocacy Superheros

Have you developed another social business superpower? Please share your social media power below so we can make the world a better place! Want to keep your identity a secret? Then please contact me at gerry@marketingthink.com.

Building a tribe of social business superheroes is the key to business success over the upcoming years. Understanding how to use social media is a start.

But, use your powers to help your business. Answer prospect questions. Solve customer problems. Amplify their messages. Leverage your knowledge to help others. This dedication is the key to being a social business superhero. Putting a little WHAM, POW, and BAM into your results!

NOTE: This post was originally published on April 7, 2013, as Unleash Your Social Business Superpowers. It was updates on February 10, 2021.

Gerry Moran is a social media and content marketing strategist who's worked for large global brands and digital agencies. He's spent significant time in hands-on marketing leadership roles with HBO, IKEA, Ralston Purina, Kodak, and numerous digital agencies. He spent his last ten years working at SAP and Cognizant, where he built their content marketing operating models, developed social media training programs, and helped thousands with their LinkedIn makeovers and personal branding strategies.

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