For marketers, employee advocacy is a tactic that’s increasing in popularity for its proven ability to boost an organization’s digital presence.
Digital marketers are always on the lookout for the latest trends and methods to get an edge and be successful. They want the latest marketing tactics that provide value and are cost-effective. If it’s a tactic that saves them money and is an advantage over their competitors – even better. That’s why employee advocacy is such a widely-considered option.
But how many organizations use it? What are the best strategies an organization can implement to optimize it? And what are the biggest benefits of it? By analyzing employee advocacy statistics, we can get behind the curtain to find the answers to these questions.
Employee advocacy is a method used to promote your brand and initiatives through people who work for your organization in an authentic and trustworthy way, typically on social media or other digital channels.
It’s used to extend your organization’s social media reach and increase your brand awareness. The idea is that by involving your employees, there are more social media accounts promoting your messaging in a trusted way.
People trust other people more than they trust brands, so when people in your organization promote your content and posts, they present your message in a more authentic way. The benefits can be profound.
Through a successful employee advocacy program, your organization can greatly extend its social media reach, boost its engagement, improve brand awareness, increase clicks and website traffic, and get more conversions, leads, opportunities, and business. You can do all this by spending far less money on employee advocacy than you would to get the same results through digital ads.
These benefits are backed by numbers. More and more organizations have an advantage over their competition and are able to reach their marketing potential by incorporating an employee advocacy program in their workplace.
This list of employee advocacy statistics illustrates these benefits and the demand in the market for these tools. We compiled numbers from multiple reports, including the Building the Case for an Employee Advocacy Program survey conducted by Social Media Today of about 400 marketers – 54% of whom work in B2B environments.
According to Social Media Today, there’s almost an even split between organizations with a program (31%), organizations that don’t have a program (32%), and organizations that don’t have one yet but plan to start one (29%).
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We already knew that employee advocacy is a niche market and these numbers confirm that. It’s still early days for the industry, but it’s rapidly growing. According to the survey respondents, the size of the industry will double, meaning employee advocacy will be more commonplace among marketers.
These employee advocacy statistics also tell us that if you have a program in place right now, it’s very likely that you have an advantage over 60% of your competition. Conversely, if you don’t have an employee advocacy program, 31% of your competitors currently hold this advantage over you, and up to 60% will have this advantage in the future.
This tells us a great deal about the current state of employee advocacy and the direction of the market.
Over 65% of marketers who manage a program believe that the best way to get employees active is by acknowledging them for good performance, according to Social Media Today.
By implementing gamification into your employee advocacy program, there are many ways you can recognize an employee for being active. You can gamify your program by assigning point totals to each social media action you request of your employees, such as:
After each month, quarter, and year, you can give out awards and prizes to the people with the most points, and people who reached specific point totals. These prizes don’t have to just be money and gift cards. You could give reward employees with company-branded merchandise, lunch with the CEO, more PTO, an assigned parking spot, and more. Adding prizes attracts employees to your program who aren’t already involved.
Despite the possibilities, a majority of program managers believe that plain old recognition is the best motivator. You can acknowledge your employees by simply sharing the scoreboard of employees with the most points in an allotted time. When your employees see how they’re doing compared to others, this will add a little competition to your program, keeping them active over the long haul.
However, 31% of respondents said that monetary incentives are the best motivator. This one is hard to argue with, but if you can’t give out money to employees, there are many other awards you can work with.
The best content to share in order to get results is thought leadership content, according to Social Media Today. This beats out videos, followed by blog posts.
Thought leadership is a powerful way to draw in people in your industry and build relevant connections. It speaks directly to your target audience of people who are interested in what your organization provides.
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Your employees will build up credibility among industry peers when they share insightful content on the trends and challenges of their industry. They’ll be respected for their industry knowledge, which looks good on your brand. When they do promote your brand and its initiatives, this content will be seen by the target audience of industry peers who are interested in what you have to say and respect your employee’s views.
Video is easily digestible, while blog posts can dig deeper into a topic. Knowing these numbers, it’s a great idea to combine your thought leadership content into videos and blog posts, but better yet, you should feature your employees in your content.
When you do this, it highlights their expertise and presents them as knowledgeable and credible resources in your field. Your employees will also be more inclined to share this content, as will their connections.
According to Social Media Today, over 74% of people say that posts from other people are more persuasive than posts from brand accounts, while under 14% of people do not, and under 14% of people aren’t sure.
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This employee advocacy statistic is not surprising. Of course, you’ll trust your friends, family, and professional connections over a brand or advertisement, but what this tells us is why employee advocacy works.
By delivering your messages to your target audience through your employees, your messages come off as more authentic and trustworthy than your brand sharing the message. Because of this, your employees are able to draw in more engagement than your brand account or advertisements.
This one employee advocacy statistic is the whole premise behind why employee advocacy is so effective. Through a successful program, you can greatly increase your reach and social media engagement for far less money than it would cost to get the same results through digital ads.
According to the Marketing Advisory Network, 44.5% of people say they are more likely to apply for a job they saw a friend post on social media than the same job on a job board.
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This employee advocacy statistic illustrates two important points. First, is the trust people have in other people over brand accounts. Second is the benefits of employee advocacy for HR departments.
If your brand says it has a great opportunity, is a fun place to work with, and offers great benefits, you might be skeptical. Are you always going to believe a brand that says something positive about itself? Do you believe every ad you see? Of course not. But if someone you already follow who works at that company says these same things, you are much more likely to trust that person.
Knowing this, if your Human Resources department leverages an employee advocacy program to get the word out about open positions, it’ll greatly help its recruiting efforts.
According to the MSL Group, a message shared by your employees reaches 561% further than the same message shared by your brand account.
With more people promoting your message in a trustworthy way, there is more reach and stronger opportunities for engagement. This, of course, leads to even more reach, more brand awareness, and an increase in your social media KPIs.
This statistic shows employee advocacy works and can deliver what you’re looking for in social media ads at a lower cost. By creating brand awareness through employee advocacy, you increase the likelihood of creating more opportunities.
People will be more familiar with your brand, even if they don’t engage with the post your employee shares. Simply seeing people talk about your brand a few times will make them familiar with it prior to when they’re interested in buying a product or service like the ones you offer.
This employee advocacy statistic from MSL Group shows us that people are far more likely to re-share a post from your employees than the same post from your brand account.
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This means they’re likely to engage with a post from your employees, but also re-share it to get more eyeballs on your messaging. People trust messages from your employees more than the same messages from your brand, a promoted post or ad, which means they’re more likely to engage with posts from employees and re-share it.
When people re-share your messaging, it creates further reach, more brand awareness, and even more opportunities for engagement. That’s what employee advocacy is all about. By achieving more reach and more engagement, you can drive more traffic and more people down your marketing funnel.
According to the MSL Group, companies with engaged employees outperform those without by over 200%.
Employee engagement is the act of people who work for your organization taking pride in their place of business, their job, and going above and beyond their daily responsibilities.
It’s no surprise that having more people who care about their job and organization leads to better productivity and better results.
Employee advocacy increases employee engagement by getting people in your organization more involved in your company’s mission. By being more active in promoting your brand on social media, they gain a better understanding of your organization’s goals and where they fit in the path towards achieving those goals. This makes them feel more valued and more active in your program.
Empower your employees to support your business goals by sharing content and creating authentic engagement with prospects, customers and more. See how GaggleAMP works today by watching the video to the left or explore more features by requesting a live demo.
