Employee Advocacy on LinkedIn is when a company empowers its employees to effectively use their personal profiles to amplify the messages being put out on the company page.
By having a well-planned system of employee advocacy, a company will benefit from greater brand awareness across LinkedIn. This is aimed at increasing the amount of leads and cold enquiries on the platform with a view to driving more sales.
With 65 million decision makers on LinkedIn, it’s important that you, as a company, a job seeker or an owner-managed business, are maximising every opportunity you can find on the platform.
HOW TO ESTABLISH A SYSTEM OF EMPLOYEE ADVOCACY IN THE WORKPLACE
The first step in establishing a system of employee advocacy is to ensure that the company page is fully optimised. Next it’s important that you create a content strategy and that you’re posting good quality content regularly onto the page. Active company pages receive 5x more engagement.
The second step is to ensure that every one of the company’s employees has a fully optimised personal profile. Click here for my free profile builder guide: Sarah’s Ultimate Profile Guide.
If you’re networking in person or you’re active on LinkedIn, people will be visiting your LinkedIn profile to find out more about you. A potential customer or client will want to know if the person they’re thinking of investing their time and money in has the skillset and the experience to help them.
We all know that people work with people they like, so people and companies want to know a bit about the personality of a potential contractor. They will be asking themselves questions such as: ‘Is that person easy to deal with?’, ‘Will I like working with them?’. The more you can tell someone about yourself in your LinkedIn profile, the more they can get to know, like and trust you and, potentially, the sooner they will be ready to work with you.
Once the groundwork is done, it’s time to get organised!
A system of employee advocacy relies on the employees knowing when the posts go out on the company page and what to do with them.
HOW TO ORGANISE YOUR WORKFORCE TO ENCOURAGE EMPLOYEE ADVOCACY TO HAPPEN
It’s important to notify your employees in advance when the posts are going to be going out on the company page. This enables each employee to block out time in their diary to take action.
It’s a good idea to set up a slack channel or a project management system for communications about what is happening on the company page. It’s also a good idea for the employees to notify their colleagues when they’re going to post on their personal profiles.
If a post gets a lot of engagement during the first hour it is posted, it is more likely to be pushed out to even more people (find out more about that here). So if the other members of the team like and comment on a post during the ‘golden hour’, it could significantly increase the reach of that post across the whole of LinkedIn.
As well as communicating between employees when posts are going live, it’s also important to share information that could be used in posts on the company page. For example if some of the team had been to an event, they could share photos of themselves at the event for the marketing team to use on the company page as well as the other employees to use on their personal profiles.
A well-run communications network could help build a sense of empowerment and camaraderie as well as foster a slight competitive edge to encourage more activity on personal profiles.
For the less confident in the team, the channel could be used to post their own posts for initial comments by the marketing department and other team members. Lack of confidence can hinder people from posting valuable and interesting posts. By having a good support system, this can be overcome.
3 WAYS IN WHICH EMPLOYEES CAN INCREASE THE REACH OF THE COMPANY PAGE POSTS.
1. By ‘liking’ and commenting on the posts.
All of our ‘activity’ on LinkedIn is open for all to see. When we ‘like’ and comment on posts in other feeds, people looking at us on LinkedIn can see our activity. So they will know if we’ve commented on a company page post. If a comment is interesting, it may encourage them to pop over and take a look at the post too.
2. By reposting the post onto our personal profile.
When we repost a post onto our personal profile, we bring not only awareness to the post but the post itself to our audience! This is definitely a step above simply ‘liking’ and commenting. Always ‘add your thoughts’. The text of the post doesn’t show until someone clicks so it’s important to introduce the post and say what you like about it.
3. By posting the same content on your personal profile.
In many circumstances, it is acceptable to take the content and the image (if applicable) of the post going out on the company page and ask the employees to post EXACTLY the same content on their personal profiles. You will find the company page has a different audience from those people who follow the employees’ personal profiles so by posting the same content on profiles and page it has a chance of being seen by a much wider network. This is potentially the most effective way to treat the company page content. By presenting the content organically on personal profiles, it is easier for other LinkedIn users to access it without the need to click through to find it elsewhere.
I advise not posting these at the same time. By spreading out the delivery of the posts on LinkedIn, you have a chance of triggering the algorithm more times, which will help the SEO of the posts.
WHAT ELSE CAN EMPLOYEES DO TO INCREASE THE EFFECTS OF EMPLOYEE ADVOCACY?
Posting and sharing good quality content across LinkedIn in this way, will increase awareness of the brand across the platform, with a view to increasing the number of inbound enquiries.
In order to further capitalise on this increased brand awareness, I advise that each employee who is active on LinkedIn also commences a well thought-out system of engagement.
By being pro-active on LinkedIn and building their relevant network, each employee can further increase the reach of the company’s posts but also start to build important relationships which could turn into paying clients and customers.
I am often amazed by how few people do this. Often it’s fear of looking silly or simply not knowing what to say but don’t forget, this is what LinkedIn is for! If each employee spent 10 minutes a day engaging on relevant content, just think of how many more people will be reminded of the company message.
If you need any help creating an engagement strategy or a system of employee advocacy for your company, please don’t hesitate to get in touch as I can help you! I can come into your office or teach on zoom to help your employees optimize their profiles, effectively ‘share’ company page posts, create posts of their own and outreach to get more leads.
Please send me a DM if you want to set up a call.
Thank you
Sarah ????
