Accelerating Employee Advocacy through Internal Comms

A LinkedIn study found that companies with a high number of employees sharing quality content are 58% more likely to attract talent. Employee advocacy is effective not just for talent acquisition but also for cost-efficient brand marketing: employees achieve a click-through rate on social media which is double that of their company.

However, employee advocacy is constrained by the bottleneck which exists today between Internal and External Communications. For 31% of employees, their biggest obstacle to sharing more company content on social media is that they either don’t know what to share, don’t have time or don’t want to share content that sounds like it’s from a company robot (Source: Marketing Advisory Network).

Solutions to the Comms Bottleneck 🧪

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These challenges can be overcome (or at least mitigated) through better alignment between Internal and External Comms. Here’s how:

1)     Make it easier for employees to determine which internal comms can be shared externally along with an easy process for sharing. If comms posted into your Slack/ Teams workspace are more interactive (e.g., sharable link buttons) and less text-heavy, this will reduce the cognitive load for employees.

2)     Coordinate Employee Advocacy with scheduled Internal Comms. If you’re asking employees to share a social media post on the same day lots of other comms are being sent out, it’s more likely that this will get lost. Forward planning between internal and external comms is crucial.

3)     Empower your employees to personalise their posts, while at the same time setting guidelines on content which is deemed sensitive or inappropriate. Take a modular approach to each Internal Comms post, clearly distinguishing internal-only content from content which can be shared externally.

Benefits of Employee Advocacy😀

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For Internal Comms teams, what are the benefits of working with Marketing, External Communications and HR/ Employer Branding teams to make Employee Advocacy a key strategic priority?

1)     Employees who understand the importance of a comms outreach (the ‘why’) are more likely to share these comms on their social media. Explaining this is usually the role of Internal Comms teams, so they can play a big role in maximising the success of Employee Advocacy.

2)     It enables Internal Comms teams to measure comms outcomes in a more meaningful way and become a barometer for employee engagement across a range of topics.

3)     Internal Communications can become a key driver of sustainable and cost-efficient business growth if they are an integral part of Employee Advocacy programs. With a clearer ROI, there is less chance of leadership teams viewing Internal Comms as a cost centre which doesn’t directly contribute to the top line.

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