This is part of a 4-part series about increasing employee engagement with employee-generated content.
1) Assessing Your Employee Advocacy Opportunities
2) Strategies for launching your employee advocacy program
3) Benefits of an employee advocacy and EGC social media plan
4) Get more content from your employees
Consider this: leads developed through employee social marketing convert seven times more frequently than other leads.
And this is just one of many positives that point to employee generated content (EGC) as the next big thing in content marketing. In fact, it’s one of the most effective forms of lead generation.
Why?
Because only 15% of people trust recommendations from brands compared to 84% who trust recommendations from people they know.
So imagine if every employee in your company was promoting your company to their own personal network. Not only will it give your brand more exposure, but it’ll improve the impact of the message that’s being put out there.
Below are four other benefits that we’ve seen our clients achieve after assessing their existing employee advocacy and then launching their own employee advocacy strategy. (If you haven’t read the first 2 blogs in the series, I recommend you click those links first)
Boost Brand Perception
70% of customer brand perception is determined by experiences with people. And who are the people they’re likely to encounter?
Your employees, of course!
Consumers build up an image of a brand through the snippets of information they glean from around them – including on the internet and, more specifically, social media.
If they’re consistently seeing your employees posting fun, engaging stories, they’re more likely to see your brand in a fun engaging way.
How Can I Boost Brand Perception With EGC?
By encouraging your employees to promote specific content via a designated hashtag on social media, you’re giving them the chance to show your brand in a positive light.
You can do that by:
- Offering rewards to the most active participants
- Giving your employees something to work towards with the campaign
- Craft a campaign around what hashtag your employees are already sharing and make it official
Cut Recruitment (Marketing) Costs
Research shows that 73% of businesses have employed someone they initially found through social media.
This shows just how huge social media marketing is when it comes to recruitment and the endless possibilities that it brings.
When your employees are consistently sharing content on social media, your brand gets more exposure, and more people are likely to interact with it – people that, at some point, might make great employees.
But it works on the flipside, too.
People who are looking for a job are far more likely to apply somewhere that involves their current employees in online communication.
Why?
Because the content your employees post about your brand essentially act as testimonials. It shows future candidates what the company is like from the inside, which is a viewpoint that often isn’t shown.
How Can I Cut Recruitment Costs With EGC?
Start by migrating all the great things that are being said about you on social media and put it onto your careers page or create a dedicated web page on your website that pulls together curated posts that are generated by employees.
Rather than spending thousands of dollars on testimonial videos, you can update these pages simply by approving content through an aggregator, like TINT.
You can also take this content with you to recruitment events by having a screen or laptop displaying the content for potential applicants to get a behinds the scene look into your organizaiton.
Take a look at T-Mobile who have a TINT wall on their career’s page that shows potential candidates what it’s like to work at the company.
Build a Positive Digital Community for Your Workforce
In this day and age, it’d be weird if you didn’t have some kind of online community for your employees, right?
People are craving connection more than ever and, as humans, we like to feel like we’re a part of something; that we belong.
EGC allows you to create this feeling of belonging amongst your employees by opening up internal communication.
How does employee content incite positive internal communication?
Here’s an example for an EGC campaign example from Allison Kelley – Content Marketer for TMP Worldwide:
EGC Use Case: Recruiting women in STEM
If you already have a number of female employees and are looking to add more, then you’re in luck. You have a great pool of content ready and waiting: your female employees. Ask them to join your mission to support and hire women in STEM.
Step 1) Interview your own employees. Ask how they got started in STEM, the struggles they’ve had along the way and how your company helped them achieve their goals.
Step 2) Brag about all the great accomplishments achieved by women at your company. Did someone become the first women at your company to achieve a specific goal? Talk about it. Are there women at your company who’ve received industry awards? Show them off. Have women filed more patents at your company than men? Put together an infographic that tells that story.
Step 3) Be ready to join topical movements that come up. The #ilooklikeanengineer movement made a splash in the tech community and many companies jumped at the chance to show off their own female engineers.
Step 4) Highlight any mentoring and/or development opportunities at your company. If your company has an Employee Resource Group (ERG) dedicated to women, there are plenty of stories to be told there. Interview the president of the ERG or ask to feature any work they might be doing in a long-form editorial content piece.
There are many different ways to attract women in STEM, whether you already have a strong female workforce or not. Make sure you choose a strategy that aligns with your employer brand and the reality of your situation.
How Can I Build a Digital Community for My Workforce With EGC?
Take a page out of TMP’s playbook for recruiting women in STEM. Set up a landing page or screens in the office where your participants can see each other’s stories and be encouraged to share their own too. If you want to make the the content meaningful, you have to generate meaningful content. Stories of struggle and achievement will definitely help you generate meaningful content.
Circulated Knowledge
One of the best ways to generate EGC is at company events and conferences.
Not only are your employees more likely to share content they create when they’re outside of their everyday tasks, but people actively want to share content that makes them look good – like going to conferences and learning new stuff.
This nurtures a kind of circulated knowledge or, as we like to call it at TINT, “knowledge sharing content”.
Why do we call it this?
Because it’s content that can be used to spark new ideas and initiatives within the company.
Think about it this way: an employee attends a conference and posts content throughout the day about what they’ve learned and discovered.
Other employees in the company see that content and, in turn, learn the same lessons by proxy.
Take it further down the line, and you’ll soon only need to send one or two employees to a conference, but you’ll still reap the benefits of your entire company learning something from them.
How Can I Circulate Knowledge Through EGC?
This is one of the simplest ways you can get employees to share content via a designated hashtag or EGC campaign.
Start by:
- Encouraging conference attendees to share what they’ve learned with a unique hashtag designated for learnings
- Providing different departments with a platform for sharing their latest projects on – maybe you’ll offer each department a different day of the week to share what they’ve been up to
- Encouraging employees to hold “lunch and learns” and share learnings they got when they return to the office.
Final Thoughts
EGC campaigns come with a long list of benefits, but only after you take the time and effort to think about what type of content you want to generate and for what reason.
As someone who is responsible for employee engagement, internal communications, or recruitment, you should empower your employees to create content that puts the organization’s best foot forward.
It’s up to you to evolve your employee content strategy so that you can reap the full benefits of your advocacy program.
