Tag: employee advocacy

Employee advocacy programs are huger than ever — and it’s time to get on board if you haven’t already.

Did you know your employees have greater social reach than you do? And that people are more likely to buy something that’s been recommended by a friend or family member? It’s a hard truth, but one worth embracing. The fact is, your employees’ posts are more likely to earn engagements and visibility than content you create and post on your brand page. 

It’s nothing to get worked up about, i.e., don’t take it personally. Instead, team up with your team and create an employee advocacy program they can get excited about. The following steps will help you get started right away. 

And remember, Rallio is here to help you with all your social media management and employee advocacy needs. Don’t be shy about reaching out if you’d rather let our experts handle the process from A to Z.

Step 1: Define Your Goals

What are you trying to achieve with your employee advocacy program? Defining your goals with clear key performance indicators (KPIs) will set you up for success. Some common KPIs attached to an employee advocacy program might include: 

• Increased engagement and reach on your branded content
• Brand awareness via content posted on employees’ personal profiles
• More leads
• Traffic to your website
• More qualified job candidates
• An engaged work force with X number of participants, contributing to your company culture and morale

Once you know your advocacy objectives, benchmark them prior to launching your employee advocacy program so you know where you’re starting from. Later, once your program has been up and running for a while, you can compare the metrics to see how far you’ve come.

Step 2: Create Branded Content

One part of your employee advocacy program should be brand-approved content — the photos, infographics and videos you create and distribute to your employees. If you’re not already creating these, now is the time to start doing so. And if you already have high-performing branded content, you can repurpose these assets and push them out to employees.

As you’re creating branded assets, it’s a good idea to get different stakeholders involved from throughout your company — especially if you have multiple departments. Designate someone on your team to collect quotes, facts, figures, videos and inspirational stories representing different aspects of your industry, company culture, products or services. 

This person — a social media manager or whatever you choose to call them — can use this information to create branded social posts. They’ll then distribute the content to your employee advocates.

Related: The 4 Types of Content Your Employees Should Post for You

Step 3: Choose a Technology

Rallio Activate is an employee advocacy platform that allows you to collect images and videos from your work force, as well as organize all your branded assets in one central location. With Rallio Activate, you can leverage your employees as ambassadors via our technology and incentivize them through reward programs of your choosing.

This is where employee advocacy gets interesting, because you’re able to use our technology to amplify your message across social platforms and on personal pages. Brand messages reach further and are more impactful when they come from your employees, and our technology streamlines the entire process.

Activate takes the guesswork out of things, helping you set up your advocacy program for success from the get-go. It also makes it easy to collect metrics and demonstrate the validity of the program as you’re deciding on a budget or making a case for advocacy to internal stakeholders.

No matter how you decide to design your advocacy program, know that technology like Activate is a critical piece for automating advocacy and getting employees excited about your program.

 

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Step 4: Establish Your Pilot Program

Recruit a core set of employees who can test-drive your program before you roll it out system-wide. Try sending out an internal message asking for volunteers, and then select a number of people from that list as your pilot advocates. Include a mix of people throughout the company — again, so you have different points of view and voices from different departments. 

It’s also wise to choose people who are already active on the major social media platforms and have a decent social media following. Don’t discount people who have a small following, however, because their micro audience might be more receptive to your messaging than you might think.

To educate this test group of employee advocates, you can:

• Create an employee advocacy document outlining what types of content you are seeking
• Hold lunch-and-learn sessions (either in person or online) to describe the program and explain how it works

Related: How to Create a Culture of Employee Advocacy

Step 5: Measure Your Success

Once your advocacy program has been rolled out, begin measuring the success of your program against the KPIs you’ve established. Look at how different types of content are performing and how engaged your employees are. From there, you can decide if you need to tweak your strategy.

Commit to educating your employees on an ongoing basis so they understand the value of employee advocacy to your organization — as well as what’s in it for them. Refine your rewards if needed to be sure they’re fully adopting the program and gaining value from it as much as you are.

Launch Your Employee Advocacy Program Today

Remember, the most important element of your employee advocacy program is your work force itself. Without your team members, advocacy wouldn’t exist. Rather than treat advocacy as a one-time, “set it and forget it” program, you’ll need to continue promoting it internally, educating your employees, answering their questions, giving them content they’re proud to post, challenging them to surpass previous benchmarks, and offering high-value rewards.

To learn more about Rallio Activate, visit www.rallio.com/activate or email sales@rallio.com.

You may have seen some of our recent articles on employee advocacy and how it can transform your team members into brand ambassadors. When implemented effectively, employee advocacy is, indeed, an effective way to spread brand awareness and broaden your impact on social media. Before you begin implementing an employee advocacy program, however, it’s important that you foster a culture of employee advocacy.

With this culture, your employees become willing participants in ambassadorship. A culture of advocacy will motivate employees to speak positively about your brand on social media. If you lack that kind of culture, they may be reluctant to share anything about your brand.

Related: Why Employee Advocacy Works for Even the Most Unusual Businesses

Why Does Employee Advocacy Matter?

Consider the ripple effect of creating a culture of employee advocacy, and you can see how important it is to foster this kind of environment at your company:

• If your employees feel satisfied and engaged, they’re more likely to do great work. They’ll have good things to say about you, both internally amongst themselves and externally on their personal social media profiles.
• If they post positively about your brand, their posts come across as believable and authentic, more so than your own branded content. Convince & Convert reports that a recommendation from a friend or family member makes 83% of Americans more likely to purchase that particular product or service.
• Furthermore, if employees do great work, they’ll deliver an extraordinary customer experience by way of great products, great services and great customer support. 
• If your customers have an extraordinary experience, and if they see posts that are believable and authentic, they’ll be loyal to your brand — becoming brand ambassadors themselves.
• If both your employees and customers are happy, they’ll continue spreading the word, extending your reach and engagement exponentially. You’ll gain new followers, new customers, and even new employees when you’re actively recruiting.

It’s one big happy cycle that you need to have working for you in order to experience ongoing success. Can you see how important a culture of employee advocacy is now?

A Culture of Employee Advocacy Starts With Education

If your employees aren’t actively advocating for your brand on social media, it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t want to. In some cases, they may simply lack the proper language and knowledge to share confidently. In order to inspire confidence, provide them with the tools they need. Here are some key points to keep in mind:

• Whether you’re onboarding new employees or working to educate existing staff, make sure you’re communicating your company’s core values and goals. Create internal programs that train your employees on your mission and vision, your product offerings and your competitive differentiators. 
• Remember, it’s not just your sales staff that needs this information; every single employee should understand what you stand for (so they don’t “fall” when trying to communicate about your brand).
• The company’s “About Us” statement, which typically lives on your website and in any kind of communications about your brand, should be in writing and easily available to employees. Take the time to craft a company description that’s easy to understand and readily translated into talking points.
• Live your mission by fostering communication between team members and their direct supervisors. Regular check-ins can help to encourage questions and clarifications as well as address any challenges that employees might be experiencing.

Use Technology to Your Advantage

Once you’ve adequately educated your team about your mission, values and goals, the next step is setting them up for success. It’s not enough to have a culture of employee advocacy; you also need to equip your employees with the best technology to streamline the advocacy process.

While your employees are naturally using technology already to post on social media, you can improve your results even more with a technology like Rallio Activate. With Activate, not only can your employees become brand ambassadors, but you can also create reward programs to your exact specifications. You’ll have the ability to incentivize your workforce to submit their own images and videos for brand content or share your message across their own pages.

Put another way, a culture of employee advocacy is necessary for your advocacy program to work — but incentivizing employees will give them even more of a reason to pull out their phones and snap a few photos. 

Here’s how it works:

• You incentivize employees with rewards programs that you create and collect assets into your brand’s image library.
• Employees are able to submit their own photos and videos to earn points, as well as publish your brand-approved content on their personal profiles.
• Your employees can take advantage of the available programs to start earning rewards. They’ll receive a push notification when a new program is available and reminders to participate before the program ends.

Simple as that!

To get an idea of how this process works for a real business, read through our case study we conducted with one of our clients, Pet Supplies Plus (PSP). Since the rollout of their limited mobile logins over two years ago on Rallio Activate, 3,395 PSP team members have been activated, equating to 173,513 images and videos submitted. Ultimately, these uploads have resulted in over 2,541,965 social media engagements (such as likes, comments, clicks and shares) from posts, which leveraged those assets that PSP otherwise would have not received. 

If you’re curious how advocacy can work for your particular business, schedule a no-obligation demo to learn more. Just choose a spot on the calendar and we’ll make sure you get all the information you need.

In the meantime, why not start fostering a culture of employee advocacy at your company, starting with the guidelines above? You’ll be well on your way to a successful advocacy program and ready to make use of our technology for your own brand.

“Customers will never love a company until its employees love it first.” — Simon Sinek

If you’re familiar with employee advocacy, then you might be aware of some of the benefits. By engaging your employees as brand ambassadors on social media, you’re able to increase engagement and reach for your brand. Employees who share both their own images and videos, along with those of your brand, help to spread the word — often more organically and effectively than brands sharing content from their own pages.

That being said, we know there are still companies that are reluctant to implement an employee advocacy program. Whether they aren’t familiar with the concept, or they don’t want to devote resources toward it, or they don’t believe it works for their particular industry, there are businesses that haven’t embraced the concept of employee advocacy.

As such, we’ve devoted this blog post to explaining how employee advocacy can work for any type of business — no matter how odd. It might just get you thinking how an employee advocacy program could benefit your business.

Note that the businesses mentioned in this article are for example purposes only and not to point out the existence or lack thereof of any type of employee advocacy program. Rather, we’re simply demonstrating that there are, in fact, lots of unusual businesses out there — and having some fun with describing how we’d approach employee advocacy if this were our own business. 

Custom Spuds

Who knew there was a demand for potatoes with custom messages on them, sent in the mail to special someones? Potato Parcel did. That’s right — the company, which touts its one-of-a-kind potatoes as “The Most Unexpected Gift in the Mail,” will imprint custom messages or images on a potato and deliver it to anyone you’d like. They even got Shark Tank on board with their concept.

The company claims “100% laughter or confusion guaranteed.” Sounds about right. 

Kinda makes you want some French fries, no?

But seriously though, imagine the employee advocacy posts for this one. Let’s say James from Potato Parcel sends his girlfriend a Valentine’s Day Potato Bundle. He films the exact moment she opens the gift and posts this on his Instagram Stories, tagging @potatoparcel. 

Now James’ friends see the Story and think it’s hilarious. They start thinking about potential potato recipients. Next thing you know, they’re following @potatoparcel and ordering a Potato Birthday Bundle for their buddy. 

The more potato-promoting people on the Potato Parcel team, the more laughter and confusion will ensue. And of course, the more Potato Parcel will grow. 

Eyewear for Your Fur Buddy

In a world where dogs are family and not just pets, it should come as no huge surprise that Doggles exist. Imagine playing a game of Frisbee on a sunny day and having your pup struggle to make a catch because the sun is in his eyes. Or imagine having a dog who needs prescription eyewear so she’s not bumping into furniture all day long. 

Here’s where Doggles (goggles for dogs) come in.

This concept screams “social,” and we’d venture to guess they have team members whose pups are proud owners of several pairs of Doggles. All they need to do is head out to the park and snap some photos and videos as their fur babies run around wearing Doggles, nailing every Frisbee catch. Or capture the moment their vision-challenged pooch slips on prescription Doggles for the first time. 

Tag Doggles in the post, and there you have it: lots more people seeing Doggles and deciding they better get some nice eyewear for their doggos. It’s the content we didn’t know we needed — and we’re soooo here for it.

Employee advocacy is easy when you have a cool product like Doggles. Judging from their Facebook page, people — and their pups — are loving them, too.

Weddings on Wheels

Nowadays, nearly everything you could ever want can be ordered online and delivered to your door. Whether you’ve got a craving for wings or, hey, you want to order a complete wedding on wheels, you don’t have to look far to find what you need in just a few clicks.

Las Vegas Wedding Wagon, for one, will come directly to the happy couple with a wedding officiant, a photographer and even a witness if needed. Starting at $129, the Wedding Wagon is a convenient, no-frills option for couples that want to avoid the high costs and stress of planning a big wedding.

The @lasvegasweddingwagon Instagram shows how easy it can be to get hitched and still keep it classy. Imagine how beautiful this Red Rock Canyon ceremony must have been for this couple.

For the team members who make these events happen, there’s an opportunity to capture special moments on camera and share them with their network. (Note that businesses who use Rallio Activate for their employee advocacy program have built-in model release forms in cases like these where there would be a need to get permission to post.)

Related: Case Study: How Rallio’s Employee Advocacy Platform Boosted Engagement for Pet Supplies Plus

Employee Advocacy Works for All Types of Businesses

The businesses above are just a few examples of how employee advocacy could be used, even in unusual businesses. What type of business do you have? How do you think your team members could help spread the word? The Rallio Activate platform is designed specifically to help organize assets, activate employees to be brand ambassadors, expand brand reach and engagement, and reward and incentivize employees who contribute.

And it doesn’t matter if you sell everyday widgets or you’re participating in a Squirrel Census. Every type of business and industry can use employee advocacy. That’s because behind every business, there are real people doing real things, and that’s what makes a business interesting.

If you read through our case study of how one of our clients has made use of Rallio Activate for employee advocacy, you’ll see how effective and cost-efficient it can be. Schedule a no-obligation demo of Rallio Activate to learn more and see how it can benefit your business.

Pet Supplies Plus (PSP) is a multi-location retail franchise organization with over 520 locations nationwide. As the preferred technology supplier for PSP, Rallio provides the social media SaaS and employee advocacy platform needed to manage, schedule, optimize and grow the chain’s entire social media presence — from corporate down to the location level.

While PSP has competitors in the pet retailer industry, the company’s unique selling proposition is their relationships in their local communities. Customers, and their animal companions, are considered “neighbors” and are treated as such anytime they walk through the doors of their local PSP. When you visit PSP, you can expect friendly service, helpful answers to questions, and plenty of love for any animal friends who accompany their humans on their visits.

With the rise in use of social media, particularly during the pandemic, PSP needed a way to generate more hyper-local images from team members in order to properly showcase individual locations on their social media pages. These images would provide the visual proof of PSP’s commitment to their local communities and their neighborly approach to providing the highest quality pet supplies and services. The assets would also further PSP’s reach on social media — with content shared by employees receiving up to eight times the engagement of content shared on brand channels.

Related: 5 Big Reasons You Need an Employee Advocacy Program

Challenge

PSP had already been utilizing Rallio’s software and mobile app to automate their content scheduling, ad boosting, review responses and engagements on their local social media pages. Yet PSP stores needed to generate more hyper-local photos and employee advocacy posts from team members. 

At the same time, PSP owners did not want to provide full Rallio admin login information to team members. Rather, they needed a way to allow team members to submit their own photos via limited logins — photos they were already snapping from their own phones and sharing via their own networks on social media. Furthermore, PSP needed to incentivize PSP team members to share content on their personal pages, thereby extending their reach on social media. 

Solution

To address the challenges above, Rallio first developed limited logins enabling employees to submit photos. With a built-in model release form and easy-to-use functionality, the app simplifies and streamlines the process of taking in-store photos/videos, uploading them with comments, and submitting them. 

The robust limited logins were rolled out to all PSP locations and team members in 2018. Then, Rallio launched a 30-day pilot program with six different PSP locations on Rallio Activate, a fully mobile employee advocacy platform that enables brands to engage employees as brand ambassadors. Using Rallio Activate, PSP would collect team members’ photos and videos in one central image library, allowing the brand to build a robust database of employee-generated content for use on local PSP pages. They were also able to activate team members to share brand-approved assets on their personal pages.

Along with the simplicity of uploading, Rallio Activate enables PSP to encourage more uploads by incentivizing team members — awarding them with $10 gift cards for uploading at least 10 images or sharing at least three pieces of content to their personal profiles. The entire process was automated through Rallio Activate, with no extra work required by PSP. 

Related: The Pandemic and Pet Businesses: How Social Media Can Help

Results

Since the rollout of the limited mobile logins over two years ago, 3,395 PSP team members have been activated, equating to 173,513 images and videos submitted. Ultimately, these uploads have resulted in over 2,541,965 social media engagements (such as likes, comments, clicks and shares) from posts, which leveraged those assets that PSP otherwise would have not received. 

With just these six locations alone, the pilot program proved to be successful in activating team members as ambassadors, incentivizing them with rewards, and generating more hyper-local assets. On average, the six Activate pilot locations experienced the following results:

• 41% increase in local posts created
• 320% increase in team member logins
• 816% increase in employee advocacy posts
• 23% increase in daily engagement

We estimate that if Rallio Activate were rolled out brandwide, PSP would have approximately 8,160 team member logins total, at an average of 16 team member logins per store. 

Conclusion: Rallio is the Employee Advocacy Platform You Need

Brands that launch employee advocacy programs with Rallio Activate have an opportunity to expand their reach via their own employees, activated as brand ambassadors. With an employee advocacy platform and a formalized advocacy program, you can expose your brand to more people and extend your brand’s reach. 

If you’re ready to launch an employee advocacy program, Rallio can get you up and running. It all begins with helping your employees understand the benefits of sharing content on their social media pages. Contact sales@rallio.com to schedule a no-obligation demo of our employee advocacy platform and get your program up and running in 10 days or less.

Convince & Convert says 83% of Americans are more likely to purchase a product or service that’s recommended by a friend or family member.

If you haven’t set up an employee advocacy program for your company yet, now is a great time to get things rolling as we begin a new year. With employee advocacy, you enable employees to publish branded content to their social media pages. 

With a formalized employee advocacy program and the right technology to streamline things, you can expose your brand to more people. By some estimates, you’ll be extending your brand’s reach by 500%. 

We’ve written on employee advocacy in the past, and we recommend reading some of those articles (linked below) if you’re looking to establish an employee advocacy program. If you’re in the camp that needs further proof that employee advocacy programs work, then this blog is the one for you.

The list of reasons you need an employee advocacy program is long. To make things easier, we’ve narrowed it down to five big reasons to get on board with advocacy and make it a part of your social media strategy.

Related: 19 Jaw-Dropping Social Media Stats + Action Items for Marketers

 

1. People Will Trust You More

As we write in this article, third-party endorsements impact buying behavior. Convince & Convert says 83% of Americans are more likely to purchase a product or service that’s recommended by a friend or family member.

It’s not just friends and family who enable trust-building, either. Gartner adds that a lead generated through employee advocacy or social selling is seven times more likely to close than those originating from other lead-gen tactics. 

Bottom line is that your followers and their friends and family will trust your brand more if you’re not the one advocating for yourself. If they trust you, they’ll follow you. If they follow you, you’ll have more opportunities to engage with them. Ultimately, you’ll have a greater chance of earning their business.

2. You’ll Get More Engagement

Along with trust comes engagement. Employee advocacy posts will generate more organic reach and expand your network faster than you posting alone. Social Media Today reports that content shared by employees receives eight times the engagement of content shared on brand channels.

Consider the difference between a friend of yours sharing something about their company, versus a company sharing something about itself. You’re probably going to be more interested in what your friend has to say, right? That’s the power of employee advocacy. Not only are you able to crowdsource your social media, alleviating some of the burden of posting, but you also get greater exposure. Win-win.

Additionally, with recent industry shifts toward consumer privacy, employee advocacy will become even more important. Currently, advertisers are scrambling to keep up with Apple’s latest changes to the mobile ad industry — which essentially makes it easier for consumers to opt out of having their data tracked for advertising purposes. With their ability to target consumers curtailed, brands will need to rely more heavily on employee advocacy to get their messages heard. 

Learn more: Apple’s seismic change to the mobile ad industry is drawing near, and it’s rocking the ecosystem

3. You’ll Retain Employees

Employees who are part of an employee advocacy program are more likely to be highly engaged themselves. According to Altimeter research, employees of companies that encourage employee engagement on social media are:

• 27% more likely to feel optimistic about their companies’ future
• 20% more likely to feel inspired
• 20% more likely to stay at their companies
• 15% more likely to connect to co-workers beyond their core teams

It makes sense why employees would feel more engaged if they’re included in the company’s social strategy. It makes them feel valued — like they’re more than just a number. When you include rewards, such as gift cards and other incentives, as part of your employee advocacy program, they’ll feel even more appreciated.

4. You Can Control the Narrative

Your employees are already using social media. Weber Shandwick reports that 98% of employees use at least one social media network for personal use, and of those, half of them are already posting about their company.

With an employee advocacy program, you can syndicate brand-approved content to your employees. And with a technology partner like Rallio, you can make it easy for them to access and share this content via our mobile app. You can also track employee posts on a leaderboard to gameify the process.

Formalizing an employee advocacy program is a natural next step for what’s already taking place. Your employees are posting content about you on their own channels, so why not be involved in deciding what gets shared about your company?

5. You’ll Build a Positive Online Reputation

As you build brand recognition with an employee advocacy program, along with subsequent engagement and reach, you’ll also bolster your online reputation. Followers who become customers will begin interacting with you more as a brand, through online reviews, direct messages, and comments and reactions.

With those engagements, you have an opportunity to engage back by responding to your followers and handling any customer service issues. The more you show you are listening to what your followers and customers have to say, the greater your online reputation will be. 

Related: The Truth About Social Media for Small-Business Owners

Launch Your Employee Advocacy Program in 2021

If you’re ready to launch an employee advocacy program, Rallio can get you up and running. It all begins with helping your employees understand the benefits of sharing content on their social media pages. 

To build that understanding, we suggest establishing or updating your company’s social media policy to include guidelines and best practices on social media posting. You can also spell out what types of rewards and incentives you plan to offer.

With your social media policy in place, you can then use Rallio’s Activate platform to bring everyone together in one central dashboard. Request a demo to learn more.