Discover why employee advocacy on social media is so important — and how it can boost your reach, driving more prospects to your content on LinkedIn.
When it comes to B2B social media, you shouldn’t just be relying on your company channels to drive content views, engagement and to get your name out there to prospects. Every business has a secret weapon: its own employees.
LinkedIn has found that nine out of ten brands (at least plan to) make use of employee advocacy. And why? The simple answer is that we’re all more likely to trust a person over a company on social media, especially if that person is someone we know.
In fact, even when sharing exactly the same content, employees see twice the click-through rate than their company channels — driving more views to your core content.
And, if you’re still not convinced by the return you’ll get by embarking on an employee advocacy programme, consider this: almost two-thirds of employees in a formal programme credit employee advocacy with attracting and developing new business.
So we can see that employee advocacy really works. And, it benefits both your company and your employees themselves, by not only driving people to your brand but also by improving your peoples’ own standing as experts in their field. So everyone’s a winner. But, when it comes to LinkedIn, what sort of content should your employees be sharing for maximum impact?
Brand new data from LinkedIn has revealed that, when shared by people rather than companies, SlideShare presentations receive 44% more shares than any other type of content.
At asabell, we’re huge advocates of SlideShare for its easily-digestible yet information-packed presentations that are proven to have big benefits for your SEO and can easily be repurposed for use elsewhere in your social media strategy. We always break down slides as images, tweet out stats from our presentations and create articles with our presentations embedded, for maximum results.
At the end of the day, think about what you’d be likely to share if you saw someone post on LinkedIn. You want to share content that is useful for others in your network, looks great and that helps you to be seen as a thought leader. That’s why SlideShare fits the bill when it comes to employee sharing.
So, here are the key types of content your employees should be sharing on LinkedIn, and their expected outcomes:
To drive company page views on LinkedIn: articles result in 3% more company page views than any other type of content.
To increase company page followers: not only do videos result in 6X more engagement than any other type of content, they also generate 7% more company page follows per impression.
To expand the networks of your employees (which will further increase your reach when they share your content): SlideShare presentations produce 10% more profile views and 2% more connections per impression.
Importantly, you need to help your employees to understand the benefits of employee advocacy, both for the business and for their own profile.
The main takeaway from the research for me is that diversity of content is crucial; your employees’ connections just won’t engage with the same types of content all the time. So you need to be creating a range of great content that your people will want to share with their networks.
And, while this blog has focused purely on LinkedIn, employee advocacy shouldn’t stop there. Wherever your people are active on social media, they should be sharing your content and being your biggest advocates. Help them out as much as you can by producing great content, and reward the best sharers to encourage ongoing commitment. By making employee advocacy part of your culture as a business, you’ll see big results.
Get in touch if you’d like to find out more, or would like to see how we can help you with your social media strategy.
