For years, companies have faced enormous challenges and been met with fresh opportunities due to rapid digitisation. More and more channels must be processed in less time than ever before. At the same time, the content posted in social networks is associated with ever shorter organic reach, as networks like Facebook, Instagram, and the like are constantly changing their algorithms and increasing attention to paid content.
The solution? Many brands have turned to corporate influencers!
Instead of continuing to rely on as many traditional marketing methods, brands are increasingly using influencers to increase their online presence and brand awareness. Rather than focusing on external brand ambassadors, it makes sense for brands to increasingly look for suitable influencers within their own ranks.
Influencer marketing: the basics
Influencer marketing focuses on the promotion and sale of products or services by influencers. Influencers are people with large followings and the ability to reach these followers with a powerful, trustworthy message. By using influencers in a social media marketing campaign, you can share your brand message with a much larger audience.
Influencers have the ability to demonstrate the character and image of a brand. When done right, influencer marketing can result in unprecedented revenues and growth, build engagement, and motivate your fans and customers to act.
Your employees are the perfect corporate influencers
Many companies are deterred by the time, effort, and money needed to find the right influencers. Your brand needs someone it can trust and who knows and understands the benefits of what you have to offer. Someone that is personally invested in the brand. Who could fill these shoes better than your own employees and colleagues?
In 2016, LinkedIn pointed out that only 3% of employees shared company-related content in an average company. But these employees are responsible for a 30% increase in likes, shares, and comments on a post.
The use of your staff as influencers provides you with all of the advantages of using external influencers while saving you both time and money.
3 facts that highlight the power of corporate influencers
- A majority of younger people (millennials and gen-z) said they trust content shared by "ordinary" people rather than content shared by brands.
- Brand messages were associated with 561% more reach when shared by employees than the same messages shared through the brand's official social channels (MSLGroup).
- According to McKinsey, using social platforms while working can increase productivity by 20-25%, e.g. through improved communication, knowledge transfer, or better internal and external cooperation.
A win-win situation!
How to turn your employees into true brand ambassadors
Make it worth their time
The best way to convince someone to put their time and effort into something is to show them the benefits. The organisational and personal benefits of sharing your messages with your employees must be made clear. Knowing that they will increase brand awareness and awareness on specific topics is a powerful motivator to persuade employees to get on board as brand representatives and opinion leaders.
This also means incentives. You can read more about how that works in our guide to employer branding and corporate influencers.
Make it believable
Your employees must feel heard. It is not enough to just ask them to share your content. You also have to let them contribute to your message. Collect information about what types of content your employees want to share and what appeals to them. Then give them all of the materials and tools needed to create and share their own content. This not only gives your employees a voice, but also increases the credibility of your content.
Make a game of it
Gamification, campaigns, and challenges can be a huge driver in motivating employees to share your brand content. Your employees could be collecting points for shared content, for example. This binds employees and rewards their efforts. By making your internal influencer programme informative, engaging, and entertaining, this is a great motivator for many employees to communicate their corporate loyalty and brand message to their own circle of friends.
Keep it simple
Many employees do not instinctively share content via their personal social media accounts. Often this is due to the fact that they are too busy or they simply don't know what to say. This is where social employee advocacy tools such as Facelift's Social Share App comes into play!
Social Share turns your own employees into brand ambassadors. Powered by facelift, you can pre-design and write social media content for your corporate ambassadors, and push it directly to a central hub for them to share in seconds.
Turn the posts you're already creating and optimising into beautiful content that takes just seconds to share. Employees can also customise the texts to give them a more personal touch, but they don't have to!
We want to make sharing on social media easier, and we want to empower our users to build content they care about and share it with the people who want it most. We believe that the simpler it is to do so, the sooner your brand messages will be shared.
Want to get started? Facelift just released its brand new Employer Branding Package for Teams. You can find out more about that by following this link.
And once again, if you'd like to go way deeper into corporate influencers as well as employer branding and social share, you should really take some time to check out our free guide: The Human Side of Social.
