Social Media and Employee Advocacy: How to Smoothly Advocate a Company

BY ANNA BOWMAN

Today's online world is all about brands: they're everywhere! While companies encourage strong branding methods to make themselves appear not just as another friendly brand on social media, many of them have taken to reaching out to online influencers to become brand ambassadors -- like Electronic Arts, who - after seeing how popular The Sims 4 was on YouTube creators - formed the "EA Game Changers", a team of content creators who the company uses in order to garner opinions from the creators' communities and implement these opinions to improve the game.

This tactic is commonly referred to as "employee advocacy". Essentially, the tactic boils down to the employee becoming a promoter of sorts for the company, swiping aside advertising and marketing schemes in order to reach out to their own circles and make the company's promotions feel more personal and intimate.

Bambu gives an excellent example of how employee advocacy works on a platform like Facebook, where a company's page - and subsequently, their only audience for outreach - may be limited to however many fans the company page has. However, if one employee advocates the company on their own personal account, the post reaches all of their friends (and the average Facebook user has about 338, according to the Pew Research Center). If many employees within the company did this, the outreach potential would completely overshadow the outreach the company would achieve had they stuck solely to their own page.

QUICKFIRE PITCH

A sense of community is important to establish on a college campus. Only a fraction of current students are likely to be involved in university organizations and student life outside of their determined curriculum, so forming a sense of unity between current students and faculty members online could help advocate SOCM and its community events while simultaneously improving student attitude. Kennesaw State University has already proven that students are willing to interact with departments through social media, like the KSU Emergency Management account (@ksuoem), who frequently engage in discussions and answer student questions on their Twitter page.

Presenting: #theFLOCK

Instagram is a platform with a multitude of methods to reach out to audiences. Stories, posts that allow both videos and photographs, and comments -- the outreach potential feels more likely on this platform than any other, especially when including the discovery page every user has access to on their feeds.

Creating unity makes students feel as if they can "fit in" with the pre-established community on campus. An account showcasing student life and the community SOCM curates could alleviate anxiety about forming friendships with other students, as well as make professors and other faculty seem less intimidating and more friendly to current students. Since Instagram allows a variety of content to be posted, small "campaigns" could be run on the page in a series of weekly themes. For instance, one week could be focused on positive experiences students and professors have had with each other, such as student confidence increasing because of a professor's encouragement. Stories could easily feature small clips of current events and happenings on campus, promoting interaction and keeping the students who follow up to date with campus life. Likewise, every Friday could focus on one "Star of the Flock", which would be a student or professor that has left a positive mark on the university's community.