The process of creating content and curating a unique story to support your brand can be a labor of love, but when done right, it pays dividends.
Content allows for an expression of voice, a unique take or positioning if you will, and can be powerful in how others perceive your brand. So, why not put the amplification of that content directly in the hands of your largest advocates - your employees?
The proof is in the employee advocacy stats:
- Over 34% of marketers say thought leadership content produces the best results when shared by employees.
- And ironically, over 74% of people find posts from personal accounts are more persuasive than posts from brand accounts.
When shared by your employees, your content creation efforts resonate better. It’s why so many organizations turn to employee advocacy tools to support their content creation and amplification efforts.
What is Employee Advocacy?
Employee advocacy makes it easy for your employees to participate in your organization’s marketing efforts through performing activities and sharing company messages with their personal social media networks.
Employee advocacy is a method used to promote your brand and initiatives through people who work for your organization in an authentic and trusted way, typically on social media or other digital channels.Read more on What is Employee Advocacy?
In essence, it’s the modern-day version of word-of-mouth recommendations. People enjoy telling other people about a great article they read, a tip or trick they learned from someone else, or even sharing big news with others. What was once done verbally is simply shared online to a much broader audience. Likewise, it spurs discussion with others with the same, or different, points of view and allows for the sharing of information.
Many people do this already, and companies recognize their message can go further when promoted by their employees rather than the brand handle. Simply put, people trust other people more than they do brands, which is why content coming from an employee resonates better.
How Can Employee Advocacy Support Content Creation?
When you create content, you have a powerful position you want others to see. When you amplify that content to your internal and external audiences, it enables stronger engagement from your employees and their audiences, supporting your marketing goals.
Here are a few ways an employee advocacy program can help with your content.
Content for Specific Teams, Partners, or Departments
You’re no stranger to creating content. When you create content, it is original to your organization and you own it. This content elevates your company’s unique positioning, expertise, product, services, opinions, and insights. Basically, it is how you position your brand to the world.
While your baseline positioning will not change, the content may depend on your audience. Take the employee advocacy space for example. In many instances, the marketing department owns the program so our content would appeal to marketers. But, HR, communications teams, or even sales can benefit from a program so the content we create for those audiences appeals to talent pool development, social selling, and employer branding. The positioning doesn’t change but the content does — it fits the audience.
Your employee advocacy content can be delivered this way, too. The positioning used in the activity you want your team to share should be relevant to their audience. Segmenting your activities allows the end-user to better understand the content in a way that is relevant to them.
How Does GaggleAMP Support Team-Specific Content
GaggleAMP Channels allows Gaggle Managers the ability to effortlessly segment content streams to make sure their Members are only seeing content that is relevant to them.
Not all content needs to go out to every member of your program — in fact, it’s prudent to have different employees conducting different activities.
Channels offer the ability for specific groups of people to share, contribute, and collaborate on content specific to that Channel’s mission. For example, we’ve seen Channels segmented by:
- Geography
- Language
- Department
- Vertical
- Product or Subject Matter
- Content Type (Corporate News, Thought Leadership, etc.)
The Channels also serve as a repository for all of the activities and content specific to that Channel, which helps you keep track of what has been served while creating a regular cadence of engagements.
Amplify Your Content for Larger Social Media Reach and Engagement
Brand messages are re-shared 24x more frequently when shared by employees vs. an official brand account, and those messages reach 561% further than the same post on a branded account.
Employee advocacy provides a more authentic engagement between people, which can be a relief in a sea of advertisements. This is why user-generated content has also become so popular — it’s more personable than traditional advertising and feels more real.
How Does GaggleAMP Support Reach and Engagement
With over 50 different activities that can be served on networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Xing, WeChat, Glassdoor, and more, employees have a bevy of options to distribute messages.
Our activities are curated by a Gaggle Manager and delivered to your team to execute. When creating this content, reach and engagement come from the execution of these activities on a one-to-one personal basis, one a brand handle cannot achieve. Also, we aid you in amplifying your content by allowing for:
- Hashtags already appended to activities to strengthen search and content.
- Employee approval of all activities.
- Diversity of activities, like adding a video, sharing a photo, commenting on a post, and more.
Plus our reporting helps you learn what content resonated with your employees and their audiences so you can do more of what is working, and less of what isn’t.
How Can Employee Advocacy Support Content Curation?
While content creation allows your brand to identify its positioning, content curation raises your brand awareness and builds connections with your audience. Curation focuses on community and driving engagement. Engagement towards a piece of created content validates your positioning, generates conversations, and facilitates conversations in a public forum. This is a brilliant way for your employees to activate conversations that are aligned with their company’s objectives.
Create Feeds of Resources
Finding the right content to deliver to your team should go beyond your content creation — you need to mix in third-party content. This helps diversify the content your employees share on their social networks. It can help address topics that are important to your audience that are related to what they do in their day-to-day, without directly competing with branded content.
How Does GaggleAMP Help You Resource Content?
GaggleAMP can support your need for content in several ways.
- RSS Content: Does your target audience regularly read content from specific resources? Pull their RSS feed into a Channel! This helps you both consume content as well as make that content an Activity you can send to your Gaggle Members.
- Google News RSS: Streamline your Google News alerts into a Channel. It helps to segment branded alerts — think brand name mentions or executive name mentions — or even to set up alerts for key ABM prospects, competitor mentions, partner pulses, and so much more.
- Channel Feeds: If you have the ‘Community’ module enabled in your Gaggle, then you can tap other Members of your program for content suggestions to share with your team. These Channel feeds may have brand mentions on third-party websites, partner content that is important to your audience, reviews of your company, and more.
 Pro-Tip: Channels can be super powerful when you leverage curated content in an ABM campaign. Here’s a use case to help you leverage employee advocacy with your ABM campaigns. |
Parting Thoughts
Content creation is a never-ending process and you need to make your content go further for longer. Using employee advocacy tools like GaggleAMP gives new life to your content, sparks engagement and conversations, and contributes to your brand advocacy goals.
Would you like a one-pager with this use case information to share with your teams? Download it here > Content Creation and Curation With Employee Advocacy.
If you’re interested in learning more about how you can leverage GaggleAMP with your content curation efforts, be sure to connect with your Customer Success Manager.