Employees generally have 10 times more followers on social networks than their employer’s corporate page, and brand messages are shared 24 times more frequently when distributed by them rather than the company. 

Companies with a successful Employee Advocacy program are 58% more likely to attract top talent and 77% of candidates are more likely to engage with a company when they hear about it from someone they know and trust. Unifying Employee Advocacy with Referral 2.0 enables companies to promote their brand more widely, efficiently and organically while simultaneously attracting the best qualified candidates via their employees’ existing networks.

A company’s best resource isn’t its offerings, its profits or its holdings – or its management, for that matter.

It’s the people who actually get things done, every day and at every level. They’re often the ones who keep a low profile, stay quiet and do their work.

They’re a valuable resource internally, but their impact doesn’t have to be limited to keeping the metaphorical gears of your business machine turning. They have influence that extends outside the organization, and they’re your very best ambassadors, hands down.

By letting them speak for you – in their own voices – on social media, you can deploy more modern and more credible communication.

Let them shine, and your brand will shine too.

By highlighting the expertise of the people in your teams, you give them the opportunity to position themselves as spokespersons for your brand and opinion leaders in your industry. This not only enhances their roles as employees, but also instills confidence in the prospects they connect with, which in turn benefits your business. Your employees’ personalities – their colors – enrich your brand universe and make it real.

And you’re doing more than landing new clients and making sales. You’re also nurturing your corporate culture and bringing it to life across the board.

That’s because giving your employees a voice breaks professional isolation and enhances their roles within the company. And at the same time, you can create an authentic bidirectional exchange with them.

It’s a win-win for everyone.

So how do you do it?

Through an Employee Advocacy program.

Employee Advocacy: Brand image for the social media era

Employee Advocacy is an innovative approach that allows companies to extend the influence of their brand through their teams’ active participation on social networks such as LinkedIn.

Instead of a single traditional communication channel managed by a team (communications, sales or marketing) with one general subscriber base, in an Employee Advocacy program, each member of the organization exerts a qualitative influence on their own network.

It’s also a way to improve employee satisfaction (and thus retention) while fostering a strong company culture. 

74% of employees surveyed say they don’t receive enough information from their company. 

And even if the company makes an effort to keep them in the loop, information often gets lost in conversation, emails, text messages and so on. This can have negative consequences for your employees’ motivation and performance.

By pushing information to your people in the context of an Employee Advocacy program, you can connect employer and employee, while strengthening your brand through increased visibility on social networks.

Each employee can directly share content created by a community manager, modifying it if they wish (with their own thoughts, for example), or even create their own content. They become company ambassadors – even influencers. 

The result? A better bond of trust with your people, your prospects and your customers, plus:

 

• • An audience up to 100 times larger

• • An engagement rate up to 10 times higher

• • A conversion rate up to 7 times greater

And you can also encourage your employees’ commitment by organizing competitions or tournaments – but above all, you’ll be creating a corporate culture that promotes your employees’ expression, confidence and well-being, in which the right to error makes it possible to explore new avenues leading to innovation.

Referral 2.0: The future of recruitment

Job seekers rank social media and professional networks as the most useful job search resources, compared to job boards, want ads, recruiting agencies and job fairs. 

Relying on job listing boards just doesn’t cut it anymore. Today, it’s all about referrals. They’re one of the top sources of external hires, and your employee ambassadors –  your influencers – are the perfect referrers! Your employees have up to 10 times more contacts than your corporate page. 

Additionally, a recruiting campaign undertaken alongside an employee employer branding program lowers cost and accelerates recruiting.

47% of employees recruited by referral report greater job satisfaction and stay longer at companies. 

Transform your employees into ambassadors with Stent

By implementing an Employee Advocacy strategy using Stent, you can be among the first to benefit from a bonus of visibility and attractiveness for your brand.

The Stent mobile app allows each employee ambassador to directly share content created by a community manager to their own networks. They also have the ability to modify it, such as to add their own thoughts or edit the text, or even create their own content from scratch. With this kind of continuous content feed, Stent’s Employee Advocacy module lets you develop your impressions, stimulate engagement and generate leads.

Thanks to its data crunching and natural language processing (NLP), Stent informs you about the quality of comments and supports your ambassadors in their development on your social networks, while increasing your credibility within your sector.

Stent helps you plan you and your team’s content using a full-featured and intuitive publication calendar. From the Administrator dashboard, you can create groups to organize your campaigns and consult statistics – all from a single interface!

Finally, Stent lets you take advantage of the employer brand you’ve established using Referral 2.0. This transforms your employee ambassadors into privileged intermediaries to facilitate recruitment from among their contacts. When you have a position open, Stent’s AI will determine which of your employee ambassadors is best positioned to get in touch with their contacts who fit the criteria you’re looking for. Then, Stent’s Talent module takes over and does the rest.

Want to learn more about how Stent can help you turbocharge your branding initiatives while attracting the best talent? Ask for a demo today!