However, absent a strategy, sometimes it can feel like the same, predictable employees share company news and insights. Most of the time, employee advocacy efforts hit limits we’d all like to overcome.

LinkedIn reports:

In an average company, only three percent of employees share company-related content, but they are responsible for driving a 30 percent increase in the content’s total likes, shares, and comments.

My company, the Marketing Advisory Network, set out to find out what’s holding employees back, and what can be done to drive more engagement. To do this, we surveyed 499 employees from a wide range of organizations. The results can be seen in our 2017 Employee advocacy impact study [PDF download].

Some Remarkable Truths

1. Just like buyer personas, we need employee personas. Many factors influence an employee’s motivation and desire to advocate on behalf of the company.
2. Millennials aren’t the only ones who get social. Gen X employees are very sophisticated in their digital sharing.
3. Those organizations that document social media guidelines have higher rates of employee advocacy.

Why Does Employee Advocacy Work?

Brands’ organic reach on social media has dwindled considerably in recent years. In response, many brands are allocating more money toward social media ads and boosting posts to amplify their reach. Employee engagement however, is a more cost-effective solution to organically increase your reach.

This is because employee advocacy is simply the promotion of company messages by its employees. Employee word-of-mouth has always contributed to a company’s success. But employee advocacy has gained more importance as social media has become central to the buying process for both organizations and individuals.

Employee advocates address two critical areas.

• First, they extend the number of people who consume company messages.
• Second, people trust content shared from employees more than from a brand, or often even other experts. The extra credibility employees have is essential for spurring action.

Essential Elements of Employee Advocacy Success

According to the Marketing Advisory Network study, the majority of respondents (78 percent) have said something positive about their employer to someone else directly. Conversely, only 24 percent have said something negative to someone else directly. However, only 27 percent have posted a positive comment or review online about their employer.

So how do you engineer social employee advocacy?

We discovered the following factors that impact the frequency of an individual’s advocacy. A clear roadmap for success emerged.

1. If you promote employee advocacy the same for each employee, you are missing an opportunity to grow participation. A wide range of factors contribute to employee advocacy. Not only do you need to offer a range of incentives, but also a range of content prompts.
2. Writing down social sharing guidelines increases advocacy.
3. Employees contribute to a wide range of social channels. Even if your company does not have a dedicated presence on their channel of choice, you should make it easy for employees to contribute where they feel most comfortable.
4. You can grow the number of employees who participate in employee advocacy programs with incentive programs ranging from public recognition to monetary rewards.

A Passionate Workforce Drives Advocacy

Do you want your employees to advocate for your organization? Then first they need to clearly understand, and feel passionate about the values and vision of the company. Without a clear understanding of what the company stands for and the desired business objectives, employee advocacy is difficult to achieve.

Periodically poll your employees to assess their level of passion for the company and their role. This insight will help you craft company vision training and incentive programs that drive greater advocacy.

Working Remotely Increases an Employee’s Company Related Social Sharing

We asked survey participants where they worked most often. They chose one of the following options:

• At a company location
• At a client location
• Traveling between client locations
• At home
• At a co-working location

It turns out those who work on client sites or travel between them were the most frequent social sharers.

Surprisingly, only 13 percent of those at a company location shared content with their social networks about professional interests between four and 10 times in the last month. This compares to 32 percent at a client location, and 25 percent traveling between client locations.

Those who spend time with non-employees doing their job, tend to be more frequent employee advocates online.

Understanding Employee Motivation

Most organizations have employees that span multiple age cohorts. We wanted to know if the generation they belonged to impacted why employees advocated on behalf of their company.

So we asked, “What is the primary reason you share or would share information about your company?” Then we broke down the responses by generation.

Which generation is the most likely to be an employee advocate and share content socially? Unsurprisingly, Baby Boomers were least likely to share information. Only 47 percent of Baby Boomers share information about their job, compared to 72 percent of Generation X, and 81 percent of Millennials.

Millennials are more motivated than their peers to help their company find quality talent. But they were on par with Generation X in the number one motivation—helping the company grow its social following.

We also compared the type of company information each generation reports sharing. Confounding certain lazy Baby Boomer stereotypes about narcissism, Boomers are much more likely to share information only about themselves than other generations. Millennials are the most likely to post about company outings and activities, and the more cultural aspects of work.

We sought to understand if there was a correlation between age and blog authorship when assessing social media engagement. Almost a quarter of our survey respondents have a personal blog. While far fewer Baby Boomers have a blog, Generation X and Millennials were neck and neck.

We wanted to know if those with a personal blog were more or less likely to share company information socially.

Publishing a personal blog denotes a higher level of social media sophistication, and is a leading indicator that an employee is more likely to advocate on behalf of the company socially.

Social Channel Adoption by Segment

Employees with children report greater use of social channels than those without children.

Parenting wasn’t the only difference. Gender played a role in which social channels were used.

Age also correlated with the variety of social channels individuals utilized.

Employees across varied educational backgrounds are socially active. However, the most frequent contributors to company advocacy are those with Master’s or Doctorate degrees.

Consider a Technology Assist

As the data clearly shows, organizations can benefit from utilizing employee advocacy. Although many organizations look to implement in-house programs through clearly defined written guidelines and training, others utilize software solutions to help standardize and enable more systematic advocacy practices. Several vendors offer solutions to help develop employee advocacy programs including Engagelyee, Everyone Social, Sociabble, eeedo, Bambu by Sprout Social, LinkedIn Elevate, Nine Connections, Limber, Smarp, and Dynamic Signal.

Don’t Sleep on Employee Advocacy

Having a documented employee advocacy strategy means you harness the credibility of everyday people to boost organizational goals. They boost your content’s likes, shares, and comments. It’s a strategy that drives brand awareness, helps attract top talent, and most importantly, increases revenue. For more on measuring the results of an employee advocacy program, download Curata’s eBook: The Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics and Metrics.

For a brief window in time—something close to a year—this was the most effective method of organic reach engineering attainable on LinkedIn. It worked like a dream. It made me appear significantly more gifted than I am, and drove the vast majority of traffic to our websites. Until of course, one day it didn’t.

These are the types of golden hacks we marketers are often in search of. A little break in the space-time continuum that gifts us an advantage over the competition. The challenge with these moments is just that; they are temporary, maybe lasting a few days to a few months. But the window eventually closes, typically because others have made the same realization as you and eventually overrun it. This forces someone to tweak an algorithm and end the opportunity.

As a marketer, you’ve surely lived through this. You likely follow the latest trends on social channel strategies. You’ve maybe become skilled at ongoing testing at a scale unthought of just a few years ago. Maybe you’ve even formalized it in new ‘growth hacking’ roles within the business. This needs to be a constant process to optimize the likelihood of tripping across such an opportunity—and to recognize when the windows of opportunity are starting to close.

Like anything when we’re focused on the short-term however, sometimes we’re so close to the frame we can’t see the big picture. And in the world of organic reach, the big picture has started to come back into focus again in unexpected ways.

That Whole Content Shock Thing

Remember the days when you could write a blog post, shout about it on social channels, and people would click on it? It actually really worked. (Click here for 11 Effective Ways to Use Social Media to Promote Your Content.) It worked so well in fact, everyone who was doing it kept increasing the volume of content they were producing. Until, well, two things happened:

Content Volumes Went Nuts

You can take Mark Schaefer’s word for it, or you can look at some indicative measures like the total number of digital news articles published in a year, as tracked by Google:

Even with the rise of fake news, it seems like there’s definitely a trend at play here.

Organic Reach Took its Ball and Went Home

And that much content, well… you know the rest.

The Rise of Paid Social

The silver lining—for the primary social channels at least—of this supply-demand conundrum? Compound quarterly paid media growth rates that look something like this:

So that, it would seem, was pretty much game over. Incorporate paid media into your content distribution strategy, or no one sees your stuff.

The Return of Organic Social Reach

For the past eight years, my agency has worked with over a hundred large enterprise organizations on global content marketing strategy development and execution.

In the early days, our clients were exclusively within the marketing department of client organizations. As content marketing has become more mainstream however, there have been numerous phases of shifts in the market. A significant one was when B2C marketers started to aggressively shift money into digital. More recently, the corporate communications function largely missed the boat during Content Marketing 1.0. But they’ve started to reclaim internal ownership of stakeholder engagement through content marketing.

Perhaps the largest development I’ve witnessed in recent years has been the application of content marketing techniques to the HR function. Firstly in isolation, and more recently, in conjunction with marketing.

At the risk of promoting and thus accelerating the end of a great hack—the results are giving dramatic new life to the organic reach of many an organization’s social feeds.

First though, let’s step back and look at what I believe has created the conditions for this very unique point in time.

Who Do You Trust?

If you ever tire of jumping on Mary Meeker’s internet stats, do yourself a favor and sit down for a few hours with Edelman’s annual report into the coming apart of the planet. The Trust Barometer covers an enormous (and sometimes chilling) range of issues relating to changing societal perceptions.

For the purposes of this article however, there is one incredibly salient finding which has been consistently important since the late 2000’s. Namely: we don’t trust official spokespeople anymore. In this age of online narcissism, we are most willing to trust people just like ourselves.

Edelman Trust Barometer, 2017

Deep down, we know this to be true. Just think about the last time you booked a hotel. You’d trust the review of someone you don’t know and will never meet over what the hotel tells you about themselves.

This trend occurring at the same time as organic reach drops has, unsurprisingly, fueled the creation of another industry, as marketers seek out the next free competitive edge…

Search Trends: “Influencer Marketing”

That’s right, we trust people like us. Well maybe they’re not exactly like us. But we agree with what they say, and they communicate with the appearance of authenticity. Which is why influencer marketing is so powerful. (Learn how to create an Influencer Marketing Program for Content Promotion.) In the image below is the same post, same influencer. But one is posted from the influencer’s own account; the other from her client’s. Lumee Case (a phone case with LED lighting that makes you look on fleek for selfies) posts, and gets 1,700+ likes. Kim posts, and gets 800,000+ likes.

As the influencer space has evolved and matured, we’ve moved through various phases. Perhaps the most interesting recent evolution is the rise of the ‘micro influencer.’ If you’re an early adopter and influential amongst your social connections in fashion or music, you’re in luck. Many major brands are looking to place two hundred $1,000 bets with a large number of people with street cred, rather than $200,000 with a single ‘Kardashian’ level influencer. As my 14 year-old son can attest.

Even in the relatively new world of influencer marketing then, we’re seeing an accelerating move away from big names towards ‘a person like yourself.’

Employee Advocacy = The New Influencers

We’ve worked with more and more enterprise HR departments on building out their employer brand and bringing it to life through social. And we have seen two additional changes start to happen.

Firstly, marketing is actually keen to be in the room with HR. Not so long ago, the concept of ‘employer branding’ was a tug-of-war disaster zone within many organizations. Marketing felt ownership of anything with ‘brand’ in the name. HR typically didn’t have the budget or relative organizational authority to make an impact. In the past two years, there has been a major shift on both sides. Now many marketing leaders are actively supporting and often driving employer branding efforts.

Perhaps the most fundamental aspect of bringing an employer brand to life is the identification and use of internal spokespeople to carry that message to the outside world. That’s right, employee advocacy. People considering working with a company have a very active authenticity radar, and want to hear from people who are—surprise—like them.

When an organization’s objectives and the employee’s aspirations are aligned, the results can be nothing short of outstanding.

For example, notice the image below from a recent LinkedIn post. In it we see PwC achieving extraordinary organic reach through what appears to be a spontaneous employee post. It is in fact the end result of an intentional strategic approach to topic selection, content co-creation, and advocacy platform.

More unexpectedly, in the past few months we’re seeing something more significant starting to happen.

Sure, we’re getting more and more clients where both marketing and HR are in the room together, taking a common approach to content marketing.

What I think’s most interesting though, is that increasingly our marketing clients are coming to believe that perhaps the best way to market to all audiences is through employee advocacy. And not just when you’re trying to convince people to come work for you.

Back to the Future

Now companies have the same teams looking across a broader set of audience needs. And more and more are discovering that employee advocacy is the most ‘authentic’ way to reach those audiences. For awareness, perception, lead-gen, nurturing, conversion objectives—all of it.

At one-level it’s back-to-the-future. Employee advocacy tools had a first burst of relevance around five years ago—but it’s much more than that. Progressive companies are trying to leverage internal employees as their marketing channel right through to the core business strategy. They’re asking: what do we want to achieve, with whom—and which of our internal team members will drive it?

All that stuff about trusting people just like ourselves really is playing out in the marketplace.

Want to dive into the details of how companies are rediscovering employee advocacy to drive external marketing results through organic reach? Please join me for Curata’s Expert Series Webinar on Employee Advocacy and The Return of Organic Reach, Tuesday May 9 at 3pm EDT.