The "social networking wall" turns your employees into ambassadors

Turning employees into ambassadors for their company... an unattainable goal? Not at all: thanks to Employee Advocacy, a communication strategy that mobilizes employees to promote and highlight the company's image, it is entirely possible. And there are numerous benefits.

We explain how Mozzaik365's new feature, the "social network wall", fits into an overall Employee Advocacy strategy.  

What is Employee Advocacy?

Definition

This is the practice by which a brand or company mobilizes its employees to become its ambassadors. In concrete terms, this can mean highlighting employees in the content produced by the company, for example by presenting their daily tasks, or encouraging employees to share and highlight the content published by the company on social networks. In all cases, employees become actors in corporate communication.

Thanks to this communication strategy, the company can increase the reach of its content on social networks, enhance its brand image and develop its visibility. The figures speak for themselves: according to a Sprout Social study, content shared by employees gets 8 times more engagement than content published by the company. Furthermore, according to the same study, 84% of consumers prefer recommendations from friends and family to any other form of advertising. It is therefore easy to see how important the voice of a company's employees is in its communication strategy.  

The benefits of Employee Advocacy

There are many of them! Here are some of them...

• First of all, a message is more credible when shared by an employee than by a company page. Content is shared 24 times more when employees post it. On social networks, this content has 561% more reach than corporate messages!
• Carried by one or more employees, corporate content appears more authentic, more legitimate. It therefore benefits from a better distribution.
• Employee Advocacy also allows you to reach a wider audience than just your company page.
• This strengthens the employer's brand, which in turn helps to recruit the best profiles (our tip for HR departments: share job offers on a personal profile rather than on a company page!)
• The company's social networks are growing organically, which helps to spread the company's culture. It is a project at the crossroads of communication, IT and HR.
• Employee Advocacy offers effective communication at low cost. Compared to buying advertising space, it is more advantageous for a company to take advantage of its employees' network. The only cost is that of the Community Manager or digital communication officer, who will be there to support employees in creating their posts.
• Finally, it is a way of enhancing the value of employees and building their loyalty. By allowing them to share content, the company demonstrates its confidence in them. An employee whose expertise and experience are valued is also a more motivated employee. Furthermore, the practice of Employee Advocacy tends to reinforce the feeling of belonging and team cohesion.

How to implement an Employee Advocacy strategy?

To create your strategy, it is necessary to proceed in stages:

1. First of all, it is important to train employees, explaining how social networks work, the benefits of publishing content for the company, the rules to follow in order to publish in the right way, etc.
2. If necessary, a launch kit can be deployed. It will be made available to employees and will contain all the necessary documentation (our tip: define the do's and dont's in this area, to establish a strict framework).
3. A clear content creation process should then be created, with the help of the company's communication department. It should be integrated into the internal communication plan.
4. Finally, in order to monitor and measure the performance of the company's actions, it is important to set up reporting tools that will make it possible to "take the temperature" and adjust the strategy implemented if necessary.

Measuring the effectiveness of its approach

To measure the effectiveness of an Employee Advocacy approach, performance indicators (KPIs) must be put in place. These indicators are allies in achieving the objectives set by the company. Here are some examples of relevant indicators:

• The engagement generated (likes, comments, shares...) ;
• Organic reach of publications ;
• Traffic generated to the company's website from social networks;
• The conversion rate ;
• Increasing the number of subscribers to the company's social networks.

This list is of course not exhaustive, and should be adjusted according to the nature of the company and the objectives it has set itself.

The right tools to boost Employee Advocacy

What is the NewsHub ?

A Newshub (or social network wall) is a virtual space on which publications from several social networks are gathered and distributed. It is often found on the homepage of websites, or on the product pages of e-commerce sites. For example, the Newshub can be used to display customer comments, photos, etc. It allows to tap into the power of visuals to promote a company's goods or services, to highlight content posted by its customers, employees or partners, to reinforce its brand image, etc.

More powerful than traditional advertising, the Newshub is an excellent marketing tool and an effective way to generate commitment. Internal and external communication are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, another key advantage of the Newshub is that it saves time in transferring external communication to internal. The result? The social network wall is a real source of ROI for companies.

Set up your social network wall with Mozzaik365

What if your company also installed its social network wall? This communication component allows you to gather information from your social networks within your Microsoft 365 Intranet, while adding external sources.

The objectives of the social networking wall are as follows:

• Gather and unify your company's communication: external communication is automatically integrated into your Digital Workplace. No double entry of information, the feed is organic.
• Engage: employees can react to your external publications and become ambassadors for the company.
• Retrieve publications from your interests and partners: this allows you to stay connected to your partners, customers and the market.

💡 Our tip: Mozzaik customers can find more information on our Zendesk

Keep your social network wall alive

Here are the different social networks from which you can retrieve publications:

• RSS feeds: you can retrieve publications from public RSS feeds
• Youtube: the social network wall displays public videos published by the Youtube channels of your choice
• Twitter: tweets from accounts you have previously selected are displayed on your wall
• Facebook: you can display on the social network wall the publications of the pages of which you are administrator
• Instagram: posts from Instagram Business accounts where you are the administrator are displayed on your wall
• LinkedIn: the social network wall allows you to retrieve publications from a personal account or a company page.

📌 Please note: it is not possible to retrieve publications from a private or public group. Furthermore, only publications are retrieved. Comments are not brought up on the social network wall.

The advantage of Mozzaik's feature is that it allows you to integrate all of your social media content into your intranet, which simplifies (and promotes) employee engagement. No need for another dedicated tool: everything is integrated into the Digital Workplace. This allows you to stay in control and avoid Shadow IT " i.e. the parallel IT uses that escape the supervision of the IT department.

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Things to remember

The pre-installation process of the "social network wall" functionality:

📌 Define a goal with a coherent strategy;

📌 Train staff to better adopt the tool ;

📌 Measure the effects and adjust the strategy if necessary ;

📌 The benefits of the "social network wall" feature;

📌 Engage Employee Advocacy;

📌 Improves productivity and team collaboration ;

📌 Strengthens the Employer brand.