As social media experts, Walls.io offer a great insight into how to leverage the power of employees as brand ambassadors for your business.

Social media and the workplace haven’t always seen eye to eye. Many business owners and executives are uncomfortable with the idea of employees using social media at work, having the perception that it hurts productivity and increases the risk of the company being misrepresented externally. 

Businesses often spend a fortune trying to improve their brand identity on social media, hiring influencers and professional content managers. But what if there was a way to build increased brand awareness with a resource that your business already has access to?

Your employees.

More than ever, employees feel like they are part of a business and that they have an impact both on their workplace and the wider world.

So how can you leverage the power of your employees and turn them into brand ambassadors?

What is a brand ambassador?

A brand ambassador is someone who flies the flag for a business or brand, either online or offline. Often they are loyal customers, but they can also be hired influencers or, increasingly, employees of the organization in question.

These brand ambassadors can use a mixture of methods to spread the good word about how great a businesses service or products are through a mixture of content such as:

• Online reviews
• Social media content
• Personal brand based content (such as blogs or YouTube channels)
• Word of mouth

These brand advocates create user generated content, also known as UGC, which the brand itself can repurpose for its own marketing purposes.

What are the benefits of using employee brand ambassadors?

Encouraging and creating an employee advocacy program has numerous benefits, including, perhaps most importantly, it's low cost and cost effective.

Low cost outlay

You don’t need to invest heavily in new tech and complicated processes to engage your employees. Instead, you can use tools that already exist: Social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or even YouTube. 

Running a business brand ambassador program usually means a few steps to encourage people to share their love of their workplace and the company culture. This might simply be:

• Asking people to share what they love about work on social media
• Reviewing a new product
• Entering a competition by sharing a hashtag

And as you can see, all of these cost the company close to nothing but can reap great returns.

Employee engagement

Social media can be an effective way of engaging with employees and can help create a sense of community. It’s not only appealing due to ease of use and accessibility, but it can also stimulate creativity. 

When you embrace social media at the workplace you give your employees a simple and natural way to interact with the company and with each other. This also provides them with an authentic overview of what is happening – and lets them know that their work is valued.

Scout24 allows employees to bring their dogs to work, and they share this perk on a social wall. Source: Instagram 

Trusted users

Who is a better advocate for your brand than your workers? If they genuinely share their love of their workplace then this obviously reflects well on the brand and can snowball into positive feedback amongst their peers and network.

Many of us will have seen friends or colleagues sharing their love of work on their personal social media accounts. This might have been having fun at a trade show or work trip, chatting about the great view from the office or basking in the glory of a reward for a job well done.

While these people might not have been official brand ambassadors, chances are they left an impression on you... And if so, they probably left you with a positive impression of their workplace.

How to harness the power of social media

When you use social media as an engagement tool, it's important to collect the content created by your employees and display it somewhere. One great way to do that is with a social wall.

Social media walls – or social media hubs – collect content from hashtags, profiles and keywords into one unified feed.  And the best ways to display a feed at your workplace or public space is to use digital signage screens.

Combining digital signage with social walls allows you to update the content on your screens — live and automatically — simply by updating your social media feeds. That, in turn, increases communication transparency and encourages your employees to connect with your target audience and with your brand.

Embracing employee advocacy is a strong play in our era of digital change, and can be a great way to supplement your traditional marketing efforts as well as boost your social media campaigns.

How to encourage employee advocacy

As we've mentioned above, brand ambassadors are often paid influencers, but can also be happy customers or employees. And when it comes to encouraging your employees to become brand ambassadors, there are some foundations that need to be in place.

• Value their workplace

Primarily, of course, employees need to enjoy their work and the workplace. If there is no love for the work they're doing, or they don't enjoy the team culture, then any enthusiasm online will be hollow and most like, very transparent.

Look at your company culture, run feedback sessions, ask your employees how they see the brand, how they feel about their work and how they would feel about taking part in an employee advocacy program.

• What are the goals?

You're not going to be running brand ambassador programs for the sake of it - so work out what the end goals are. Is it more followers on social media? Is it to boost the effects of word of mouth marketing, or to promote the brand online more effectively?

Or is it to promote the company's products, or maybe attract more higher quality candidates to open roles?

Define what a successful employee advocacy program looks like so that you can set up clear guidelines, and track performance and success moving forward.

• Rewards and gamification

For many people, they may need to be given a reason, or at least shown why, they should share their enthusiasm for the brand and company culture.

While sharing workplace selfies on Linkedin and Instagram isn't uncommon, do they tag the brand or use branded hashtags?

Encouraging people to become brand ambassadors might mean offering rewards for their participation.

Whether this is offering tangible rewards such snacks, days our or vouchers or other financial rewards; or team rewards such as away days, extra days off or paid lunches - there are many ways to offer employee rewards.

Read more in our guide to workplace gamification.

• Offer training and content curation

While it might seem that everyone is on Instagram all the time... Not everyone is a social media natural. Those who are keen to take part and become brand ambassadors might appreciate if your provide training and expertise in using the platforms in question.

In addition to this, your fledgling brand ambassador might not know what to share.

Offering courses or training, or simply a briefing about how to be more effective on social media doesn't just mean they can share your branded content. It also means they're learning a new skill, which is highly valued in todays working landscape.

And, it also means that you avoid any come back from controversial content - which could obviously cause numerous headaches.

• Investment from senior management

While encouraging your brand ambassadors is obviously key, perhaps most importantly there needs to be an attention and perhaps financial investment from the senior leadership.

At the most basic level, this just means that your senior leadership need to be aware of whats happening with the brand ambassador program and to do their best to engage with and encourage it.

Employees value the recognition and appreciation from both their peers and managers. In fact, it's one of the major factors in job satisfaction in the modern era. So offering regular meetings, town hall sessions or engagement with the senior management can go a long way in the success of your brand ambassador program.

Examples of successful employee advocacy programs

When it comes to running a successful employee advocacy program, it helps to know what has worked before. We've picked out some great examples of how brands have used a brand ambassador program to great effect...

Corporate influencer program

German insurance provider LV 1871 leveraged social media to turn their employees into corporate influencers. 

They chose 30 (volunteer) employees to post on social media using the #TeamLV1871 hashtag. This UGC, posts from the official LV1871 accounts, and by the general public, were collected and displayed together on a social wall.

The wall was prominently displayed at the company’s headquarters, drawing plenty of attention from employees.

The dashboard that displayed both corporate news and user-generated content was received positively by employees. The wall has become even busier and driven more attention during bigger events. 

As the LV 1871 example shows, running a corporate influencer campaign is a bright and innovative way to keep an eye on what people are saying about the company. It can also help continually improve and evolve the company image presented to the outside world. 

An internal campaign-turned-public

Employee-focused hashtag campaigns can also turn into a public campaign. The #ownie campaign by METRO Cash & Carry, designed for their worldwide event Own Business Day, is a great example. 

In the first stage, the campaign focused on the company’s own employees in all 25 of the countries METRO operates in. They were invited to take pictures with their favorite independent business owners shopping at METRO stores. Social media posts with the #ownies hashtag were then posted on internal channels, and METRO employees could win both rewards and glory for their engagement. Remarkably, some of them posted well over 100 #ownies with their accounts! 

The second phase took the campaign public and engaged more than 19k business owners from 13 countries. It gave both METRO employees and METRO customers a chance to demonstrate pride in what they do, connect with other people, and share the joy of a long-term partnership. And, METRO reached its primary goal of engaging both employees and customers and turning them into brand ambassadors.

Social recruiting

Hashtag campaigns don’t just target current employees, but can also be an essential part of social recruiting.

Scout24, Germany’s leading digital marketplace, uses social walls to attract talent and win them over before they even submit their application. They use the recruiting hashtag #WorkingAtScout24 for all careers-related content and showcase it on a social wall within their offices and at events. 

Scout24’s recruiting social wall uses their own employee advocacy program

A social wall helps Scout24 spread their core values, showcase additional benefits, and encourage current employees to speak about their experience. Their employees can also share how much they enjoy working at the company. Positive employee content can therefore help  attract new talent, and help manage expectations for applicants. 

Are you ready to embrace employee advocacy?

As you can see, happy employees are the best advertisement for your company, so it makes sense to allow, and even encourage, them to post about their experience and submit authentic UGC on social media.

If you’re only starting to use social media as a workplace engagement tool and are not yet ready for an entire campaign, make sure to follow a few basic rules to succeed:

1. Don’t make posting about the company on social media compulsory. Instead, think about how your employees would identify with the company’s content and try to make it relatable, honest and shareable.
2. Show employees what kind of posts you would like them to share by briefing managers and setting examples. 
3. Make employee advocacy fun and give something back. 

But most importantly, invest in the positive and inclusive company culture, one that’s worth being an ambassador for.

Using Walls.io and ScreenCloud

Using Walls.io for your own employee advocacy program is simple and is a really neat way to highlight some the great mentions from across your socials. What's more, it takes just a few minutes to get set up.

If you have a ScreenCloud digital signage network in action, using Walls.io is available in our app store - although you will also need a subscription to Walls.io.

If you'd like to see Walls.io and ScreenCloud in action, check out our app guide here.

Not used ScreenCloud for your digital signage? Sign up for a free trial, or request a demo today.

Thank you to Aleksandra Petrash – Marketing Partnership Manager at Walls.io – for writing this guest blog for us.