The reputation of a company is reflected in the treatment of its employees. For a business, there is no better advertisement than a passionate, satisfied and happy employee.

By making your employees feel valued, you are raising their morale, self-esteem, and self-confidence, thus creating loyal staff motivated to give their best in achieving the goals of your company.

There is no need to emphasize how important it is to be sincere while doing so. But, there is also a way to take advantage of such a resource. You can grow your employees into your most dedicated and authentic brand ambassadors. It can be an awesome way to boost your brand reputation and help attract new talents who share similar values.

Employee advocacy is contemporary influencer marketing. It has been around for decades in various forms, but the internet and social media have revolutionized it. Yet, there are plenty of companies that haven’t been activating their employees as marketing, sales, and recruiting assets.

Let’s see how to improve that. But, first…

What is Employee Advocacy?

Simply put, employee advocacy is the promotion of a company by its staff members. Employee advocacy activities include recommending your company’s products or services to friends or family members and raising awareness of your brand through various online or offline channels. 

Employee advocates also represent the best interests of your company, internally and externally alike, and provide insight into the company culture. As you can see, you and/or your staff may have already been using some of these marketing tactics without realizing it.

There are different ways in which your employees can advocate for your company, both off and online. However, social media proved to be the fastest, most effective, and most common channel for employee advocacy.

Here is why.

Employee Advocacy on Social Media

Traditional marketing channels have long ago left the scene to the digital ones. Your customers spend a lot of their free time on their social media networks, but so do your employees.

It’s not just marketers, salespeople, and paid influencers who can share your content. Your complete workforce can find relevance in the content your marketing team creates and, therefore, be your brand voice.

Though bloggers and social media celebrities certainly have large followings, it’s not so uncommon for regular people to have hundreds or thousands of followers too. Since they have already built a certain reputation, activating such employees to be the ambassadors of your brand can be the key social media growth hack for your business.

Benefits of Employee Advocacy

Building Your Brand Reputation

As mentioned above, employees are the mirror of the company. When workers are happy with the company and the work environment, when they feel respected, valued, and have a sense of purpose, they are willing to share it with their friends, colleagues, and peers around the globe.

Once they share something positive about your brand, it cannot go unnoticed. It puts your company and brand in the spotlight and spreads the message. Word of mouth is the best advertisement. When it comes from your employees, that word is even more valuable. While making a decision regarding a purchase, generated leads trust employees more than they trust CEOs or the marketing department., and this reflects on your conversion rates.

When you create a culture that your employees value, they then want to share it on their profiles with other people. The total social media reach of your staff can be greater than that of your brand. You should take advantage of it and try to grow your social media following organically.

Improve Your Brand Visibility

The results of a study by Cisco showed that employees’ posts on social media generate eight times more engagement than the same content shared on the brand’s official profiles. Additionally, your employees’ network can number up to ten times more followers than that of your company. This, of course, depends on the size of the company.

For easier calculation, let’s assume that your business has 100 employees and 5,000 fans on your Facebook business page. If each of the employees has an average of 400 friends on Facebook, the total reach is 40,000 people. There lies the possibility to reach a much larger audience.

Having employees who share your content and promote your initiatives is like having more accounts on social media that promote your brand. Except that they are more authentic and less promotional.

However, it also means that your employees need to take a proactive approach when it comes to managing a social media workflow. They need to plan and schedule Facebook posts to create a constant output. It’s important for your employees to be able to schedule Facebook posting themselves, and they can do that easily with a dedicated tool and a centralized platform. That said, keep in mind this needs to be an organic approach that’s not blatant PR for your brand.

Adding More Human Element to Your Brand

When employees post online information related to their workplaces, the message is viewed as more genuine and trustworthy. Their personal yet objective insight can make a difference in how the audience relates to the brand.

The same applies to avoiding the more professional jargon and using more common and colloquial phrases. All that helps humanize your brand. A message that bears a more human touch is more receptive.

Let’s set team-building activities as an example. New job candidates will trust the pictures and comments posted by your employees regarding team-building activities in your company rather than the same content posted on your official social networks.

The psychology behind this is straightforward – the experience of your company gatherings, the overall atmosphere, and their willingness to participate seem more genuine when coming from the employees themselves.

Employee Advocacy Strategy

As you can see, employee advocacy can be a powerful marketing tool. Like every other marketing effort, it requires more than simply telling your staff to share your content on their personal profiles.

To get the best of it, you need to develop a plan, a policy, a guideline, and a consistent social media calendar. You need to set goals and find the right people among your workforce to deliver this task to. You also need to provide them with a great platform and quality content they can share.

Though the actions they take might have already revealed the employee advocacies in your company, you still need to prove proper training and helpful tips. You can increase their willingness to participate in these extracurricular activities by offering guidance on:

• Relevant social media channels they should post to
• A list of topics and links to share
• An insight into posting interval
• Identified target audience and set tone of voice
• Training on how to optimize their social media profiles
• A list of appropriate hashtags
• Suggested captions for sharing content
• Define the value behind employee advocacy

Don’t hesitate to go into detail. As in making every strategy, it is always better to calculate every step in advance than to be taken aback by a sudden situation, unprepared to react. Introducing your advocates even into something as basic as email subject line formulas can come in handy in certain situations.

However, half of brands find it difficult to keep their employees motivated. That is why it is important to nurture relationships with your staff and communicate the benefits the employees themselves can gain from participating in employee advocacy programs.

In fact, 86% of employees in companies that have a formal employee advocacy program say that their involvement in social media for professional purposes has helped in building their careers.

Like every other marketing strategy, employee advocacy requires lots of effort and patience to get the results. Similarly, measuring and analyzing social media success is vital for an employee advocacy program. It gives you an insight into what works and what needs to be improved.

On the other side, the payoffs of employee advocacy are enormous. It might be the right time to give it a try.

Author Bio

Nina Petrov is a content marketing specialist, passionate about graphic design, content marketing, and the new generation of green and social businesses. She starts the day scrolling her digest on new digital trends while sipping a cup of coffee with milk and sugar. Her white little bunny tends to reply to your emails when she is on vacation.

No matter what your business size or niche is, customer satisfaction is a key to business success. With 4.48 billion social media users who spend a considerable amount of time on social media platforms, providing social customer care is an important element of customer satisfaction that brings your business to the next level.

Everyone uses social media, so it’s no wonder that businesses market their products and services on these channels to reach out to their target audience. At the same time, modern people want to communicate with brands and get their questions answered on social media networks, so the demand for social customer care is constantly growing. 

In this blog post, we’ll tell you the importance of providing social customer care and name the most important social media channels to use for customer service, as well as provide six tips on excellent social customer care to follow.

Why Should Businesses Provide Social Customer Care?

Handling customer service isn’t easy. The more communication channels your company uses, the harder it is for customer service representatives to keep track of all conversations and provide excellent customer service. However, providing social customer care is a must these days for business growth.

Here are three main reasons to provide social customer care:

• • Boost customer satisfaction: During the customer journey, people may have questions about your product or services. Since it’s convenient for people to ask questions on platforms they interact with your brand, it’s more likely that you get customer requests on social media. When you answer customer requests, people feel satisfied and more connected to your company.
  • Increase customer retention: Acquiring new customers is five times more expensive than retaining existing ones. To give your customers a solid reason to deal with your business again, it’s important to pay attention to their needs and wants as it’s one of the most effective customer retention strategies. This means the importance of answering their questions on communication channels they use more often. 

• Keep up with current customer service trends: The days when customers used phones for customer support are long gone. With the rise of messaging, when people expect companies to send emails or messages as a reply to their requests, social customer care is one of the most important customer service trends. Keeping up with trends means standing ahead of your competitors.

If you are still doubting whether your company should put time and effort into providing social customer care, take a look at the chart below to see that the demand is growing.

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Which Social Media Channels to Use for Social Customer Care?

Businesses should provide social customer care on channels their audience uses more often. 

By having a social media presence on different channels, it’s important to be ready for customer requests on all of these platforms. But if you can’t provide followers with social customer care on all social platforms you use for business promotion, it’s better to keep a focus on the most used and popular ones.

According to the Social Media Marketing Report, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are still the most used social media platforms.

This means you should use these social media channels for social customer care, as your customers are more likely to reach out to your company on these platforms. But don’t forget about safety. Your password must be unique and complex. In this case, using a password generator will be an indispensable help for you.’

Read on below for actionable social customer care tips for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. 

Tip #1: Tell Followers How to Get in Touch With Your Business

Around 67% of people now seek resolutions for issues on social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. When people reach out to your business on social media, they want to make sure that their request will be delivered to your customer service team. Thus, it’s important to tell your followers how to get in touch with your business.

The best way to do it is to write about your customer support options In the bio section so that your followers or visitors can find information on how to contact your business with ease.

For example, Made.com has around 1.5M followers on Instagram, so the company encourages customers to contact its customer support via email. Thus, not only does the company write about it in the bio, but it also adds its email address as a contact option:

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However, Made.com provides social customer care on Twitter, and the company has a separate account for customer inquiries:

Tip #2: Reduce Server Response Time

When it takes days or weeks to get a reply from a brand, people lose interest in buying from your business. Moreover, social media response time expectations have grown in the last few years. Today, 39% of social media users expect to get a reply within one hour.

To please customers who want to share their customer service issues on social media, it’s important to reduce server response time. The best (and easiest) way to do it is to create a FAQ video and upload it to your business profile, as people can find answers to their questions without reaching out to a customer service representative.

With the rise of video content, when 69% of people prefer to watch a video to learn about a product or service, how-to videos help customers find answers to their questions and make the resolution process faster and more cost-efficient.

Luckily, every business owner or marketer can create professional-quality videos without specialized expertise, as the current market offers several highly intuitive video editing apps. For example, you can rely on Videoleap (available for iOS & Android) when creating FAQ videos or other support content, as it allows you to mix videos and images, add sound effects, use unique filters and stickers, all on the go.

The company’s own how-to videos are great examples of effective support content. These clips make it easy for viewers to understand more about how to make the most of Videoleap – without needing to contact the support team at all. Take a look here:

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What is more, social media platforms roll out business-specific features that help businesses communicate with customers fast. Having a Facebook presence, you can install a messenger chatbot based on the knowledge base to help customers get answers to frequently asked questions or even more. Check out how Air France did it:

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But if you use Instagram or Twitter for social customer care, where you can’t install business chatbots, you can still make the most out of the quick reply feature that allows your business to create a list of replies to frequently asked questions and therefore send them quickly without typing the same replies to different customers. Here’s how this feature looks like in action:

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Another good way to speed up your response time is to encourage social media followers to call you and install IVR so that callers can interact with your customer support team through a series of automated menus ​​and get their questions answered without reaching out to a human. This is a solid option if you have a small team or are experiencing high call volumes. 

Tip #3: Dedicate a Separate Social Media Profile to Customer Inquiries 

Providing followers with excellent social customer care means dealing with their inquiries fast. With a strong social media team, you should have customer service reps who can collect and manage customer inquiries on social media. 

Case in point:

If you sell items on social media and get hundreds of product requests on your main profile, it can be daunting to keep track of all customer inquiries and manage them fast. To help your customer support team deal with customer requests, it’s important to create a separate social media profile for customer care, just like in the example below from Yahoo!:

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Tip #4: Keep Track of All Conversations about Your Business

When people ask questions about your product or share their customer experience on social media, they use different communication options. Some people leave comments under social media posts or slide into direct messages while others tell about their experience on their personal profiles tagging your brand profile.

Simply put, people start a conversation with your brand without asking about your communication channel preferences. To provide good social customer care and show that you care about your customers, it’s important to keep track of all conversations about your business and monitor brand mentions, direct messages, and comments.

If your customers tag your profile, you get a notification that allows your customer support team to manage customer service inquiries quickly. Here’s how it looks like in action:

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But if you want to manage all conversations from one place, it’s a good idea to find a tool with a social inbox feature that helps your customer support team members collect inquiries and redirect them to the right staff across multiple social media channels.

Tip #5: Use Private Channels for Critical Support Conversations

It’s harsh but true: people are more likely to share their negative customer experiences on social media to help other potential customers make the right choice.

Living in the era of social media, when most people read online reviews before choosing a business, negative reviews have a devastating effect on your brand as they convince people to avoid a business. This means the importance of dealing with critical support conversations. 

What is more, it’s a good idea to use private channels for dissatisfied customers to help them avoid cyber criminal attacks when sharing personal data and prevent your brand from negative word of mouth. 

To move critical support conversations to a private channel, learn from Whoop:

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Tip #6: Provide Proactive Customer Care 

Great social customer care should be proactive. This means you can identify and resolve customer issues before they become problems. Communication with your followers and customers on social media is a proven way to provide proactive customer care. Moreover, there are many ways to encourage proactive customer care.

For example, you can tell your subscribers about a customer satisfaction survey. To encourage more people to fill it out, you can also give all participants a chance to win something valuable, just like in the example below:

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Another great way to understand your customers and their pain points, you can use business-specific features like the poll sticker to collect their questions and reply to them before customers reach out to your customer support team. Check out how M&M’s uses this tactic:

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In a Word

In the last decade, the demand for social customer care has grown. Since people spend a lot of time on social media channels, it’s no wonder that they use these platforms as communication channels for solving customer inquiries. What is more, people have high demands, which means brands should be ready to provide outstanding social customer care to stand out from the crowd and keep their target audience satisfied.

Author Bio

Val Razo is a freelance SMM consultant who helps small and medium businesses promote their products and services online.