Why your employees are your biggest brand advocates

Employees are one of the company's most trusted sources of information. Employee advocacy also means that employees pretty much own the brand themselves so much so that they propagate the company through social media via their views of the work they do, the colleagues they work with, and all the cool stuff they do together as a team. This brings about the best shades of the company both internally and externally. Such advocacy helps create employee ownership organically and automatically over a period.

Companies provide personalised experiences for their people. This instills pride among workers. Leveraging this pride, companies create stories that raise the level of exposure and awareness for their brand through various media platforms. Employees feel more connected, have more fun, all while helping create brand recall.

Aside from products and services, employees have proven to be the most effective referrals and ambassadors in promoting the brand over the past half-decade. They can influence their family members and friends, and this again creates a sense of trust and pride wherever they work. People are 15 times more likely to read a social media post from a friend who works for company X than a post from company Y themselves. For instance, job seekers usually search for reviews and information about the workplace culture. An employee's post about working for a company adds a great deal of authenticity.

Social media and online branding play a large part in society's perception of a company. Today, especially with the advent of remote working, more and more people are spending time online each day for work, study, and entertainment. According to studies, the average amount of time spent on social media is highly distributed today. People on average spend 40 minutes on YouTube, 35 minutes on Facebook, 25 minutes on Snapchat, 15 minutes on Instagram, and a minute on Twitter. Customers are usually intrigued by authentic social media posts and tend to seek out more information about a company or product.

Cutting-edge workplaces of today are constantly looking to ensure that business and cultural integrations happen with minimal disruptions to the ways of working. There is a lot of community participation on various virtual and physical platforms, where a diverse set of talent (new-age individual contributors, innovators and domain experts) from new-age companies come together to talk about the next wave of disruption, ideas that enable customer success, work practices that transform their business, trigger cost efficiency or enhance people experiences.

These forums bring out real-life stories through the lens of employees on how many of these initiatives influence the world’s outlook towards business, customers, and most importantly, a company’s brand. The impact of these stories traverses the length and breadth of how companies like to be perceived and importantly how employees are at the forefront of advocating their experiences to the world.

Employees of a company are the best people to understand its products and services. Their word in the digital space on the power of what a company produces, or is known for, is the ultimate voice that propels business, attracts talent, and makes them credible spokespeople for a company. The pandemic has only reinforced the importance of employee advocacy for branding. There is no company too small to take advantage of employee advocacy for brand building and every company, big or small, will benefit from investing in it.