Are Your Employees Positively Amplifying Your Brand?
| By Shannon Smedstad | HR, Social Media
More than 700 YouTube videos are shared every minute on Twitter. If Facebook were a country, it would be third largest in the world. Every second, two new people join LinkedIn. And, social media is the number one activity on the Web.
It’s no wonder that social media is social business, and a critical way for employers to amplify their career brands.
Get employees to join the conversation
At a recent Talent Management Alliance conference, John Leech, senior director of recruitment marketing and branding at Comcast, said, “I don’t want brand ambassadors, I want fans!” Me too.
Are your employees brand fans? How are you encouraging them to be fans and participate in online career conversations? This is something that I think about, a lot. At the end of the day, a large network of social connections is good, but it only gets better when the connections are having conversations.
When employees are fans, compelled to take positive actions–to join conversations or share content–that is #winning in employer branding. Click to tweet this!
How can employees amplify your employer brand?
The simplest step is for them to connect with your company’s social channels. (Though be careful, you don’t want to require them to do it. Check with Legal, if necessary.) If your organization keeps social media on lock down during work hours, you may have to get more creative on how you encourage and enable employees to “like” you.
For organizations that allow social media access at work, I would recommend working with your internal communications team on a promotional plan. Take a baseline measurement of your social channel followers and engagement levels before the big push; then track initial activity and long-term results.
Like, share, comment and create
Encourage your teams to like, share, retweet, or comment on postings that they enjoy. Better yet, ask them to participate in content generation: take photos, submit blog posts, design e-cards, or tag photos with a company-specific hashtag so that your corporate handles can retweet.
Let’s say you are an organization of 2,500 people strong. If each person shared just one or two postings a week, just think how far that could go to increase awareness of your employer brand and career opportunities! There are countless ways for employees to join the conversation …
It’s just a matter of will they?
Stat sources: Facebook.com and socialnomics.net
Hi Shannon,
I love that you wrote this post because I think of lot of companies who are focusing on employment branding sometimes overlook one of the most important aspects to the brand – their employees! No matter how much effort a company puts into making the brand engaging, employees can essentially make or break it. Candidates rely heavily on the testimonials of employees, so why not leverage that to the company’s advantage? Even going beyond review sites like Glassdoor, companies can incorporate things like employee satisfaction surveys. They can even allow employees to have a voice by using their testimonials to provide “career spotlights” or give them freedom to represent the company on things like social media.
Since you seem to enjoy employment branding topics, I thought you might find some interest in the recent report WilsonHCG put out – 2014’s Fortune 500 Top 100 Employment Brands. You might find some value in it: http://www.wilsonhcg.com/ebreport.aspx
Regards,
Ashley Lauren Perez