Employee advocacy refers to when employees share your company’s content within their network, helping you meet marketing, sales and recruitment goals.
Not everyone has time to write thought-leadership articles or respond to each Facebook post your company makes; that’s where a social media employee advocacy platform comes in handy.
Find Influencers
Social media has become an indispensable component of hotel operations. Potential guests use it to research hotels and make decisions about their stay; one study revealed that customers reading an employee-shared post about a hotel are three times more likely to book. Employee advocacy benefits recruitment, sales and staff engagement strategies as well as crisis management efforts.
As you launch an employee advocacy program, it is critical that clear goals be established for the team. This will eliminate ambiguity and allow measurable social media metrics to measure success – depending on your type of business these may include brand recognition, website traffic and customer or candidate conversions. Benchmark your objectives against industry standards to assess results accurately as well as periodically reviewing results against efforts for opportunities for improvement.
After your hotel has established a list of objectives, the next step should be identifying potential influencers to partner with. Hootsuite Insights or Mention offer excellent tools to do just this – you can look for employees or influencers talking about your brand or industry that mention it directly and learn what kind of content they’re producing while tracking how far their posts reach. Furthermore, using the search function filtering by location gender etc to narrow down a list of possible influencers further.
Finding influencers that align naturally with your hotel brand and values is the key to successfully engaging them as brand advocates. Aim for an even balance of follower count, engagement rate and audience relevance when selecting influencers to work with. In addition, take a closer look at past partnerships to get an understanding of their style and effectiveness.
Once you’ve identified influencers, it’s essential to provide them with approved content they can share. This could involve using do-for-you employee advocacy software like Hootsuite Amplify or simply having members of your hotel team share the most engaging articles from your website on their personal accounts. Beyond providing content, fostering an atmosphere of empowerment and trust between employees is also key if they’re motivated enough to participate.
Create a Hierarchy
Generating genuine recommendations from customers is the aim of all hotel marketing, and employee advocacy is the way to achieve that. While employee advocacy may sound ideal in theory, making it part of your company culture can be challenging. One approach would be providing employees with content that highlights your hotel’s best features while aiding them in their jobs or positioning them as industry experts; DrumUp allows this with easy sharing from personal accounts.
Start by identifying social media leaders within your company and asking them to advocate on your behalf for social media use. They’re likely to get word out quickly about your program while being more enthusiastic than most about its implementation. They can help define campaigns, communicate with colleagues and peers about it and set goals. Plus they can assist with selecting tools and incentives to motivate employees into participating!
Once you’ve identified your leader employees, the next step should be encouraging the rest of your team to join. To achieve this goal, ensure that the program is voluntary and won’t impose on anyone’s work schedule or be too taxing on employee effort; otherwise it could reduce participation rates significantly.
At the conclusion of your program, it will be essential to monitor its success by tracking which metrics are most essential to your business and deciding how often and how you will measure these measurements. Your ROI and effectiveness of an employee advocacy program should become crystal clear after taking this step. Just like any marketing initiative, starting small is best. Your program may grow as time goes on. As such, this will enable you to avoid any potential negative repercussions, and ensure the program runs efficiently. In essence, the more effective your employee advocacy program is, the greater its value to your brand will be; this is especially true in hospitality industries where recommendations from trusted sources can play an invaluable role in drawing in new guests.
Automate
As part of your employee advocacy strategy, it’s essential that you establish specific goals. Depending on the needs of your hotel, these may range from increasing social media reach and faster time-to-hire metrics to expanding talent acquisition channels like LinkedIn; or perhaps you need more discussion. Twitter might be more suitable. Once your goals have been established and set, the next step is defining channels for content dissemination; LinkedIn could be optimal if talent acquisition is at the top of your agenda while for thought pieces and opinions Twitter could be the superior platform.
As you advance with your efforts, it’s essential that your employees become acquainted with the program and tools you have implemented. This will enable them to feel at ease sharing content on behalf of your brand without feeling like they’re being forced. If needed, use a social media analytics tool such as SumAll to demonstrate the impact of their efforts (reach, impressions, sentiment etc).
Make it fun in order to engage your employees! Offering bonuses, exclusive access to events or “virtual badges” as incentives will increase visibility and recognition within their networks and internally. Employing an employee advocacy platform that automates this process makes sharing company content much simpler with just a click of a button!
Once your employees have signed on to your employee advocacy strategy, the next step should be implementing it. For optimal results, running a pilot program during the initial weeks after launch to test objectives and see how they perform will provide invaluable data that can inform which platform(s) to focus on as well as content production requirements.
ULTA Beauty’s social recruiting posts serve as an outstanding example of how well-designed, engaging posts can attract top talent. Their posts are simple yet effective and creative in design – showing why working at their company would be an enriching experience.
Monitor
An employee advocacy program at a hotel is an innovative form of word-of-mouth advertising. Employees can spread positive sentiment about the brand on social media with followers they already have; similar to influencer marketing but delivered directly by employees themselves. This form of word-of-mouth advertising, commonly known as employee advocacy, has proven more successful than traditional forms of promotion.
Employees typically have more connections and followers on social media than corporate brands, meaning their messages reach a broader audience and are easier to relate to. Studies have demonstrated that when an employee shares the brand message it travels 561% farther than when shared by its account – leading more organizations to introduce employee advocacy programs as a result.
Attaining maximum effectiveness from an employee advocacy program requires regular communication and training with all employees involved, including sharing guidelines and best practices with them, while inspiring creativity in social content creation. Furthermore, setting specific goals such as recruiting more candidates or driving traffic to your website are crucial – these allow the team to track progress using analytics tools such as Amplify.
An employee advocacy manager should communicate with and motivate team members to join a program, while providing feedback about what is working and what needs improvement. This person can also offer insight on what strategies might work better or don’t.
Managers should be able to clearly explain the benefits of the program, such as increasing brand visibility and creating a more collaborative workforce. Furthermore, managers can educate team members on how to create and share content effectively.
Advocacy teams can be invaluable resources for organizations. One way of rewarding advocates’ participation is through hosting fun contests for participants; prizes could range from gift cards and hotel stays, so make sure all activities adhere to legal considerations. When organizing these types of activities, be sure to work closely with both legal department and employees so as to ensure all content shared by employees complies with privacy laws.