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How to Help Your Employees Become Influencers

by | Nov 15, 2018 | Best Practice,

The concept of your employees being influencers may sound odd to some. When most hear the term ‘influencer’ they think of the social media influencers on platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and YouTube endorsing consumer products to their audience in return for a pay cheque. Employees don’t quite fit this definition.

But if we actually take a step back, what do we really mean by the term ‘influencer’? Well, according to the Cambridge dictionary an influencer is ‘someone who affects or changes the way that other people behave, for example through their use of social media’; ‘a person or group that has the ability to influence the behaviour or opinions of others‘.

Now let’s look at what we mean when we use the term ’employee advocacy’. Consumers are increasingly trusting logos less and people more and this trust in PEOPLE is where Employee advocacy is so powerful. Your employees are your greatest asset; the ones behind the ‘everyday’ and therefore the most knowledgeable when it comes to talking about your products and services. They have the ability to speak about and advocate your brand with credibility and authenticity, as their audience trust and value their opinion. Employee advocacy is all about shifting the focus away from the brand itself and instead empowering your employees and giving them a platform to share their voice.

Now let’s look back at the definition of an influencer. They’re quite similar, no?

Ultimately, both influencer marketing and employee advocacy are all about the power and influence of people. The only difference is that your typical influencer is external to your brand, whereas your employees are internal.

Knowing how to help your employees become more influential is a win-win scenario where your employees can build their personal brand, all while increasing advocacy and coverage for your brand. Read on to learn how.

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Should all employees join the program?

This is a huge mistake that lots of brands make and something that I’d like to nip in the bud early. Too many brands decide that they want to start an employee advocacy program, and immediately see it as a project that will include all employees. This will not work. For one thing, this will make the program too large too quickly and create a much larger mountain to climb. You’re also going to struggle to on-board all employees which will make a perceived failure pretty much inevitable. On top of this, let’s assume all employees do join the program, not all employees’ hearts will be in it, so you won’t see the results you expect. As ever, quality over quantity.

Instead stick to those that show an interest in joining – they’re the ones that are going to be great brand advocates, and potentially influencers in the long term. As a rule of thumb, 10% of your workforce is a good place to start.

Can all employees be influencers?

In the same way that not all employees will want to join the program, not all employees will reach the ‘influencer’ stage. And this is absolutely ok. Tribal Impact have created this employee maturity model in which we can plot employees on a matrix depending on how large their audience is and their level of social activity.

What Employee Personas are there?

 

Persona

DescriptionData-Led Analysis
InactivesDo not have much of an online presence. LinkedIn is normally activated only when they are looking for a new job. May be very active on social networks that would be considered more personal e.g. Facebook and Instagram.
  • No social posts on topics that drive advocacy for the brand
  • No social engagement with other employees
  • Audience size: Up to 1,000 online (LinkedIn and Twitter combined)
NetworkersTypically, more active on LinkedIn but no other platform other than personal social networks. They will often accept invitations online and may even occasionally send invitations to others. (a lot of sales people sit here).
  • LinkedIn and Facebook Accounts but no Twitter or Instagram account
  • Shares occasional brand content on LinkedIn
  • Publishes 1-10 social media posts per month on LinkedIn
  • Audience size: Up to 2,000 online (LinkedIn and Twitter combined)
ConnectorsLarge network on LinkedIn and always know someone who knows someone else who can help. They actively connect people together because they know that sharing is caring.
  • LinkedIn and Facebook Accounts and possibly a business Twitter or Instagram account
  • Shares occasional brand content on LinkedIn
  • Publishes 1-10 social media posts per month on LinkedIn
  • Audience size: 2,000+ online (LinkedIn and Twitter combined)
ParticipatorsRelatively small network, they are beginning to dabble in social networking. They are testing the water by engaging with others online e.g. liking and commenting on content.
  • 2+ social engagements with employees per month
  • 10+ social media posts per month (LinkedIn and Twitter combined)
  • Audience size: Up to 1,000 online (LinkedIn and Twitter combined)
BroadcastersBeen “dabbling” for some time by engaging with other people’s content and are now starting to share other people’s content to their network.
  • 2+ social media interactions with employees every month
  • 4+ Internal or External Influencers’ content shares per month
  • No 2-way interactions with External Influencers
  • No original thought leadership content
  • Audience size: Up to 2,000 online (LinkedIn and Twitter combined)
CollaboratorsBroadcast less and appreciate feedback more. Typically, employees in this space have a large network, they have been through the engaging and sharing stage and are now starting to formulate opinions themselves and seek to listen to others.
  • Minimum 10 social media interactions with employees every month
  • 4+ Internal or External Influencers’ content shares per month
  • Evidence of 2-way interactions with External Influencers on LinkedIn and Twitter
  • 2+ Original Posts per month
  • 500+ LinkedIn Connections
  • Audience size: 2,000+ online (LinkedIn and Twitter combined)
EnthusiastsHighly active on social media. Anyone this far right on the model will be actively out there creating their own content and formulating their own opinions. However, they may have a relatively small network.
  • Minimum 20 social media interactions with employees every month
  • 4+ Internal or External Influencers’ content shares per month
  • No 2-way interactions with External Influencers
  • 20+ Original Posts per month including longer form Blog / LinkedIn Posts
  • Audience size: Up to 1000 online (LinkedIn and Twitter combined)
Thought Leaders Considered the knowledge experts within an organization e.g. product marketing, pre-sales, sales consultants and they hold an enormous amount of credibility with customers. They do not actively network (often they don’t have time) but they may blog or tweet when they can.
  • 2-way social media interactions with employees every month
  • Share External Influencers’ content circa once a week
  • Up to 10 social media interactions with External Influencers (LinkedIn and Twitter)
  • 10+ Original Posts per month including longer form Blog / LinkedIn Posts
InfluencersHighly active networkers and content creators.   Social has become part of their daily routine – part of their DNA if you like. They are considered influencers in their field, formulating opinions and writing content that sets them apart from their peers.
  • 2-way social media interactions with employees every month
  • Share External Influencers’ content circa once a week but little to no interactions
  • Up to 10 social media interactions with External Influencers (LinkedIn and Twitter)
  • 20+ Original Posts per month including longer form Blog / LinkedIn Posts
  • Audience size: 2,000+ online (LinkedIn and Twitter combined)

The Journey to Becoming an Influencer

Now the ideal, perfect path here is to move diagonally across to the right. But employee maturity journeys are rarely this linear. For example, it is ambitious to get an ‘inactive’ employee to go from having no audience and no social media activity to increasing both of these things simultaneously. In this case, the focus may be to first train them on how to create a profile and increase their social media activity to interact with other users, so that they’re a ‘participator’. From this increase in social activity with others, they may start to see their audience grow organically in time, helping them transition into more of a ‘broadcaster’, where they’re starting to not just engage with others, but they’re starting to read and share relevant content with their audience too. Once employees start seeing this kind of progress, it naturally encourages them to continue putting in the effort to reap yet more results.

Contrary to the above example, your typical salesmen that have social media profiles with audiences that are moderate in size but fairly un-leveraged, may be able to feasibly grow their audience while simultaneously increasing their level of social activity.

Some example evolutions:

The transition from an enthusiast to a thought leader

 

The transition from a networker, to a collaborator

 

Employee advocacy evolution

The transition from a thought leader, to an influencer

 

Connecting employees with influencers

In the same way that brands working directly with influencers can help to increase brand awareness and amplify branded content, connecting your employees (internal influencers) with influencers (external influencers) can help them build their own networks, amplify their content and establish their professional brand.

In simple terms, connecting your employees to external influencers is a great way to accelerate your employees’ journeys to becoming influencers in their own right.
In order to effectively do this, follow these 4 steps:

Step 1: Map your influencers

In order to effectively connect your employees to relevant influencers, it is important to understand the different kind of influencer personas.

influencer personas

What are the main influencer personas?

 

Influencer Definition

DescriptionData-Led Analysis
Industry Experts Professionals that have worked in industry who can influence key decision makers on a peer level. They have walked the walk, have high authority and very well engaged networks offline in niche topical areas. They often are authors or have published original research. They can be good event speakers, but this is not guaranteed.
  • High Topical Authority on niche topics
  • 20+ Original Posts per month
  • High Post / Share Ratio
  • Referenced in news articles, blogs and forums
Online Connectors Influencers that have the most amount of connections and interactions online within a specific topical community. They are the people who you would want at a party to attract a larger crowd and therefore engaging them initially will help you collaborate with the longer tail.
  • Most amount of interactions within the influencer community
  • Topic Agnostic
Content Creators People who create and publish original content or thoughts rather than simply sharing other people’s content online. Their content gets good engagement from their networks.
  • High Average Engagement per post
  • 20+ Original Posts per month
  • High Post / Share Ratio
Event Speakers Expert speakers that may or may not have a large online influence. Likely to have a presence on LinkedIn. They tend to have a large offline influence and get referenced a lot in news articles, blogs and forums.
  • High Topical Authority on niche topics
  • Speaking at events at least once per month
  • 20+ References per event on Twitter
Social AmplifiersPresent on most social platforms with large audiences with the ability to share content and make it viral. They normally have friends/peers in their network who will also help content become viral within a specific industry.
  • High Reach
  • 100 Posts+ per month
  • Low Post / Share Ratio

 

Step 2: Define your employees’ personas

Using the employee evolution model and employee persona definitions, do an audit of your employees that have opted in to join the program. For a start, progress is much easier to achieve on both an individual level and a program level if you’re able to benchmark where you’re currently at. Different personas will also need training and motivating in different ways to reach the next level. We will cover all areas of motivation, training and enablement later on in the blog series.

After analyzing the employee personas, it is possible to gauge what influencer personas are most appropriate to connect with the employees. For example, an employee that falls into the ‘thought leader’ or ‘influencer’ category would be appropriate to connect and collaborate with a content creator, whereas the social sellers that are regularly at industry and networking events could connect with conference speakers to build relationships offline and online.

Step 3: Define your employees’ topical niche

Every employee is passionate and an expert at something that relates to their field and role. This is the basis upon which brands should connect well-aligned influencers. For example: connecting the marketing team with external marketing influencers.

Step 4: Listening to influencer community insights 

This process goes beyond connecting employees with influencers, as it is also highly valuable for brands to monitor conversations amongst the influencer community to understand what topics are trending and resonating with their target audience. These insights can then be fed into the content creation strategy to ensure that you’re creating content that is going to resonate with your employees’ target audience. This also facilitates your employees to share great content that is going to increase their influence.

How to connect your internal influencers with external influencers

What do the experts have to say?

“Employees need training and guidance on how to ENHANCE their social presence, project their expertise, stimulate engagement, and value.”

Susan Emerick, Senior Manager Global Marketing & Advocacy at IBM


“More and more brands are transforming their employees into advocates, putting their marketing into the hands of staff. Working with colleagues enables leading brands to grow authentic brand awareness from the people who know their brand, products and services better than anyone. Employee advocates are the next generation of influencers.”

Caroline Jory, Engagement Director at Qubist


“Content adds value to the social media feeds of employees, whether they are social sellers or influencer marketing (and when I talk about influencers, I mean our 4500 employees who are influencers in their own micro-communities or sector spaces) then content is what drives the conversation.”

Keith Lewis, UK Social Media at Zurich Insurance


“As an Advocacy manager, I train our colleagues in the importance of personal branding and thought-leadership with the goal to create an army of thousands of micro-influencers with their own areas of expertise.”

Sonia Rosua-Clyne, Globsl Social Media at Sage


“I think that a big mistake that brands make is to fail to understand who their true influencers are, which I believe are their employees and their happy customers – those two groups of people make up your very best brand ambassadors.”

Melonie Dodaro, CEO of Top Dog Social Media


“People trust people. If done right, employees can be activated to be brand storytellers and influence others through the purchase funnel.”

Michael Brito, EVP at Zeno Group


“These days, if you want to be seen on social media without paying for an advertisement you need to be working with influencers and I think that employee advocacy also becomes part of the infrastructure and part of a mainstream marketing spend just like influencer marketing and obviously there is that overlap with “employee as influencer”.”

Neal Schaffer, CEO at PDCA Social


“As you encourage more employees to create content, you’ll generate more influencers within the market.  Credible spokespeople that buyers trust.  This is when you can start connecting your employee influencers to external influencers – influencer marketing that’s more human and authentic.”

Sarah Goodall, Founder at Tribal Impact


To learn more about how you can integrate your influencer marketing and employee advocacy programs, download the full Employee Advocacy 2.0 guide below.

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