LinkedIn is more than just a professional networking site. It’s a powerful brand awareness tool for businesses of all sizes—from startups to established corporations. The key to its power? Harnessing the collective impact of your employees’ presence on this platform.
If you’re an employer, learning how to leverage employee activity on LinkedIn could significantly elevate your brand’s reach and authority. In this article you’ll learn how that works and specific strategies to motivate and guide your employees in using LinkedIn.
Let’s dive in and learn how any company can turn its employees into powerful online brand ambassadors.
How employee advocacy on LinkedIn works
The collective voice of employees can be a game-changer for a brand’s visibility and credibility online. Unlike other social platforms, on LinkedIn every employee’s network, activities, and endorsements serve as a testament to the company’s culture, expertise, and values.
This influence is not confined to large corporations; small and medium-sized businesses can benefit from the expansive reach of their team’s networks through:
- Company branding—Employee profiles will often reflect the company’s branding. Since profiles often serve as the first point of contact with your brand, one that’s well-crafted and aligns with the company’s branding can create a lasting impression, subtly reinforcing your brand’s message and values.
- Multiplying networks—An average LinkedIn user has hundreds of connections; more active employees may have thousands. This means that any post or endorsement of your brand can exponentially increase visibility. This easy way to amplify reach is criminally underutilized.
- Authenticity and trust—When employees share their experiences, insights, and achievements related to their work, it adds a layer of authenticity to the brand. This humanization builds trust, an essential ingredient in an era where consumers and professionals both prioritize genuine and transparent companies.
There is a colossal difference between sharing a post from one business page, and the cumulative effect of employee posts—each with its own perspective, voice, and audience. Turning your workforce into a chorus of brand advocates, each with their unique audience and influence, is a digital-era superpower.
Benefits of encouraging employees to use LinkedIn
Greater brand awareness, in a general sense, is fantastic. But there are numerous ROI-related benefits that any company can reap, simply by having active and engaged employees on LinkedIn.
1. Lead generation
The vast majority of companies could successfully leverage LinkedIn to bring awareness to prospects and even bring in leads. If employees are sharing success stories (e.g. case studies), their experience working on projects and with brilliant clients, or speaking directly about the company’s services, is going to reach a large audience.
Over time, and with consistency, this is very likely to result in leads. For some businesses, even one client a year would more than pay back all of that effort creating content & engaging on the platform.
2. Business development and networking
Active employee engagement on LinkedIn can lead to valuable business connections and opportunities. Through their networks, employees can tap into potential clients, partners, and even talent, thus contributing to business growth in an impactful, if less-measurable, way.
3. Recruitment
A workforce that actively showcases the company culture and achievements makes the company more attractive to potential hires. It positions the company as a desirable place to work, aiding in talent acquisition and retention. People buy from people. People connect with people. People build trust with people.
Candidates will always research your company before application or interview. A strong employee presence on LinkedIn can cast you in a very favorable light.
4. Employee personal development
It’s not just the company that takes the plaudits, of course. If it was, no employee would ever post or engage. Posting and engaging on LinkedIn is a brilliant way to grow, meet great people and expand your horizons. It also adds a little fun into their day.
Strategies to motivate employee activity on LinkedIn
You can’t just tell employees to ‘post on LinkedIn’ and expect anything meaningful to happen. They need to want to be present and active on the platform. That means giving them:
- Free reign to post whatever they want
- Time to scan their feed, leave comments and share DMs with other professionals
These two ingredients let employees build an engaged network. One where other users look forward to their updates and become familiar with their style and delivery. It’s a kind of personal branding, in essence.
And when they do post about work, it’s being well-received with engaging comments and real reach—not sent into the ether, to be ignored for eternity.
It’s crucial to motivate employees with the benefits they’ll personally enjoy. Most won’t care about whether the company has received 5 new leads from LinkedIn this month; they will care about the opportunities, dopamine hits, and satisfaction that comes from maintaining an active social media presence. Top tips:
- Profile optimization—Give employees training or resources to help them optimize their profiles, including headline, photo, banner, and bio.
- Content training—Teach them to write posts that reflect their personality, engage their audience, and trigger real conversations.
- Networking—Training on how to add connections, break ice, and start conversations with fellows in the industry.
Success stories of employee-driven brand awareness
To illustrate the impact of employee engagement on LinkedIn, let’s explore a few case studies where businesses have successfully harnessed their employees’ presence to boost brand awareness.
A report by We Are Social and Hootsuite highlights the significant impact of content shared by employees. It states that leads generated by employees are seven times more likely to convert compared to other leads. Moreover, content shared by employees is eight times more likely to engage people than content shared directly by brands.
Technology giant Cisco views its 84,000 employees as brand advocates and is training them all in using LinkedIn. It’s an innovation from their Chief People Officer, Kelly Jones, and it’s taken off.
Employee advocacy will never have the attribution or clear ROI of paid advertising, but it clearly is a powerful force for success in brand awareness.
Conclusion
Employee engagement on LinkedIn can have a substantial impact on boosting a brand’s visibility and solidifying its credibility. It helps foster authentic connections and leads to valuable business opportunities.
The effectiveness of such initiatives, however, comes down to action from the employer: encouraging action, providing training, not putting expectations on employees to ‘deliver’ something.
Cisco has already started an 84,000-strong march towards massive brand advocacy. It won’t be long until many more brands follow suit.
Are you ready to leverage your employees’ network for brand advocacy? Take a quick pulse of your employee sentiment to see how they feel and learn what they need. By better assessing employee sentiments, preferences, and expectations, you can work with your employees to create an employee advocacy strategy that is a win-win for everyone!
