Facebook. Twitter. LinkedIn. Take a look at your newsfeed on any social channel – how many articles appear based on shares from friends? Probably a pretty significant amount. Social sharing has become second nature to us as we regularly scour the internet for articles, peruse our various newsfeeds, and drift through YouTube videos.
As the lines continue to blur between personal and corporate approaches to media and technology, the power of social sharing in the business world becomes more evident. Communicators have started to focus on harnessing the power of their employee’s social reach, known as employee social advocacy, to build awareness in the online community.
Employee Social Advocacy
The concept of employee advocacy has been around for quite some time. Employee social advocacy however, is a newer concept that has grown with the prevalence of social media. It describes the exposure that employees generate for organizations using their personal online channels such as social media, email, chat, forums, discussion boards and more.
Trust Benefit
Research suggests that the two least trusted sources of corporate news are company executives and company social media channels while our most trusted news sources are friends and family. Thus, corporate news shared from your employees on their personal channels provides authenticity and trustworthiness that would otherwise be nearly impossible to achieve.
Reach Benefit
Your employees have a much larger digital footprint than that of your brand. According to a recent Cisco study, employees have 10x more followers than corporate social accounts. While your digital strategy likely focuses on networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, your employees are on additional networks like Digg, Tumblr and Reddit which allows for a much greater level of exposure.
Sparrow’s Take on Employee Social Advocacy
The team at Sparrow has recently added a multi-faceted social sharing feature that empowers employee social advocacy. However, Sparrow social sharing goes beyond a simple share button, providing organizations with the ability to promote social sharing, control post visibility, and measure the impact.
Promote Social Sharing
Got some really exciting news? Encourage employees to share it by turning on the Sparrow social sharing option. Empower your team to share what makes them proud to any of their personal social channels with the simple click of the ‘social share’ icon.
When a non-employee (or any external reader) views a shared article, they are directed to an open collection of your organizations public Sparrow posts; your own dedicated organizational newsfeed! Don’t have a company blog? The Sparrow public newsfeed can provide many of the benefits of a corporate blog: improving SEO (it is indexible by Google) and driving reach (these articles can be further shared and measured).
Maintain Control of Your Messages
We realize that not all news articles are intended to be shared publicly, so Sparrow provides authors the option to make a post shareable or to keep it private.
A Flexible Composition and Editing Process
What makes Sparrow stand apart? The Sparrow publishing platform enables content creators to publish content easily, in one place, the same way every time. With the flexibility to edit text, settings, images and more you can make a private post shareable with a single click.
Measure the Impact
Like anything else in communication, at some point you need to know whether it’s working. Sparrow Social Sharing empowers you to measure a variety of factors such as the number of times a post has been shared from Sparrow itself, or from your public newsfeed.
So next time you’re cruising through your social feeds, pay attention to the source of those articles you’re reading – a huge number of them are likely shared from friends, family, or colleagues – and imagine the potential that employee social advocacy could have for your business.
Want to learn more about Sparrow social sharing? Get in touch with us here.
