How to turn employees into brand advocates.
Most estate agencies are unaware of the social marketing gold mine at their fingertips. The value lies in their own employees: who else is better equipped to become a brand advocate than a brand’s own employee?
By harnessing an employees’ existing social networks, employers can access an impressive social reach. Enhancing this opportunity is the fact that the popularity of social media sites has made it easier than ever for employees to share information and influence their social network.
This is the idea behind employee advocacy. Employees are encouraged to participate in communications efforts and motivated to share interesting professional content to their social media networks. In other words, it’s about turning employees into brand advocates.
This a very powerful prospect. A recent report found that employees are the most trusted source for information from the perspective of a customer. So much so, employees are considered over twice as trustworthy as the CEO for certain trust attributes.
However until recently, firms have shied away from actively engaging employee’s social circles for fear of lack of controls and privacy and ethical issues. Although great care should be taken, employee advocacy shouldn’t be invasive nor preachy.
Rather employees should be empowered with fantastic sharable content that makes it as easy as possible for them to become brand advocates. If targeted correctly, they shouldn’t need to be asked to share content you’ve created.
Of course this depends on employees who believe in their product and are happy to be socially associated with their employer’s content. Although not easy, nurturing employee brand advocates can be an extremely powerful tool for tapping into a vast, inexpensive marketing resource. After all, personalities are more powerful than faceless organisations when it comes to relating to the customer, especially when it comes to property.
Originally posted on Propertyflock, a new and easy to use one-stop hub for marketing your estate agency.
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