Your most engaged employees are the ones most likely to raise their hands to become employee advocates. They’re also likely to be your most prolific referrers of job candidates. They’re committed to the success of your company, and willing to pitch in to help corporate efforts whenever they can. This makes them ideal partners for expanding the reach of your content marketing efforts.

Getting Employees Involved with Your Content Marketing

To initially get your employee advocates involved with your content marketing, create an employee content curation and sharing program. Ideally, you can integrate this into your existing employee advocacy platform. But, you can also do this by simply sending out regular email roundups with click-to-share links. Then, once budget allows, you can create a more formal program that involves gamification with an online employee advocacy portal.

The best tools to use to implement your employee advocacy program vary depending upon your objectives and what other brand advocacy programs you may need to implement. You have two different types of platforms to choose from:

• A brand advocacy tool like Influitive for both internal and external advocates
• An employee-only advocacy and social sharing platform like PostBeyond, Spredfast, or Bambu by Sprout

The Benefits of Employee Advocates Sharing Brand Content

“Since the aggregate network and reach of your employees will typically outweigh that of your brand profiles, advocates can help you get more eyeballs on your content,” says Stephan Hovnanian, Content Solution Architect, Bambu by Sprout Social. “But more important than the reach itself is the fact the audience to which employees are sharing company content is far more trusting of them than a brand. So you end up with higher quality traffic and increased trust of your brand.”

Meaghan Halloran, Content Manager, PostBeyond, agrees, and is able to further quantify the value of employee content sharing: “Employee advocacy improves your content marketing results by exponentially increasing your brand’s reach,” she says. “We know that messages shared by an employee travel 561% further than a message shared on a brand channel, and those pieces of content are 24x more likely to be shared from an employees’ network. That’s huge!”

More Ways to Tap Employee Advocates for Content Marketing

After you’ve implemented an employee content-sharing program, go deeper with the employees who’ve been most engaged in those efforts. Invite those employees to develop content with the team, or contribute content ideas.

Further, through content sharing, you’ll likely uncover employee industry influencers. Identify opportunities—from speaking at industry events to leading webinars to authoring research—that will help them further develop their influencer profile.