Nobody wants to be faceless; people want to have character and be heard. Just think how hard Arya Stark had to work to escape the Many-Faced god! A girl might not have a name, but she surely has a personality!
Putting a face to a name helps put people into context. Connecting your idea of them and meeting them in person usually helps make sense of your working relationship.
The disconnect we’ve all experienced between hearing someone’s name and meeting them can be similar to how customers view companies with a social media presence. The content they engage with on Twitter and LinkedIn might be very different than an interaction with a salesperson or customer success. But social media shouldn’t create a void; it should bridge it.
Customers need to be able to associate real emotions and feelings with your company for a more powerful relationship. Emotional triggers are better at converting customers. Putting a face to your company can help humanize your brand.
To help with this, you can engage in employee social advocacy. Advocacy programs are proven to positively influence reputation and increase customer satisfaction.
Just as training with The Waif (yeah, that’s the character’s name…strange, right?!) helped turn Arya into a fierce warrior in her battle to escape from
Braavos, you, too, can educate your employees in social realms and turn them into your fiercest brand advocates! This shows customers you aren’t just a logo and a slogan but a company made of real people who care about customer needs and pain points. Using the personalities of your various employees gives your social presence diversity and life and connects who you are at your core with what customers have come to you to help them solve.
Creating an emotional connection
To really reap the advantages of an employee social advocacy program, establish an emotional connection between your employees, your brand, and your customers. If your employees can tell a personal story with emotional resonance about your product, your readers are far more likely to engage. Brands that inspire higher emotional intensity receive three times as much word-of-mouth marketing as less emotionally connected brands.
Think about using your employees as stellar word-of-mouth marketers. Considering 88% of B2B purchasers look to online word-of-mouth sources when researching a purchase, this would seem to be a platform too good to miss out on. Employees who talk about the company from their own perspective show followers that the value extends to businesses and real individuals.
Benefits of social advocacy marketing
Putting a face to a brand name is just one of the benefits of an employee social media advocacy program. Above the emotional connection, social advocacy establishes a trust that customers can rely on when making decisions. In fact, even a 5% increase in employee engagement can show as much as a 3% increase in revenue growth for the brand.
That fact alone is why cultivating a strong employee social advocacy program can make an incredible difference in your social media marketing. The key to successfully instilling a human image in your brand is to encourage your employees to actively use their social accounts, be themselves, and embrace the company’s values in their posts.
The more authentic, personable, and emotional a social account is, the more reach and impact it will create. Don’t let your brand become so cold and aloof that you lose customers. Return to the qualities that inspired the company’s formation. Infuse those values into your social personality and invite your employees to do the same in their social advocacy.
