According to a 2016 study, content shared by employees get 561 times more reach than content shared through the company's social media channels.

So for every post your company makes, one of your employees posting the same thing could reach 500 more people.

With stats like that why wouldn't more companies utilise this essentially free resource?

Or as Social Recruiting Strategist Steve Ward put it during his session at HR Tech Fest 2016 “If employee advocacy is so effective, why do we typically hide employees in a box?â€'

Watch this excerpt from his session where Steve goes more in depth with these impressive statistics:

Transcript

The power of an employee. This tells you a lot about the opportunity that presents itself from how we work with our employees productively in the area of their personal brand. This is a very recent study. Company messages are shared 24 times more frequently when posted by employees versus the brand's social media channels. Employees are 24 times more effective than companies' branded channels on the whole, because most of our company brands are a bit boring. It's alright if you're Nike or you're Innocent Drinks, Coke, etc., but most companies are pretty boring. But people are less boring, and actually people buy from people.

Content shared by employees – again, by people – get 561 times more reach, that's the extended reach, than content shared through the company's social media channels. You've got to take this back to your marketing people, have a word with your marketing people, because the stuff they put out is great, but if people engage with it, then the opportunity for application is huge. But do employees do it enough?

And rather pertinently, 92% of people trust recommendations from individuals over messages from brands. I think this is something we know already, in our own behaviours, that we're always slightly disbelieving of brands' messages, but we're much more trustful of individuals' personal recommendations. We live in a recommendation kind of environment, with TripAdvisor and Yelp Airbnb, all these things now that tell us we'd go to places where human beings advise we should go somewhere now. So we trust human beings more than we trust people, and ironically it has a more effective reach.

About the Speaker

Steve Ward is an award-winning social recruiting strategist and digital recruiter. His passion and purpose is to help people and companies integrate social media into recruitment, branding and talent attraction. With 22 years' recruitment experience, he is credited as being one of the first (in 2009) to undertake what people would now call social recruiting. He also writes the well-known therecruitmentmisfit blog.