Report: Authentic employee posts LinkedIn drive more engagement

Companies can do a great job of brand storytelling to provide a thorough insight intwo what life in an organization is like. But the best stories don’t always come from corporate accounts. A recent study found that the most valuable storytelling can also come from employees themselves.

British software company DSMN8 released “The World’s Biggest Employee Advocacy Study”, which found that employees can have just as much impact talking about their companies on social as their leaders and official organizational platforms.. The study analyzed over half a million LinkedIn posts across the world covering the topic of employee advocacy. According to Elliot Elsley, director of sales operations and engineering at DSMN8 and one of the major forces behind the study, one of the key takeaways in the data is that every employee has valuable perspectives to share — and comms needs to know how to identify and amplify them from social platforms.

“There’s nobody who shouldn’t be involved in advocacy,” he said. “If they want to be, there’s no reason to gatekeep this away from employees just because they don’t have a huge following. The data shows everyone can have an influence.”

Here are a few major points found within the data that internal comms pros should keep in mind:

Personal posts are more authentic and resonates more than company-filtered posts. When employees take to LinkedIn to share their takes on employee experience, the data found that personal stories have more impact when they come directly from the source rather than when they’re shared through a company’s voice. For internal communications, creating or highlighting pathways for employees to share their voice and perspective authentically can prove effective. The data is showing that audiences want to hear from the people behind the company, and avenues like blogs in an employees’ own words or video series following workers can help fill this need.

Network size isn’t everything — communicators need to remember that all perspectives can make a difference. While the top brass or employees with big social networks might get a lot of attention, the data found that 60% of all employee advocacy activity on LinkedIn came from users with less than 2,000 followers. Additionally, the highest engagement comes from accounts with 5,000 to 10,000 followers with an average of 12.65 engagements per post. This reinforces the idea that comms pros can work successfully with employees with smaller networks to share their experiences to build a picture of employer branding and organizational culture. “Things have shifted away from chasing huge audiences and toward micro-influencers with engaged communities,” Elsey said. “Employee advocacy mirrors that. An employee with 500 to 2,000 connections can be just as powerful, sometimes more so, than someone with 20,000.”

Format should match your aims. Communicators should build out guidance on which formats work best for certain audiences and situations.  ”From a comms perspective, your goal is awareness,” Elsley said. “That’s where format matters most.”

The big takeaway here is that by encouraging and training employees and leaders to share their perspectives on social media in a way that balances both authenticity and company values, comms pros can help drive engaging narratives that get a lot of eyeballs. Those narratives aren’t done in isolation either — they can be a key part of an employee recruitment strategy and a building block to a positive employer brand perception.

“You don’t need to be Gary Vaynerchuk to have an influence and make an impact,” Elsley said. “No matter who you are in a business, if you’re posting to your network it can be pretty engaging.”

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.