12 Killer Facts on “Employee Branding”

You hear a lot about employer branding these days but what about ’employee’ branding? What I mean by employee branding is the concept of specifically leveraging your employees as brand ambassadors to help you better recruit.

I was inspired last week by the terrific post: Stop Employer Branding, Start Employee Branding, by Tom Laine out of Finland — it included a number of great data points supporting the value of employee branding.

 


I’ve included Tom’s employee branding tips as well as others here so you’ve got them all in one place.

The first 7 data points came from research done by MSL Group, the strategic communications and engagement company. Items 8 through 12 come from Tom’s article. You’ll notice that the data suggests you have to nail the engagement of both your employees/team as well as your CEO and senior leadership.

  1. Employees have on average 10 times more connections then what the brand can reach in other channels.
  2. Brand messages reach 561% further when shared by employees compared to the same messages shared via official corporate accounts. (this was supported by the Oracle test we wrote about recently, Oracle’s employee testimonial on Instagram wins by a landslide).
  3. Companies with engaged employees outperform those without by up to 202%.
  4. Only 26% of employees are engaged, leaving 74% of employees as upside for your employee branding.
  5. 77% of buyers are more likely to buy from a company whose CEO uses social media (might this suggest that 77% of candidates will apply to a company whose CEO uses social media?).
  6. 82% of buyers trust a company more when the CEO and senior leadership are active on social media.
  7. 98% of HR managers say social networking is an important tool for recruiting, retaining and engaging employees.
  8. 92% of an employee’s Twitter followers are new to the brand (that might stimulate some social recruiting ideas for you!)
  9. People trust other people 90% of the time, but they only trust official corporate messages 33% of the time.
  10. 70% of customer brand perception is determined by experiences with people!
  11. Content shared by employees received 8 times more engagement than content shared by the organization.
  12. An employee is twice as trustworthy as the CEO.

In a future post, I’ll cover some specific tips on how to leverage your employees as social ambassadors to extend your employee brand.

by in Employee Branding