Employer branding is the process of using marketing strategies to create and spread a unique employee value proposition that can attract and keep workers. At first, this was a one-way process in which companies built and shared their brand in ways that were almost entirely up to them. But because of the success and rapid growth of social media, things have changed for the better.
Organizations are losing control over their brand more and more because many messages about the brand don’t come from the company but from its employees. People talk about their jobs on their own social media profiles or on review sites like Glassdoor. This makes it hard for employers to keep track of their messages. But this information, which is easy for job seekers to find, can make them less likely to apply for jobs or join groups. In fact, more than half of job seekers look for information about a company on social media. When it comes to talking about work-related things at a company, they trust the employees more than the CEOs.
As a result, more and more employers are encouraging their employees to help spread the word about the employer brand in order to reach new audiences and potentially interesting professional profiles outside of the company’s network.
How to build a company’s brand by getting employees to talk to each other
Our own research in this interesting area shows some of the possible benefits and problems to think about when using employees’ social media communication to build an employer brand:
1. Find out which employees use social media for work and keep an eye on what they post.
Obviously, not all employees use social media all the time, and not all of the content they post may be relevant or help spread the employer brand. Companies need to find and reward those whose content is more in line with the strategic focus and values of the employer brand.
2. Figure out why your employees post work-related things on social media.
The most important thing is to figure out why employees share company-related content. This goes beyond the strength of the employer brand’s reputation. In general, there are two main reasons why employees post on social media: reasons that have to do with how they feel about their organisation and reasons that have to do with building their professional brand. When making an employee ambassadorship programme, the company will be able to come up with a better incentive system if they know what drives their employees.
3. Keep in mind that employees use social media under different names
It can be hard to get employees involved in employer branding because they are more than just their jobs. Professional self-branding has grown at the same time that the need for employees to be involved in building employer brands has grown. It is still not clear what the effect of different employee self-branding communication is on the employer brand.
In one of our studies, we took over 34,000 social media posts and, using text-mining techniques, looked at how employees use self-referential words like personal pronouns to talk about work-related topics. Our research showed that impersonal forms of communication, like sharing the employer’s brand posts on social media, are most common. However, more personal forms of communication, like using the pronouns “I” and “we,” seem to be more effective at boosting not only the employee’s professional profile but also the employer brand.
4. Closely monitor potential negative or harmful social media content
Even though employees might want to post positive work-related content about their company on their social media sites, the rise of company review and rating websites where people can post content anonymously has made it more likely that negative content will show up in these places. Careful monitoring and a clear policy on how to respond to these reviews help to lessen the potential damage to the employer brand.
Allies and brand advocates with a lot of power
To sum up, in today’s competitive job market, social media communication is becoming a common and unavoidable way to spread the employer brand, especially among young people. Employees who use these media are powerful allies and promoters of the brand, but using their social media posts to help the employer brand needs to be done carefully.
