What is an Employer Brand?
Employer branding is a fundamental part of every company’s identity. It’s not just about the products and services you offer. It is a much broader concept — encompassing everything that determines your organization’s reputation as a place to work. It’s about crafting an authentic narrative that appeals to both existing and prospective employees by showcasing your culture, values, and the opportunities available to your workforce. So naturally, an employee-centered social media presence can be a highly effective way to humanize your employer brand.
Why Humanize Your Employer Brand?
To attract high-quality candidates in today’s competitive labor market, most companies want to be recognized as a great place to work. Many strive to differentiate themselves based on their organization’s vision, mission, and values.
If this is your goal, you can make a significant impact by leveraging social media. In particular, when employees advocate publicly for your brand, it becomes more relatable, authentic, and persuasive to others. By involving team members in your external outreach and showcasing their experiences, you let them speak on your behalf.
The objective is to paint a compelling picture of your company as an employer of choice. In the process, you reinforce current employees while appealing to others who may be a strong fit for your culture. In other words, this helps you find more people who not only possess the right skills, but also gravitate to your company’s values, priorities, and ambitions.
Connecting Employee Advocacy With Branding
Employee advocacy happens when your organization empowers members of your workforce to share their genuine stories and insights about the workplace (along with company-related content) on social media. This may seem pretty straightforward — and it is. But many companies still haven’t grasped just how powerful advocacy can be as a tool for HR and Marketing teams that need to humanize your brand.
How Advocacy Works
Advocacy helps humanize your employer brand because it bridges the gap between your company’s curated brand image and authentic, day-to-day employee experiences. This connection is valuable because it adds depth, meaning, and credibility. As a result, it makes your brand more accessible and trustworthy to potential candidates.
People trust people, not logos. That’s why you want your brand to be more human and relatable to your audience. When employees openly share positive aspects of their work life, they offer a peek into the company culture that no corporate advertisement can replicate. That’s key in today’s market, where job seekers value transparency.
By activating employees as brand ambassadors, you give your brand a human face. Individual messages shared by real people make a much more memorable, persuasive impact on your audience. It means you’re no longer a company just tooting its own horn. Instead, you’re an organization that believes in its people and supports them in sharing their stories.
Benefits of Humanizing Your Employer Brand
1. Build Authenticity and Trust
By leveraging employee advocacy to enhance your employer brand, you’re choosing a strategy grounded in authenticity — the cornerstone of branding. When employees share their work experiences, achievements, and the daily realities of their work environment, they provide a more realistic glimpse into what it means to be a part of your organization.
This insider perspective is invaluable because it achieves a level of authenticity and transparency that traditional marketing simply can’t replicate. In the process, it enriches your employer brand and builds trust among internal and external constituents, alike.
People gravitate toward companies that do more than talk the talk. That’s why it’s vital to walk the walk. When you put employees front-and-center, their testimonials reveal a deeper truth.
2. Extend Reach and Enhance Engagement
Building your employer brand around employee social media advocacy will spread the word beyond existing brand circles and spark renewed engagement. This, in turn, expands your reach to new audiences and grows your brand community.
What’s more, when employees share content on social channels, it leads to higher engagement rates than content pushed through official corporate channels. That’s because employee-generated content is more approachable and trustworthy than carefully crafted corporate messaging. It resonates more deeply with audiences because it comes directly from personal experiences, rather than a source with a business agenda.
3. Attract Top Talent
The more relatable your employer brand is, the more likely it will be to attract candidates who appreciate your organization’s values and culture. That means the quality of your applicants is likely to improve. Ideally, potential job candidates will see a vibrant community of employee ambassadors who represent your brand in their own way. Collectively, these diverse stories can leave an overall impression of your brand that reflects well on your workplace.
What’s more, individual contributions from across your workforce can reveal aspects of your culture that can help you shape and refine future branding and marketing efforts. These insights transform employees into brand ambassador partners whose narratives help you continue to attract strong talent over time.
4 Ways to Humanize Your Employer Brand on Social
With so much activity across so many channels these days, weaving your way through social media can be daunting for employers. It’s true for employees, too. There are endless ways for employees to produce and share content online that can help advance your employer branding agenda. But to kickstart the creative process, here are several successful ideas we’ve seen in practice:
1. Share a Glimpse From Behind-the-Scenes
Encourage people to share behind-the-scenes moments that represent what they experience in their daily lives on the job. What is unique, fun, interesting or special about their work environment, team activities, or a project that matters to them?
From professional development courses or team-building events, to a business problem employees solved or a process they improved, stories that show how you support and invest in your people often spark lively social media conversations.
Think for a moment. How can you familiarize people with your organization by helping them visualize themselves as part of the team? What would they appreciate about your work atmosphere, routines, and rituals? How can this translate into a slice-of-life story? And who would you tap to develop this narrative?
2. Highlight Employee Achievements and Milestones
Turning the spotlight on staff is always a smart way to enhance your employer brand. For example, social channels are a great place to recognize work anniversaries, achievements, and personal or professional milestones.
This doesn’t need to be complicated. However, it’s a natural way to celebrate individuals while demonstrating your commitment to employee growth and happiness. And when recognizing individuals on social media, you can encourage them to re-share that content along with their own commentary. This amplifies their voice while expanding your visibility.
3. Host Social Media Takeovers
Why not give the mic to your employees for a while? One way to do this is by coordinating social media “takeovers.” In other words, employees from various departments can fill-in for a day or more to manage your various corporate social media accounts.
This adds a diverse, personalized point-of-view to your company presence. It also gives followers a chance to ask questions and get unfiltered answers. It also opens the door to help people understand what it’s like to work in a specific function or role, directly from employees in those positions.
4. Showcase Corporate Social Responsibility
Sharing content about your corporate social responsibility efforts is another effective social media idea, especially when those endeavors involve employees. It reflects your company’s commitment to making a positive impact on the community at-large, and it resonates with socially conscious candidates.
When you share this kind of information on your company page, be sure to publicly recognize individuals who have contributed to an initiative’s progress. When these employees re-share it, they’ll proudly shed light on your organization’s commitment to broader causes, which benefits everyone involved.
A Final Note on How to Humanize Your Employer Brand
Social media activity that humanizes your employer brand shouldn’t be about lip service or enhancing your company’s image in a strictly self-serving way. To be effective, you’ll want to focus on community-building strategies that foster natural connections through employees.
By leveraging authentic voices from across your workforce, you can transform your employer brand from a static, impersonal business entity to a relatable, trustworthy community participant. This is becoming increasingly important for employer brands as the digital landscape continues to evolve. Employee social advocacy will help you stand apart in the recruitment marketplace, so you can build a stronger organization that is positioned for sustainable growth and success.
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