Employee Retention and Social Media Marketing With EGC
In the world of social media marketing, UGC – user-generated content – is widely known and coveted. UGC is content like images, reviews, videos, testimonials, and more created by your customers and posted on social media. UGC is important for telling your brand story.
What is underutilized but still incredibly important for your brand, for marketing, and for employee retention is EGC – employee-generated content.
What is EGC?
Employee-generated content consists of images, blogs, videos, and other forms of content that your employees create. It is shared on your employees’ social media platforms and provides insight into your employees’ experiences at your company.
EGC is part of employee advocacy, which also includes likes, reshares, and comments on content posted to your brand’s social media. It can also include positive reviews on employer review sites and positive discussions when your employees are networking.
Why is EGC important?
EGC and employee advocacy are not only important for your digital marketing strategies and spreading awareness of your brand, but they’re also an important piece of your recruitment toolkit. EGC conveys a level of authenticity that both consumers and candidates crave.
EGC + Remote Work
The gap between an employee’s work, home, personal, and professional life has closed significantly with the rise of remote work. EGC allows you to share the human perspective side of your brand, which is comparable to the “office culture” of the past. Even without one single physical space bringing your employees together, EGC shows connectivity and loyalty by allowing your current employees to show your potential customers and future employees a new perspective of your company.
How to Encourage EGC
Just asking for your employees to share EGC is probably not going to get you a lot of engagement. Here are a few tips to encourage EGC without being inauthentic.
Start With YOU
Lead by example. You are a member of your company, and likely you have the most at stake, so be the first to jump on the EGC bandwagon. From a daily vlog to snapping a quick photo to share to social media, any little step you can take to encourage your employees to do the same is going to go a long way. Be authentic with your messaging and show that you’re not just a business owner or a marketer, but that you’re also a consumer with real problems that need to be solved.
Once you show your own engagement, others will follow suit, and you can ask the most highly engaged to continue the trend and encourage the rest of your employees to share as well.
Create Spaces for Sharing
Sharing to social media is the easy part – it is very likely that all of your employees are going to have social channels where they can share the content they create. Make sure they are sending their audiences back to your company by having your employees tag your company and even use a unique hashtag to connect all of the posts shared by your employees.
You should also encourage internal sharing! Create a Slack channel, dedicated group message, or Drive folder where your employees can drop in their EGC for use by your marketing department.
Reshare & Repurpose
When you reshare your employees’ posts to your brand’s social media, you are showing that you recognize their efforts and want their stories to be seen and heard. This is also where training your employees to use social media to promote the company they work for is very important. You want the content you reshare to reflect your branding and messaging standards while also being authentic and personable.
A lot of EGC can also be recycled and reused for future brand posts. For example, take the content your employees share and repurpose it as a wrap-up video at the end of the month. Getting as much mileage as you can out of content created by other people is helpful for your marketing team, too!
EGC & Employee Retention
Employee turnover and quiet quitting have been steadily rising since the pandemic. In 2022, 47% of millennials planned to leave their jobs within two years while 66% of employees accepted a job only to discover they were a poor fit for it.
EGC and employee advocacy are ways you can prevent a lot of turnover and weed out potential candidates that may not be the right fit for your company.
Authenticity is Key
EGC doesn’t have to be carefully curated, high-quality images and videos that cost hundreds of dollars to create. It is more simple than that. You’re asking your employees to share their real-life experiences with your brand, and while you may guide your employees in what and how to share, you’re really giving them free rein to be honest about their experience.
Potential employees will have the chance to see what works for your company is really like and even interact with your current employees before accepting a position.
If You’re Worried About Employees Being Inappropriate on Social Media
Consider this: it’s very likely employees are already active on at least one social channel. STAT. Instead of ignoring that fact or worse, attempting to stifle usage, it’s important to provide training for your employees to demonstrate appropriate social media sharing. You can ask a marketing agency to present a training session and create guidelines for the types of content they can create, what to include in their posts, how to be active on social, and even how to post to each distinct channel. It does not have to be formal, but it can make your employees more comfortable sharing online.
If you are worried because you are in a regulated industry or have strict policies in place about photography/videography in the workplace, consider encouraging them by establishing and communicating good boundaries with an employee social media policy.
Final Thoughts on EGC
When you are genuine and honest with your current and potential employees and customers, you have a better chance at real growth, and this can be accomplished in part with EGC. If you have questions about EGC, employee social media training, or social media marketing for your company, let us know!
