3 Ultimate Benefits of an Employee Advocacy Program: A Fujitsu Success Story

Following our latest employee advocacy webinar with Fujitsu – great job to Sapir Segal for planning and hosting it along with Daniel Klaus from Fujitsu – I want to share some of the key highlights.

To kick things off, I would like to point out that employees are often an untapped marketing asset with 50 – 5,000 relevant customer and influencer connections on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. They help to drive your company message forward, adding a layer of authenticity and credibility to it.

Leading Japanese Information and Communications Technology company, Fujitsu is successfully harnessing the power of hundreds of employees to spread and promote its content. Here are the three major points I learned from the webinar and hope you too can find valuable:

1. Amplified Reach

Empowering employees through a strategic advocacy program will result in a far greater social reach than your company could generate alone. Through employees, your content has the potential to land in front of hundreds, if not thousands more eyes across the social networks. By increasing your online reach, employees ultimately drive your brand awareness. In fact, a 2015 research by Hinge Marketing and Social Media Today of 588 professionals who use social media for business purposes, found that 80% reported increased visibility and 65% reported increased brand recognition.

Prior to launching its advocacy program, Fujitsu only had its three main corporate social platforms to communicate with its audience promote its content. At that point in time, Fujitsu’s estimated reach was approximately 1 million individuals. Within 6 months of launching its advocacy program, employees shared over 23,000 content pieces on their personal social networks, increasing Fujitsu’s potential reach by almost 70%. This number goes to show that employees are the strongest marketing engine to build your online presence and reputation.

2. Increased Social Engagement

Beyond increased social media visibility, turning employees into company ambassadors pays off in that it bolsters your engagement. When employees continuously share high value content, they will become thought leaders. The impact of that is two-fold: first, individuals will perceive your employees as more professional, reputable, and knowledgable. Second, as employees’ personal brand flourishes, your content will be received more positively and is more likely to be engaged with.

Another study conducted by Social Media Today shows that content shared by employees receives 8X more engagement than content shared by company channels. That being said, within 6 months of its advocacy program, Fujitsu could see much higher click rates coming from the employee accounts versus its corporate social accounts. Fujitsu in fact increased its ‘link clicks’ on social media by 29% since using employee advocacy.

3. More Cost Effective than Social Ads

More and more B2B marketers are scrambling to invest in social media ads, but does this investment translate into better results? Statista shows that social media advertising budgets have doubled worldwide over the past two years – from $16 billion U.S. in 2014 to $31 billion in 2016. In 2017, social media ad spending is likely to exceed $35 billion, making up 16% of all digital ad spending globally. In an ideal world, this growing investment in social ads would lead to an instant rise in engagement and conversions. Unfortunately this isn’t the case, with 46% of B2B marketers still unsure about whether any social channels have generated revenue for their business.

If you’re facing a similar predicament, perhaps you should consider an investment in employee advocacy. Fujitsu quickly came to the conclusion that its advocacy program is a lot more cost-effective in comparison to paid social ads. After using the Oktopost Employee Advocacy platform, Fujitsu achieved a tremendous 360% ROI.

“If, for example, LinkedIn charges 4 EUR per click on a sponsored post campaign, we can calculate the earned media value of our employee advocacy program based on the clicks our employees are earning. Therefore, the current ROI of Oktopost’s Employee Advocacy is 360%.” — Daniel Klaus, Senior Manager of Global Digital Marketing at Fujitsu

Fujitsu certainly managed to squeeze the juices out of its employee advocacy program, achieving exceptional results! If you want to hear more about Fujitsu’s successful employee advocacy program or how Oktopost can help you reap the same benefits, check out our latest webinar ‘Breaking the Social Media Code: How Fujitsu Achieved a 360% ROI with Employee Advocacy’ hosted by Daniel Klaus, Senior Manager Digital Marketing, Global Marketing at Fujitsu, and Sapir Segal, Content Marketing Manager at Oktopost. The webinar provides an in-depth breakdown of the following:

• How to increase online reach
• How to make content easily accessible to employees
• How to measure the value of advocacy