Whether you own or work for a large or small company, employee advocacy can be a huge advantage in getting your social media message disseminated, both internally and externally.

Today in Promotional Consultant Today, we share these tips on gaining a digital presence from Martin Hiesboeck, director at Gerber Brand Consulting.

In-house magazines, websites, a Twitter account everyone follows or the LinkedIn company page are all great places to build loyalty and increase transparency in your organization. Once you have your employees on board, you can leverage their attention for the marketing efforts of your organization.

Don't force, encourage! Of course, you cannot force your employees to like and share content, but you can encourage them. What's more, you can include them in the creation process and personalize the content.

Your employees are your best marketing asset. For example, one company in the semiconductor industry includes posts about outstanding management-level individuals, but also day-in-the-life-style posts about the average Joe. Those posts are shared in the internal newsletter before distributing the link publicly, and the company actively asks employees to like, share and comment, so by the time a post goes live, it already has a significant number of likes and comments. That's because employees see themselves in the videos, point out where other employees and friends can be seen, and see the social marketing associated with it more as a social engagement than the forced marketing of their company assets.

This kind of personalized, humanized boost is increasingly essential. The algorithms of Facebook, Twitter and Google are punishing you for mediocrity. That means that if you have a series of posts no one likes or shares, your next post may be actively hidden from users, so even if it is a great post, it may never get traction. The way to combat this is by engaging your employees so that every post has a guaranteed baseline of likes and shares from the instant it gets posted.

Authenticity over perfection. Of course, employee advocacy in digital marketing only works if it is authentic and believable. That means you must create engaging content. But hold on—here is an excellent opportunity to test your content: your own staff. If your own employees can't get behind it, why should your customers?

For some, especially very large organizations, it even may make sense to limit the distribution of content based on the results of an employee program. Instead of flooding the internet with thousands of posts, why not limit yourself to those which got the most likes and shares from employees. This can validate digital marketing efforts, help improve quality, catch mistakes, avoid embarrassing gaffes, etc.

Try these tips to drive employee engagement and you'll build your company's digital presence.

Source: Martin Hiesboeck is director at Gerber Brand Consulting.