How HR Can Win On Social Media With Maya Tsankova From Coca-Cola HBC

79% of candidates in the last year have used social media as part of their job search.

During our LinkedIn Live, hosted by Tribal chief Sarah Goodall, Maya Tsankova, Global Employer Branding & Digital Communications Lead at Coca-Cola HBC, shared some insights into how HR and employee advocacy go hand-in-hand.

Coca-Cola HBC are bottling partners of the world-famous soft drink with 33,000 employees around the world.

Read on to discover how they utilised their employees’ love of social media to build their employer brand and help with their talent acquisition.

You can listen to the podcast below, or watch the recording here.

What Is Employer Branding?

Employer branding is all about the employment experience a company offers. It’s a reflection of their reputation as a place to work and the employee experience they provide.

For Coca-Cola HBC, it’s not just about selling their vision internally or selling who they are. Maya explained that “employer branding is driven by employees.”

How Does Employee Advocacy Impact HR?

As part of their employer branding efforts, Coca-Cola HBC has an in-house social media app called This is Me. It’s an Instagram-style app for employees to share their working life with their colleagues. By nature, it’s an employer branding app.

Employees are invited to submit short images or videos. All of them are about presenting employees’ own moments at work – how they celebrate success, failure, and learnings.

Maya explains the 'This is Me' app was their first experiment with employee-generated content. More recently, they’ve started sharing this content on public social media, too.

The Difference Between Social Media For HR And For Marketing

Marketing is all about clicks, views, engagement, reach, and impressions.

While Maya’s team still measures those things, their priority is putting employees at the centre of what they do, rather than using them as a content channel. It’s a human-centred approach that grows organically.

“They’re really the driver of advocacy that makes the whole engine work.”
Maya Tsankova

It’s not about driving more traffic. Instead, it’s another way for someone to get into touch and organise a call. That’s how Maya feels it should be if you want to put advocates at the heart of what you’re doing.

How To Scale Employer Branding Efforts

Research shows that 76% of companies with over 10,000 employees have an employer branding strategy.

Here are Maya’s tips for scaling an employer brand:

Design something that’s locally and culturally relevant.
Don’t treat it as a one-sided process – advocates have to win something too.
Focus on employees loving what they do and being eager to share it, not just having a huge network and being present on social media.
You can always teach LinkedIn and writing skills.
Hold workshops to improve employees’ storytelling skills.

Maya explains how they started off with 200 people in their program and have now scaled to 1000 on LinkedIn.

They don’t have ambitions to grow much bigger than this – instead, they want to focus on engagement.

Across over 15,000 posts, they’ve reached more than 10 million people. That’s more than 5x what they’ve achieved through company channels!

Needless to say, this has won stakeholders over.

How To Scale Employer Branding Across Territories And Cultures

It’s important that any content you share is locally relevant. You therefore need advocates who can overcome any language or culture barriers.

To do this, they have local employer branding managers and advocacy leads. These employees know their communities, help keep them engaged, and drive enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm for advocacy and excitement to share new things can be contagious. It’s an energy that requires a certain type of person.

How To Measure Social Media’s Impact On Employer Branding

The main focus of the program is to drive engagement, not traffic. It’s a way to invite people who discover employees’ content to have a conversation with them.

To measure the success of their program, Coca-Cola HBC analysed data from as many sources as possible. Maya explains they have a very targeted approach of identifying those who are already active on social but aren't yet in the program.

Put Employees At The Heart Of Your Employer Branding

When you put employees at the heart of your employer branding, it helps you reach more people, even with a small group. Their content has a much larger reach than branded channels and can help with everything from talent acquisition to brand trust.

Focusing on getting employees who love what they do, and who are enthusiastic to share it, is key. You can always teach writing and marketing skills.

If you’d like to grow your employer brand on social media, get in touch to find out more about how we can help with your employee activation today.