Revolutionising the world of Unified Communications with employee advocacy at VIA

VIA are a young, tech focused team of thirty based in central Nottingham and have remote workers based all over the UK. A diverse team of experts, they pride themselves on their knowledge, experience and customer service across all aspects of the business. Just talking with their Marketing Manager, Suzanne Whetton, we’re filled with warmth and understanding, and her clear passion for driving the business forward and delighting customers.

VIA UC gives customers complete visual control over the management of users and call flows, along with full visibility of their system through real time activity reports and billing information.

If you’re not first, you’re last (not really!)

They’re a close knit and encouraging team but Suzanne tells us that, when it comes to VIA’s quarterly team building activities, the competitive streak comes out to play. Everyone wants to be the winner and Brand Message’s leaderboard adds to the excitement.

Working with the likes of Cooper Parry and italki to unify their communications, VIA understood the benefits of an employee advocacy platform that would empower their employees to communicate with their personal social networks across Twitter and LinkedIn.

“We didn’t use an employee advocacy platform before Brand Message. We had looked into options from LinkedIn directly, but the cost was far too high and unsuitable for a team and user numbers as small as ours.”

Heading up the marketing team, Suzanne tried coaching individuals on LinkedIn’s employee advocacy platform first, but it was time heavy and wasn’t a realistic approach for employee advocacy across the whole business. Not to mention creating, scheduling and monitoring company social networks, and ensuring that any posts that employees did send, used the correct terminology and consistent messaging with the brand.

Making it easy with employee advocacy

They began to look into what options were available to synchronise their brand voice and communications across social media, that’s when they came across Brand Message.

“Brand Message allows us to create company content which is available to all of our users on the platform across several departments. We work with individuals initially but they very quickly find their feet as the platform is so easy to use. Employees can be selective about which posts they wish to share with their professional network, depending on the content and topics.”

As a brand admin on VIA’s Brand Message, Suzanne found that she was able to craft personalised posts, whether at the request of individual employees or teams, quickly and consistently.

As employee confidence grew and they were personalisting their own content, Suzanne and the marketing team were then able to repurpose it as user-generated content across the companies social media pages too - adding to their authentic messaging and a significant increase in content created by their employees (and the enthusiasm to do so!)

Initially VIA thought that using Brand Message would result in a small drop in engagement from on their company pages, as employees were no longer directly sharing posts from the page. However, Suzanne said, “That has not been the case, we have seen a rise in both followers and engagement!”

The team at VIA found Brand Messages scheduling feature extremely useful, as it’s not a feature directly available through LinkedIn. As their sales team are quite often working on the go and out of the office, being able to schedule posts at peak times for engagement is a huge benefit for the team.

What the team at VIA had to say about Brand Message

Finally, we asked Suzanne at VIA what she would say to a company who was considering using Brand Message in their business as their employee advocacy platform….

...so, did VIA recommend Brand Message?

“Brand Message will allow your employees to share content which is curated by experts in your Marketing and Social Media teams. It will give your employees confidence using LinkedIn, as they will know that the content they are sharing is of value and relevance to their online network, whilst accurately representing your brand’s key messaging and focus.”