Social Seeder

In the post COVID world, employee engagement levels seem to be consistently dipping with remote working. According to recent studies, merely 15-20 percent of employees are engaged with their organisational culture. This disengagement is also impacting companies’ quest to find and retain the right talents. Consequently, companies are striving hard to build a holistic culture that will help them stand out as a brand, which in turn will attract the best resources. However, even if they manage to build a wholesome culture, they often fall short of demonstrating it to the world, which hampers brand building. It further doesn’t help when the siloed sales, marketing, and HR departments in companies send out different organisational content to the outside world and internal workforce respectively, leading to a fragmented, inconsistent company voice. This lack of a coherent, unified organisational voice hinders companies seeking to build a brand that can present them in a light that resonates with both present and potential employees.

Enter Social Seeder with its brand advocacy platform that helps organisations create and nurture a network of brand ambassadors from their existing workforces. Founded by Patrick De Pauw, who serves as the CEO, Social Seeder enables companies to share their vision and culture to wider audiences via their resources sharing the recommended company content online through the platform. Through these in-house brand advocates, Social Seeder helps companies augment their employee engagement programs and leverage social media to not only keep employees engaged but also garner new resources and retain them.

Social Seeder’s journey began with De Pauw’s visit to Google headquarters, where he was invited to an interactive event owing to the success of his erstwhile travel company.

During the course of the event, he realised that the major portion of any travel company’s clientele came from humble word-of-mouth recommendations, not through expensive search engine ads. Based on this epiphany, he applied this age old method, arguably the most powerful way to generate new leads in business, to employee recruitment and engagement, and Social Seeder was born. The company takes the view that every employee is essentially an influencer and the best source of authentic company information that can be leveraged to create better brand value and employee engagement.

Bespoke Brand Building with Engaged WorkforcesSocial Seeder’s platform sends out recommended company content to the ambassadors select employees who opt to become the online representatives of their organisations who can simply share messages and stories they like the most about the company online without requiring any training or social media expertise.

This adds a human touch and a feel of genuineness to the company’s vision, culture, and operations, which demonstrates its dedication to practicing what is preached to both its existing and potential employees.To enhance this genuine feel, Social Seeder consciously avoided gamification of the employee advocacy program to ensure the ambassadors share only those campaigns that they find truly interesting, instead of promoting only those stories for which they are rewarded points.

Additionally, the KPI-based platform collects data on the online engagement levels on the shared company news to provide companies feedback on the ambassadors’ posts. “We work with data, which gives insights on the ambassadors’ communication style, and analyse the real impact of having an engaged workforce in spreading company content,” explains De Pauw. Also, through the data aggregated over the years, Social Seeder provides companies with a yardstick to measure their performance against other players in the same industry.

We work with data and analyse the real impact of having an engaged workforce in spreading company content

Considering each organization’s uniqueness, Social Seeder conducts workshops to gain in-depth insights into their client companies, based on which it designs optimised custom solutions for employee engagement and advocacy for them. Simultaneously, Social Seeder defines measurable employee engagement goals for organisations, and helps them reach the goals with a near-hundred percent success rate. All the while, Social Seeder’s customer success team ensures the platform maintains simplicity and ease of access and use.

A Simple and Easy Way to Enhance Engagement

In a notable instance showcasing the reach of the brand advocacy platform, Social Seeder assisted a large international B2B company in hiring new resources at breakneck speed. Its platform helped create a continuous stream of stories that represented the company’s brand, which was shared by their employees periodically on social media. Based on these stories, the company was able to find and recruit new employees in no time when they advertised open positions in Belgium. “Thanks to the messages shared by their employees, about 2,500 people viewed the open positions on the same day, out of which 250 applied and more than 25 were hired,” informs De Pauw. “This clearly shows the power of engaged coworkers sharing interesting company stories from time to time.”

Social Seeder is currently active in employee engagement programs across Europe and is looking forward to expanding beyond the continent in 2022. Furthermore, Social Seeder will be integrating another layer pertaining to corporate social responsibility to its employee engagement program, keeping in mind the increasing trend of companies seeking ways to give back to society. Through this layer, employees acting as organisations’ ambassadors will have the option to contribute to varied social causes. On the road ahead, Social Seeder will strive to be the go-to partner for enhanced employee engagement. “What Google is of search engines, we want to be of employee advocacy programs,” concludes De Pauw.