How to create an employee advocacy program on social media

What is employee advocacy?

Employee advocacy is the practice of internal employees genuinely and organically endorsing their employer’s products, services, or brand.

Here are three employee advocacy examples to illustrate what we mean:

• An Apple employee raves to their friends about the latest iOS accessibility features. 
• A Starbucks barista posts funny TikToks every few days about his love for their lattes. 
• A Morgan Stanley banker tells her LinkedIn network about how the bank accelerated her career for the better. 

Anything kind that employees publicly say about their employers is considered employee advocacy. Social media is a hotbed for advocacy — and savvy businesses are catching on to that.

Today, buyers almost always do their own research via online channels before they ever chat with a salesperson. They look at what current customers and employees are saying about the vendors and brands they’re considering. They look at how active everyone is in their industry’s community. They watch for authentic, trustworthy behavior, specifically on social media.

Which begs this question: How can small businesses and global enterprises alike show up excellently on social media for their buyers?

The answer is simple: an employee advocacy program. 

What is an employee advocacy program?

An employee advocacy program is simply the formalization of the ad-hoc, organic endorsement employees make about their employers’ products, services, or brands.

While employees can, of course, be solo advocates for their organization, forward-thinking organizations are creating more formal employee advocacy programs because there’s strength (and sales) in numbers. 

To be clear, ad-hoc advocacy is still fair game and welcomed by most brands — but sanctioned employee advocacy programs put the tools, resources, prompts, and enablement right into the hands of employees who may need a bit more assistance to pull together a strong social media advocacy post.

Here’s one important caveat before we go any further: advocacy programs should never feel like another form of advertising. Buyers can sniff out sneaky self- or business-promotion from a mile away. Instead, great employee advocacy programs exist to align employees and give them tons of fodder and support in building authentic and trusted relationships with their networks at scale.

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Benefits of employee advocacy

Based on logic and intuition alone, you probably can guess that employee advocacy programs impact the bottom line. But the extent of that bottom-line impact? That might surprise you. 

The Hinge Research Group released a report on the impact of social media-based advocacy programs on 500+ businesses, and the results are fascinating: 

• 45% of companies attribute new revenue streams to employee advocacy
• 32% of respondents now see better search engine rankings
• 17% have actually decreased their marketing spend with an advocacy program

But the benefits go beyond the bottom line. Hit “play” to hear Steve Watt, Seismic’s Director of Market Insights and social selling expert, share why employee advocacy on social media has to be more than just a marketing function because there are benefits for both broader company and individual employees.

Benefits for the company

Drive sales and marketing outcomes: When employees organically share about their work and life experiences and name-drop your brand every once in a while, buyers see authenticity and approachability. This almost always increases inbound sales and makes it so your other marketing functions — like your website or ads — are amplified because people know your company.

Increase brand awareness and reputation at scale: This goes hand-in-hand with marketing outcomes. Employee advocacy is one of the best ways to enhance and solidify your reputation in the market. But for this to happen, employee advocacy really has to be a team sport, not just an internal marketing function. To show up in a way that’s more captivating and engaging than your competitors, you’ll need client-facing folks (think sales and CS), as well as executives actively involved. 

Improves employee engagement and performance: Employee advocacy on social media builds morale in a way that few other initiatives can. In fact, 69% of employees from the survey we cited earlier said that social media has actually helped them in their careers — in large part thanks to employee advocacy. As Steve also points out, employee advocacy is a top talent magnet. Candidates love to see happy employees rave about their experiences.

Benefits for employees

The benefits don’t stop just with employers. Check out these three ways formal advocacy programs enhance the employee experience as well.

Creates an easy-to-follow roadmap for success: Lots of employees would love to have a more active, vibrant social presence — but it’s hard to know where to start. By providing recommended prompts, articles, and industry expertise for them to customize and share, you’re enabling them to take that leap. 

Establishes credibility and thought leadership in the market: Steve says it best: “When people, specifically executives show up on social, they create categories, they can build their reputations as well as their company’s reputation. They can pull the world towards them like never before.”

Provides networking opportunities: Our world is more digitally connected than ever before, and starting (or joining) conversations on LinkedIn opens up the door for more connections with people in your industry who share your same professional values and interests. Just look at how many “LinkedIn helped me get this job” labels live in people’s current and past role descriptions. Social media scales the number of people you can interact with each day for the better.

Tips for launching an employee advocacy program

Creating a successful employee advocacy program takes a lot of intentionality and planning. If you’re considering building or bolstering one for your organization, follow this five-step roadmap to get organized and bring it to life faster.

Employee advocacy best practices

It’s completely normal for advocacy program leaders to face challenges in the months following the launch of their programs. Thankfully, some of the main culprits — selectively engaged employees, repetitive content recommendations, and engagement drop-offs — are nothing Steve hasn’t seen before. Listen to how he’s overcome these challenges with the following best practices to rebuild a more successful, longer-lasting program.

Provide adequate training

Employees can’t just be expected to succeed without any training or enablement on social media best practices. As you roll out your advocacy program, be sure to offer self-service learning options for employees and a few live training sessions for folks who prefer a more hands-on demo.

Incentivize participation

At first, you may need to sell the value of your employee advocacy program internally. Some leaders and employees don’t understand what’s in it for them or the business impact of them posting. It’s on you to not only explain those individual and company benefits to incentivize participation, but to encourage participation with giveaways, prizes, and even monetary rewards for active participation if possible.

Lead by example

The best employee advocacy programs leverage internal experts who encourage other teammates to use social media. Encourage your experts — especially executives and top-level leadership — to share their opinions, stories, and advice to drive buy-in and excitement across the team. Leading from the top makes all the difference in a successful program rollout.

Focus on educational content

All too often, companies just push their own promotional content, which doesn’t drive results and honestly feels spam-y to buyers who stumble across your posts. Instead, encourage and enable your employees to share educational, thought leadership content that’s relevant to their network. The less it’s about your organization and company, the better. Buyers will do their own research and quickly figure out who the most helpful people in their network work for.

How to measure the success of your employee advocacy strategy

If step one is launching an employee advocacy program, step two is effectively measuring it and understanding its success. Here are five different key performance indicators (KPIs) we recommend monitoring every month to make sure your program is active and successful:

1. Adoption rate: What percentage of employees are bought in and have made a post?
2. Active participation: What percentage of invited employees are repeat, active posters? 
3. Reach, engagement, and impressions: How many people are consuming employee-driven content? 
4. Impact on revenue: What revenue can be partially or fully attributed to employee advocacy efforts?
5. Growth of followers: How much has your organization’s followership grown? How about individual followership of your most active employee advocates?

One final note: Don’t forget to set goals and measure these metrics against your program’s original targets. Otherwise, you’re just gathering data for data gathering’s sake. Many people who are standing up employee advocacy programs on social media will capture key stats (followers, reach, engagement, impressions, and revenue impact) prior to rolling out their programs so they can paint a clear before-and-after picture.

Enable everyone to be an employee advocate with Seismic LiveSocial

Interested in starting your own advocacy program or bolstering your existing one? Seismic’s LiveSocial tool is an employee advocacy platform you’ll love.

Hundreds of leaders use LiveSocial (even our internal team here at Seismic!) to implement and launch successful social media-based employee advocacy programs. The results are more informed buyers, shorter deal cycles, and higher win rates. To see what we mean, check out this two-minute video about the impact of engaging with buyers on digital channels like social.