Navigating Employee Advocacy on Social Media: Rules of the Road by Jeremy Simon
As you’re thinking about initiatives for 2025, might we recommend employee advocacy? In an era where 75% of brands could disappear overnight and most people wouldn’t care (Source), one way to combat that is storymaking through employee voices.
Company messages and announcements advocated by employees are re-shared 24x more than when the brand shares. (Source). In addition, employees engaged in an advocacy program are more likely to stay at their company, feel optimistic about their company’s future, and believe their company is more competitive. (Source).
The company benefits are clear, but any successful employee advocacy program needs to start with the question, what’s in it for the employee? If you want high employee engagement on social media, the first step is to make sure that employees can clearly see the benefits. This includes benefits to the active participants as well as benefits to the employees receiving and engaging with the content on company channels.
Outside of incentive-based rewards, these are the tangible employee benefits of an employee advocacy program:
Increase employee credentialing through publishing and the ability to engage with product and portfolio updates, business goals, and innovative strategies.
Increase employee cultural relevance through timely culture-related content either through the company or resonant voices within employee resource groups.
Increase employee capabilities and continuing education by distributing content marketing across the broader organization instead of a centralized team.
Assuming that your organization is already actively posting corporate communications via social media and has an existing social media policy, your next step is to activate an employee advocacy program. You want to ensure that you are creating a mutually beneficial program that is relevant to the employee's audience and in your employee’s voice. Employees are more likely to engage with and share content that excites them with their friends, families, and colleagues. This includes educational content, employee updates, and commentary on trending topics. (Source).
Employee advocacy programs come in all shapes, sizes, scopes, and implementations, but there are some standard features found in most programs.
Ensuring everyone involved understands the objectives of the program.
A diverse mix of identified employee advocates with different levels of experience.
A content feedback loop to ensure content is relevant for the intended audiences.
In most online communities, 90% of people are lurkers who never contribute, 9% contribute a nominal amount, and 1% are the predominant voices within the community. When it comes to employee advocacy, the self-reported consensus is about 50% active participation. However, much like online communities, you will quickly identify the super users and company ambassadors.
How do you support ambassadors in posting company content on personal social channels?
Host town halls or events where the employee ambassadors play a leading role
Offer incentives or awards (as you can based on regulations)
Utilize social-first content built for sharing that provides the employee with social capital
Provide guidance to help support compliance with company social media policies (#mycompany)
Once you get into a groove you’ll want to regularly monitor measurement and performance in order to gauge the program’s effectiveness. Based on the analysis, combined with the employee feedback loop, you’ll be able to continually refine and improve the program.
Has it been a while since you’ve evaluated your employee advocacy program? Just getting started with employee advocacy? We are here to help.
#EmployeeAdvocacy #BrandAmbassadors #CompanyCulture #SocialMedia
