15 Employee Advocacy Cheat Codes for Employer Branding

Your social media policy should outline the code of online conduct you expect your employees to adhere to. This includes the behavior you expect from them when sharing anything online, work-related or not.

If you’re as old as me, you’ll likely remember social media policies that read, in essence, “don’t ever share anything on social media, full stop.”

In recent years, companies have come to realize that having employees actively posting and engaging on social media is hugely advantageous. This evolution has led to policies becoming far more inclusive and encouraging.

The goal of your social media policy should be to guide and encourage employees, not police them. If yours is a big list of things not to do, it’s going to make them too scared to post anything.

Instead, align your policy with business goals. Present it as a tool to empower your employees, enabling them to use social media to help the company meet those goals.

A clear policy that states what’s completely off limits, while allowing for authentic posting, will both alleviate employee worries and help you avoid a PR nightmare.

It’s imperative to make sure employees are aware of your new social media policy. They need to know that times have changed. Give copies to new starters as soon as they join.

In sales, we talk about buying personas. It’s essentially creating a fictional representation of an ideal customer in order to better understand their needs.

So apply that concept to employee advocacy. What are your potential advocates like?

To get you started, I’ve built 4 personas based on the types of people that make good advocates. Understanding their different motivations, challenges, and content preferences before launching will help you shape your program to drive advocate engagement.

1. The Seller

This is the most obvious one, but they aren’t necessarily a salesperson. It’s anyone in the company with quotas to reach. Their main challenge is time. They’re under pressure to hit their numbers. Their motivation to join an advocacy program would be to exceed targets by positioning themselves as thought leaders. The content that resonates with this person helps them make sales. It’ll be things like social proof, case studies, product updates, and industry news.

2. The Leader

The CEO, divisional heads, and sales leaders all have an external responsibility to show what’s going on in the company, and an internal responsibility to lead employees. Their challenge is engaging the workforce. They’re time-poor, and although social media may not be their number one focus, their motivation is to be seen as industry experts while broadcasting company communications, internally and externally. The content that will work for them will be customer success stories, company news (acquisitions, senior leader appointments, mergers), case studies, and financials.

3. The Champion

This is someone who loves where they work. They support the company mission, believe in it, and want to be an ambassador. Their challenge is internal politics. For example, they might not go on LinkedIn and write content about their company, out of fear of stepping on marketing’s toes. They’re afraid of getting it wrong. They also don’t want their employer to think they’re looking for a job by building their personal brand. Their motivation is simple: they enjoy being a cheerleader for the company. The content they lean towards is positive PR, awards, and company culture.

4. The Ambitious

These people are looking to advance their career by networking and building their personal brand. Whether they believe in the company mission or not is irrelevant. They know that sharing content makes them more visible, both internally and externally. It makes them look like a team player and boosts their reputation. This person’s challenge is that they’re dependent on their digital reputation. They need content to share, and lots of it. They don’t have a content preference.

One of the biggest reasons people don’t post on social is that they’re worried it might harm their careers. Employees worry that if they suddenly start posting, their managers and co-workers might think they’re looking for a new job.

To counter those worries, you need to promote the benefits of employees developing strong personal brands—and carry out that promotion at a company level. Encourage all your employees to share, and explain why they should. That way, they’ll feel safe and happy to do so.

You might be worried that helping your employees create their own personal brands could make them more attractive to other companies, potentially resulting in them being headhunted. But actually, employee personal branding will not only hugely benefit your business and its image, but also make it more likely to retain and attract talent.

Employees with strong personal brands have stronger relationships with their social media audiences. This results in those audience members having stronger relationships with your brand. Employees with well-developed personal brands can also become seen as thought leaders and industry experts, building further trust and kudos within their networks.

Providing content to your employees to help their personal brands flourish will be a vitally important part of your advocacy program. You’ll need your employees to feel empowered to post more about what they know. This, in turn, results in more posts about your company.

Company culture is the foundation of employee advocacy.

Employees that feel valued are much more likely to naturally advocate for your company, and want to join your program!

To put it bluntly, employee advocacy cannot exist without a good company culture. Forcing employees to post positively about your brand on social media when they don’t want to isn’t the way to go. The content simply won’t come across as authentic, and employees will begrudge you for making them do it.

A thriving company culture encourages collaboration, creativity, and an atmosphere of trust. You’ll want honest feedback on your advocacy program content in order to improve it, and you’ll only get this in an environment where employees feel safe to voice their opinions.

Focus on improving your company culture, and you’ll see better results from your program.

People know people who know people.

Your advocates are highly likely to be connected to people who work in the same fields they do… who are also highly likely to be connected to other people who also work in those same fields… As a result, your employee advocacy program could be extremely useful for attracting new talent.

You might want to hire new engineers, for example. If so, encouraging your engineer advocates to post about the benefits of working for your company can really pay dividends, attracting potential new employees at a fraction of the cost.

But you shouldn’t expect simply blasting social media with job ads to bear fruit. Talent acquisition through employee advocacy needs to be delicately balanced with content promoting your company as a desirable workplace.

It doesn’t need to be complicated. Content that features a tour of your offices, existing employees discussing their experiences, or pictures from team away days will all help provide that balance. Potential candidates who’ve been primed by your advocates’ posts are far more likely to hit the ‘apply’ button on your job ads.

Yes, internal communications will always be inherently linked to your employee advocacy program. They’ll both always involve employees and communication, but their objectives are very different.

Internal communication is almost the step before employee advocacy. Its purpose is to distribute company internal content to employees, in the hope they’ll digest it. This makes them aware of what’s going on inside their organizations, as well as enabling them to communicate and collaborate.

The purpose of an advocacy program is to encourage and empower employees to take content produced for external consumption, and amplify it using their own professional social media connections. The tone of external content is very different, as it’s designed to ultimately win new business, promote a brand, educate an industry, or find talent.

That means you’ll probably need to appoint someone from outside your internal comms department to run your advocacy program, someone with the skill set and knowledge required to create an excellent social media post. One of your internal communications workers may have that ability, but it will likely be by chance. This is because social media content creation is very different from the internal comms core competency of educating a workforce.

Your aims should be to build an employee advocacy program that serves both your company and your external audience—and to build it by working in partnership with your internal communications department. When you launch your program, it’s likely some people will be confused and take it to be an internal communications initiative. Be prepared to help them understand by highlighting the marketing elements that define employee advocacy.

To find out what impact employee advocacy has on internal communications, my team analyzed over 1,000 employee social media posts. The results were fascinating. Over 37% of interactions on social media posts containing company content came from co-workers. Using external channels as a way to reach your workforce is an added bonus of advocacy!