25 Employee Advocacy Cheat Codes

Your employee advocacy program won’t be something you’ll be able to “set and forget.” It will require constant nurturing, so choosing the right long-term leader is imperative.

They’ll certainly need to invest time upfront to launch your program, but they’ll also need to commit to refining its delivery for as long as it runs. This is why it’s so critical to appoint a leader with a vested interest in your program’s long-term success.

Many businesses choose someone quite junior to run their program. This might seem the obvious choice, but in the long run, it often turns out to be a poor one. Running a successful employee advocacy program requires authority that a new or junior employee is unlikely to have.

The role isn’t just about creating compelling social media content. Your program leader must have internal credibility, too. Advocacy from your company’s senior leadership is integral to your program’s success, so its leader must be able to regularly communicate with your C-level executives to bring them into your program.

But you shouldn’t appoint someone too senior, either. Although a senior leader would definitely have the authority to drive your program, they might not have the time. Their other day-to-day responsibilities would likely get in the way. Senior leaders tend to make great advocates and brand ambassadors, but poor advocacy program leaders.

The right person to run your program will be someone with a few years of experience, great communication skills, an understanding of your project’s goals, and the time to get the job done. Competency is key. 

Over time, your employee advocacy program should come to encompass and positively impact almost every aspect of your business. You need a project leader you can trust to achieve that.

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.

Before launching your program, use the table to create 4-5 ‘ideal advocate profiles’. They are the people in your company that you believe employee advocacy will help the most. Not the people that can help you the most.

Creating these advocate profiles will help you to focus on the value to the person you’re selling to. If you launch your advocacy program saying, “Please, join our advocacy program because it’ll really help the company”, it would be like Apple saying, “Please, buy our new Mac because it’ll make us money”. It’s not going to work. You need to demonstrate how advocacy will alleviate their specific pain points and help them reach their objectives.

Using ideal advocate profiles in the planning stages will help you to efficiently target prospective advocates by tailoring your messaging. It will also help you decide how to approach that person or group to improve the probability that they will sign up.

When you’re considering the best way to approach potential advocates, be sure to identify the key stakeholders who might be a gateway to that group of people. They’re the ones with influence, e.g. the VP of Sales. Know how you’re going to communicate with that individual and show why advocacy should be important to them too. Get them on side and watch your program grow!

Your employee advocacy program will need to make sharing content simple. Don’t, for example, bury all your content in some hidden SharePoint drive where your advocates can’t find it.

If content isn’t easily accessible, people won’t share it. Everyone is busy, so make it easy for advocates to find the content they want to share. Don’t make them go searching for it; it should only be a click or two away.

If you have a lot of content, you may need to create “content buckets” relating to employee roles. This prevents advocates from needing to sift through everything to find something relevant to them. Think about the content you’re going to produce. If some of it will only be relevant to certain specific business units, make it easy for those advocates to find.

Segmenting your content means the right content will be shared by the right people.

You should also provide advocates with options for their posts—different captions and images, for instance. Again, make it easy for them to select the content that best matches their own personal brand and what they are trying to achieve by sharing.

Utilize your existing technology to help advocates find content. Your internal communication tools will be great for notifying them when there’s new content available to share.

The easier your program is to use, the more likely it is that somebody’s going to participate—and not only once, but time and time again.

Don’t try to push your employees to advocate. Do enable them to make social media part of their roles.

Clearly, the more advocates your company has, the more potential ROI your program can deliver. But trying to force employees to become advocates by mandating it across your company is pointless.

First, it will turn advocacy into just another task on your employees’ ‘to-do’ lists, discouraging them from investing properly in your program. Advocacy programs—and brands—can be damaged by advocates posting carelessly.

Second, employees with valuable networks are likely to quickly understand the importance of advocacy and want to get involved. If an employee has to be pressured into becoming an advocate, it’s unlikely they’re the owner of a useful network anyway. So why bother?

If you believe your program won’t get good results without a company-wide mandate to advocate, your company is probably not ready to launch an advocacy program.

Our clients tend to think they have a pretty good idea of who their most influential advocates will be before their programs have launched. Of course, client-facing employees and senior leaders are obvious nominees. 

Marketing and sales team members will also see clear and immediate benefits of being active on social. However, this is not the whole picture… far from it, in fact.

In pretty much all cases, we find employees in non-client-facing roles with massive networks of relevant people.

It’s entirely possible that many of your company’s employees have worked at other companies in your industry during their career, building relationships along the way—and not just with co-workers. Their contact list might include members of the press or even the CEO of your largest client.

There is no need to be precious when considering who to invite to your advocacy program. Encourage anyone who wants to join. You may find some hidden influencers in your company’s ranks.

It’s quite likely that some of your advocates will already be social media veterans with high levels of digital dexterity. Whilst your program will add fuel to their fires, they won’t really need much education or encouragement from it.

However, it’s equally likely that some of your other advocates will be very new to the idea. Employees in the early stages of their careers, who’ve only just created their business social media accounts, perhaps. Or maybe a member of your C-suite who’s not yet aware of the business benefits of social media.

Some of your company’s employees, though keen to try it, may even be ‘non-digital natives’ for whom social media may not come naturally.

But needing some time and encouragement to get to grips with using social to benefit their career doesn’t make an advocate any less valuable to your company.

Remember, an advocate’s network size isn’t necessarily the defining factor of their effectiveness. A CEO with 500 LinkedIn connections can quite often outperform an influencer with 10,000—because the relevance of posts is a more important key factor.

An advocate in the early stages of their social media journey might need not only program-user training, but also mentoring in growing their network. It could take face-to-face training to get them on track, or just the provision of resources for them to read and learn from; but whatever it takes, every one of them will be worth your investment.

Think about your advocacy program as a community.

The thing about building a community is that it takes time. You can’t expect a thriving advocacy community from day 1.

Yes, there’s likely to be initial excitement and participation, but your program needs nurturing to maintain that level of interest.

There’s no use in inviting all of your current employees, and then forgetting to invite new recruits. Do this, and your program will inevitably die with staff turnover. Consistently invite existing and new employees to participate.

Hype up your advocates! Be sure to thank them and shout out their successes. Consistently engage with their content, offer support, and celebrate their wins. This is something that should be done on a regular basis, to keep them engaged and feeling appreciated.

The same goes for content! If you’re using a platform, you’ll want to make sure there’s a bunch of content from a variety of sources (e.g. your company blog, YouTube channel, third-party articles) loaded in before inviting employees. Otherwise, they’ll log onto an empty page and think, “well, no one cares about this”, and never use it again.

There’s also no use sharing an abundance of content initially, only for it to become stale in a few months. Regularly curating and maintaining content is essential. 

That consistency is integral. Otherwise, employees will either forget about it, or have the impression that it isn’t important to the business, and not bother participating.

You want employees to be excited about the launch of your employee advocacy program, and of course, you want them to participate. But you do need to be wary of them being over-eager and sharing everything in sight.

New advocates may be lacking in social media experience, and if you’ve created an exciting program encouraging them to share in order to succeed, they may think that the more they share, the more successful they’ll become. So it’s always a good idea to have a content sharing limit.

If an advocate shares 10 times a day, it’s going to look bad to their audience—and that will be bad for your company and its brand. It could also negatively impact the credibility and reputation of your program, reducing the number of potential advocates. 

Nobody wants to join a program that carpet-bombs social media with repetitive content.

You need advocates to be sharing quality content with their networks, in order to generate engagement. But you don’t want them sharing for the sake of sharing.

The average user of our platform shares 2.2 pieces of content a week, which is OK… but one post a day per advocate is probably the sweet spot. 

Two a day is actually quite a lot, and our research shows that sharing more than three times a day actually has a negative impact on engagement.

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 aim 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. 

There’s no denying that regulated industries have it harder when it comes to social media. In pharmaceuticals, finance, oil and gas, and legal services there are a lot of rules and regulations you need to follow.

Add employee advocacy into the mix, and it might just seem too risky for leadership to endorse the concept.

But what if I told you it can be risk-free?

Employee advocacy works incredibly well in regulated industries, as long as you adjust the strategy to make it appropriate. Here’s what to do:

Instead of encouraging employees to create their own content, get your marketing team to create it for them. Provide pre-written captions for employees to share, ensuring legal compliance and preventing the distribution of misinformation.

You’ll see the benefits of employees being active online, without giving your board members a heart attack over rogue social posts.

Limit your advocacy program to professional social media platforms that you conduct business on, particularly LinkedIn. Onboard your C-Suite to set a positive example for the rest of your team.

Most importantly, make sure your social media policy outlines the do’s and don’ts. Provide all the necessary training to make sure everyone understands how to behave professionally online.