Employee Advocacy Corporate Governance: Best Practices

Employee advocacy is a powerful strategy for businesses looking to strengthen brand awareness, increase social media engagement, and boost transparency by showcasing the human side of their organization.

For an employee advocacy program to work in an enterprise organization, especially within a regulated industry like pharmaceuticals or financial services, some considerations are necessary to ensure compliance.

In this article, we’ll explore the importance of content curation and approval workflows for corporate governance within your program. We’ll also discuss balancing employee personal posts with corporate guidelines to ensure your advocacy program aligns with company values and regulations while promoting authenticity.

Curated content should play a vital role in your program.

It ensures that employees advocate for your company in a way that adheres to your company values and any industry regulations you need to follow.

Even if you’re encouraging your team to create original employee-generated content (EGC), curated content will help fill the gaps and provide useful examples from which your advocates can draw inspiration.

Here’s how to do it 👇

To streamline advocacy efforts and prevent potential risks, we recommend creating a library of pre-approved content.

Ideally, before any employees sign up, you should have about 10 pieces of content ready to go. It’ll give them plenty of options to choose from as soon as they join.

Your content library ensures that employees have access to a significant amount of posts that align with company messaging while following compliance standards.

The easiest way to provide employees with a pre-approved content library is by using an employee advocacy platform like DSMN8. Rather than an endless stream of Google Docs, DSMN8’s feed allows advocates to browse all available content and admins to offer unique pieces to different teams efficiently.

Ready to see more? Book a demo.

The dynamic display feature allows employees to mix and match the post captions and images you provide. This creates unique content variations while making sure everyone is compliant and on-brand. A win-win! 🏆

Taking this approach allows you to confidently empower employees on social media while minimizing any risks involved.

While it will take time to build up a library of evergreen employee advocacy content, it will pay dividends in the long run. Remember, as you enroll new advocates or expand the program, the more use you’ll get from your evergreen pieces 👌

One efficient way to ensure employees always have access to relevant and approved content is by connecting your content sources to DSMN8 via RSS feeds.

Leveraging RSS will automatically pull in company content that you’ve shared on other channels, such as your company blog or podcast.

This approach is a helpful way to supplement your curated content. It saves time and ensures that the shared content is timely and aligned with company messaging.

Be sure not to depend on it too much, though, because your advocates won’t want to share company content 100% of the time! 😳

Here at DSMN8, we recommend a three-pronged approach to advocacy content:

1. Company Content.
2. Company Culture Content (employee-focused!).
3. Third-Party / Industry News.

This ensures your employees are positioning themselves as helpful experts on LinkedIn. By sharing educational and valuable content, they’ll build personal brands rather than come across as company billboards.

Check out this podcast episode for more on the most effective employee advocacy content strategy:

Implementing a structured workflow guarantees that employee advocacy content aligns with corporate governance and compliance standards.

In this section, we’ll explore an example step-by-step workflow to streamline content approval. Plus, we’ll look at simplifying the process for busy executive leaders, making advocacy seamless and secure 👏

Here’s an example workflow you could follow to ensure compliance with corporate governance and regulations.

This will ensure that the content is going through appropriate checks before being shared with your advocates and publicly via their social media profiles.

Example Employee Advocacy Approval Workflow:

Your senior executives are arguably the most important employees to get involved in your program.

Our analysis of 11,107 employee LinkedIn posts showed that a CEO can generate the same level of engagement as a company page despite having 98% fewer followers. We’re talking about 5,000 vs 300,000 followers here! 🤯

And the 2025 Employee Advocacy Benchmark Report revealed that the biggest priority for 74% of employee advocacy program managers is getting leadership involved.

While some executives may prefer to leave social media and employee advocacy to the marketing department, others may want more involvement in the process. So here’s the challenge faced by many marketers:

Create original thought leadership content for executives, gain their approval, and then share it on their accounts.

It sounds simple, but oftentimes, senior leaders are so busy that it takes weeks for them to even look at the content, let alone share it. And sharing passwords isn’t the most secure approach…

That’s where DSMN8’s executive influencer platform comes in.

Delegate access enables specific admins to post on behalf of the executive (no password sharing or access to DMs!).

Approval workflows enable executives to decide whether they want to review content before it gets published. New content will get sent to them, and they’ll have a deadline for reviewing it.

We’ve found that the execs who do want more control over their LinkedIn content will find time to review it. Knowing that the post will go live either way motivates them to check it out!

Of course, the majority of employee advocacy programs don’t just include curated content.

They also allow employees to create their own posts from scratch or use pre-approved captions as a starting point for adding their own perspectives.

In these cases, it’s essential to find a balance between empowering employees to engage authentically and ensuring that their personal posts remain aligned with corporate governance.

Is it essential to allow employees to share personal posts? 🤔

Technically, no. But for the best results, we really do encourage it.

Even in the strictest of industries, there are ways for your team to add a personal touch to their content.

They could rewrite pre-approved captions in their own tone of voice or add their own experience-based insights to a piece of industry news.

Besides, showcasing the human side of your brand on social media is great for employer branding,  attracting top talent to your company.

Here’s an example: An employee sharing a post about their participation in a company-sponsored charity event reflects well on your brand while showing the employee’s personal commitment to shared values.

When it comes to building personal brands within employee advocacy programs, Anna Bertoldini is your expert. Give her episode of the podcast a watch:

When encouraging personal posts, it’s crucial to establish clear guidelines to ensure that employees don’t share content that could violate company policies or governance rules.

Personal branding is important, but employees should be very clear on the boundaries.

1. Do’s and Don’ts: Provide a list of best practices (e.g., highlighting company values, avoiding controversial topics) and pitfalls to avoid (e.g., sharing confidential information, making political statements that don’t align with corporate values).

2. Approval Processes: Depending on the level of personal engagement, you can require a soft approval process for certain types of posts. For example, an employee might need approval before posting about new product launches or financial performance. Make this very clear to your team if you want to follow this approach!

3. Use Pre-Approved Templates: To help employees share authentic content without straying from corporate guidelines, offer pre-approved templates or post suggestions. These templates can encourage employees to personalize their posts without risk. This allows employees to feel empowered to express their personal experiences while staying on-brand.

By integrating content curation, approval workflows, and a balanced approach to employee personal posts, businesses can create a powerful employee advocacy program that adheres to corporate governance requirements.

This approach fosters a culture of compliance and transparency, allowing employees to share their voice while aligning with corporate governance. It’s a win-win situation where employees are engaged, and the company remains in control.

Ready to launch an effective and compliant employee advocacy program?

Want to make LinkedIn as easy as possible for your CEO? Explore our Executive Influencer Platform!

More guides and resources for ensuring employee advocacy program compliance:

• Advocacy-Ready Social Media Policy Template.
• Guide: How To Build a Personal Brand as an Employee.
• 12 Essential Social Media Guidelines for Employees.