How To Be A Great Employee Advocacy Program Manager

Last Updated: 23rd August 2024

Your company has started an employee advocacy program, and you’re the program manager. You’ve got executive buy-in: leadership sees the value in employee social media content! 👏

You’re probably a marketing or social media manager… or perhaps you work in HR or employer branding.

Either way, you’re wondering how to actually manage this thing, while doing your primary job responsibilities.

You’re struggling to find the time to:

• Share fresh content and assets with your team.
• Write a variety of social post captions, because you don’t want everyone sharing the same thing!
• Encourage employees to participate.
• Track the impact.

It’s a lot. You really want to be the best employee advocacy program manager, because you know how much impact it can have on the business. But it can be overwhelming.

Here’s a step-by-step guide covering what to do! 👇

Why did your company start an employee advocacy program? 🧐

What are the goals, and what KPI’s do you need to track?

6 Common Employee Advocacy Goals:

• Improve your employer brand for talent acquisition.
• Empower salespeople to become social sellers.
• Reach the right people with marketing content to generate leads and sales.
• Establish expertise in your industry with thought leadership content.
• Build and support the personal brand of your CEO.
• Increase brand awareness and engagement on social media.

Make sure you’re aligned with leadership’s goals for employee advocacy before onboarding employees.

You need to know what kind of content needs to be shared, and which employees would be right for the job.

Whether you’re starting a pilot program, or initially onboarding a small number of employees, The Pyramid of Employee Influence is a great place to start:

You can also use our Ideal Advocate Profiles Worksheet to help you find the best candidates for your program.

When it comes to tracking metrics, here are some detailed guides to help:

• Employee Advocacy Analytics and Reporting
• Employee Advocacy Metrics For Measuring Success
• How to Uncover Employee Advocacy Impact Beyond Metrics

To figure out how to manage your employee advocacy program, first you’ll need to outline what your responsibilities as a program manager are.

Are you solely providing the content for employees to share?

Or do you need to find the best candidates within your company, and onboard them to any technology you’re using?

Will your company be outsourcing social media training, or will that be handled in-house by you?

As employee advocacy is unlikely to be your primary focus, how will these tasks fit in with your day-to-day job?

This does vary company-to-company. You might have content admins or curators supporting your role as a manager, or you may share responsibilities.

But, from our experience in supporting hundreds of employee advocacy programs, these are the 3 primary responsibilities of a program manager:

1. Creating and Curating Content.
Providing employees with up-to-date company content, industry news, and social media captions/images.

2. Internal Communication.
Providing support, encouragement, onboarding, and monitoring EGC (Employee-Generated Content).

3. Tracking Results.
Finding ways to improve based on company goals, and demonstrating ROI to leadership.

Now we’ve established what your goals and responsibilities are, let’s jump into how you can achieve them!

The best way to manage an employee advocacy program is to make it as clear and easy as possible for employees.

It’s not a case of onboarding everyone and leaving them to it…

But there are ways you can set up for success, and reduce the amount of support you’ll need to provide.

As a program manager, the last thing you want is 100 messages a day from employees asking you what they can post to social media 😩

Start with these fundamentals before you start asking employees to share content:

Start with updating your social media policy. Most importantly, make sure it doesn’t prohibit social media use at work, because that defeats the point of employee advocacy!

Employees want to know the basics: what they can and can’t post on social media.

If your social media policy is 52 pages long, they simply won’t read it all 😴

We’ve got a free advocacy-ready template you can customize to your needs.

Finally, make sure your social media guidelines and policy are available for employees to access. These shouldn’t be hidden somewhere deep within your website or intranet.

It’s absolutely worth holding social media training sessions with your advocates.

If you’re a marketer, don’t make the assumption that everyone understands social media like you do… because they really don’t 👀

And don’t forget about future employees!

If you hold one training workshop or seminar… what about the new candidates joining in a few months?

Consider recording these sessions or sharing the slide deck with new starters.

You can also create or outsource social media training materials. Check out our Resource Hub for ideas and templates.

These should cover more than just the basics of social media. Include things like how to optimize their LinkedIn profiles, and how to be professional on social media.

Finally, the fun part of your role: providing content for employees to share!

Remember your company goals when doing this. It’s not about quantity. It’s about providing the right content for the right people.

Curate content created by your marketing team, and write multiple captions for employees to use. Consider creating multiple graphics too, so employee posts don’t look identical in the feed.

There’s no worse way to run an advocacy program than having everyone share the same post at the same time. Your advocates will look like bots! 🤖

And don’t forget to include third-party content. Employee social channels shouldn’t solely share company content. Who would want to follow them?

You want to position your employees as industry experts. Including industry news, trends, and research is the way to do this!

Bonus points if you can get your senior leaders to add their own insights when they share content. Executives wield huge influence on social media. Getting them involved will drive significant program results.

Here’s a brief 2 minute video by Bradley, covering the must-have content types for employee advocacy programs:

Now you’ve got the foundations in place, you’ll want to maximize the opportunity. It’s time to take your advocacy program to the next level.

There’s no denying that managing your advocacy program will take time and effort.

But there are ways to streamline the process, while making it easy for employees to participate.

If you’re managing a small program of around 10-20 employees, without much need to segment content by team or region… a manual employee advocacy program can work for you.

Any bigger than that, and it’s probably time to look into an employee advocacy tool.

Here’s how DSMN8 helps employee advocacy program managers meet all of their responsibilities, while making it easy for employees to participate👇

Remember when we talked about how important onboarding and training is?

We can help with that 👏

At DSMN8, you’ll be assigned a dedicated customer success manager, motivated to help you succeed.

Our service includes full onboarding, including things like employee communications, training webinar sessions, videos, and a knowledge base for your team to use.

Your customer success manager will also have quarterly reviews with you to make sure you’re reaching company goals 📈

And of course, you can reach out at any time for support.

Content management is one of the biggest struggles we see in manual advocacy programs.

Employee advocates want a place to find content to share. They don’t want to search for it! 🕵🏽‍♂️

It’s not efficient to scroll through a Google Sheet to copy-and-paste a caption, then search through folders on Google Drive to find a suitable image, then upload it all to social media.

If there are too many steps involved, most employees won’t bother 😫

This process isn’t great for content admins either. There’s no way to approve or deny employee-generated content suggestions, and it’s so easy for anyone to accidentally delete or change your content.

It gets even more challenging if you’ve got content in multiple languages, or you’re trying to curate content for specific teams…

Organizing a large-scale advocacy program manually is a mammoth task.

That’s where DSMN8 comes in…

We make content creation and curation hassle-free.

DSMN8 is your all-in-one solution for managing content, motivating employees, and tracking employee advocacy results.

Segmenting content by department, language, region, and campaign provides a personalized experience for all employees.

Oh, and the platform is customizable with your company branding! 🎨

Want to learn more? Check out the 90-second platform tour below, and book a personalized demo.

Employee Advocacy is a two-way street: it’s not all about your business.

The old approach is simply getting employees to engage with company content and share it on their own social media profiles.

We think that’s pretty outdated.

Employees want to know what’s in it for them. How can advocacy benefit their careers?

Take this approach instead:

Start by demonstrating the value to employees.

Then, make sure that the C-Suite are leading by example.

Employees need to know why you’ve started this new initiative and see that leadership are involved. Otherwise, they won’t consider it a priority.

You’ve updated your social media policy, established guidelines, and provided training. Now, it’s time to trust them to create appropriate content.

Prospects, clients, and future recruits want to hear from the people who work at your company.

That’s why social media posts from employees get 800% more engagement than the same posts from brand accounts.

DSMN8 makes it easy for employees to submit their own content for admin approval ✅

The platform looks like the social media channels they already use, so it’ll be familiar and simple to use.

With a mobile app and integrations with the tools you already use (e.g., Slack and Teams), DSMN8 becomes second nature for employees.

Creating and sharing content becomes part of their day-to-day routine! 🙌

How can I track user activity and demonstrate ROI to leadership?

If you’re managing an advocacy program manually, there’ll be limitations, but it’s not impossible.

You could add UTM tracking to each link you ask employees to share, then track the clicks in Google Analytics.

You could ask your advocates to share their social media analytics with you, to monitor engagement rates and follower growth.

With a small team, it’s manageable.

But if you have a large team? You’re in for a spreadsheet nightmare 😭

DSMN8’s Analytics Suite is one of our most popular client features, and here’s why:

You can track SO many data points.

Get a deep-dive on how the program is performing as a whole, at team/department level, and even for individuals.

Our leaderboards system motivates employees to participate in friendly competition, and makes it easy for you to shoutout your top performers! 🏆

Want to know which content is the most popular? We got you.

Oh, and those pesky UTM links?

It’s all handled in DSMN8 😏

As for demonstrating ROI, our dashboard even shows you the EMV (Earned Media Value) of employee content, down to equivalent cost-per-click from paid social media.

Program managers love this as a way to showcase value and maintain leadership buy-in.

Want to hear from a pro?

Katherine from Dropbox is an excellent example for managing an employee advocacy program the right way.

Check out the podcast episode to find out her top tips for the first 30 days of starting an employee advocacy program.

Ready to get started with employee advocacy?

But not sure if you’re ready for a platform?

Schedule a call with one of the team.

Prefer to cut to the chase and explore DSMN8?

Roger that!

Book your demo.

Learn More About Managing an Employee Advocacy Program 👇

• Why Employee Advocacy Programs Need Multiple Stakeholders

• Here’s Why You Need An Employee Advocacy Tool

• The First 60 Days of Employee Advocacy