Employee advocacy has become a powerful tool for organizations looking to amplify their brand message and create authentic connections on social media.
It’s an effective strategy that continues growing among B2C and B2B brands and is predicted to scale even further in 2025.
But what does it really take to manage and sustain an employee advocacy program?
How do program managers balance employee advocacy growth and maintenance alongside their main roles? 🤔
Drawing from our experience supporting hundreds of programs and after speaking to a bunch of program managers, today we’ve got the answers!
The Skillset & Core Responsibilities of an Employee Advocacy Program Manager
First, let’s get clear on what the core responsibilities and skillset of an employee advocacy program manager should be.
Depending on the structure of your program and your organization, additional content curators or admins may be needed to help supply fresh content to employees. However, in some organizations, one program manager is responsible for everything.
Ideally, the program manager should work in a marketing, communications, or employer branding role.
The individual needs to understand social media marketing, and their skillset should include effective communication and content writing ✍️
The program manager should be clear on company values and goals, so the role is probably not well suited to someone new to the organization.
They must also be confident speaking with key internal stakeholders, such as department heads and the C-Suite. Getting leadership involved sets the example for employees while generating better results.
Day to day, this involves curating content, coaching colleagues on best practices, and collaborating across teams to ensure alignment with our broader brand strategy.”
Marcus Lier, Head of Marketing EMEA/Americas @ Synpulse.
1. Program Metrics
Tracking and reporting on metrics is a key pillar of an employee advocacy program manager’s role.
This is important for maintaining leadership buy-in, convincing more employees to join the program, and improving content output.
Initially, this will require some time investment. Tasks include things like setting up suitable UTMs to track website traffic, establishing the metrics that matter most, and creating report dashboards that show these metrics.
However, once everything is set up, reporting can be an activity that only takes a few hours a month. The majority of time will be spent on analyzing the data to relay this information effectively to leadership and inform your strategy.
Analytics is one area where having an employee advocacy tool really becomes useful.
DSMN8 automatically adds your UTM parameters to any links shared by employees. The analytics dashboard can be customized to show the metrics that matter most to your organization, from earned media value and website clicks to top-performing post captions and total audience size.
2. Employee Training
The last thing you’ll want to do when launching an employee advocacy program is invite employees without providing any guidance. It’s a surefire way to limit your results and advocate confidence! 😩
A key component of a program manager’s role is to support employee advocates, from creating a clear social media policy and guidelines to offering ongoing training and advice.
Creating an employee advocacy program ‘welcome pack’ is a helpful way to reduce the time required here. All advocates would receive your brand guidelines, social media policy & guidelines, and any training materials created.
Recording training sessions for future reference and new starters is also a good idea.
If your organization uses an employee advocacy platform, program managers should check with their customer success manager to see how they can support with training. DSMN8’s team are eager to help where they can.
As our employee advocacy program leader, I focus on empowering coworkers to feel confident in sharing their unique insights and expertise, by offering training, resources, tips, and a steady stream of content to share.
This means working with other marketing teams to curate global and vertical-specific content, running workshops on building their our ambassadors’ personal brands, and making sure every question is answered.”
Anna Bertoldini, Senior Social Media Brand Manager @ NielsenIQ.
3. Advocacy Strategy
Outside of day-to-day management, an employee advocacy program leader will also oversee strategic development.
A critical part of their role is to craft a comprehensive advocacy strategy that aligns with the company’s broader communication and brand objectives.
This will likely involve coordination between several departments, such as marketing, PR/comms, sales, and recruitment/HR.
As the program matures, core objectives can shift, meaning the strategy may need amending. In addition, if the advocacy program spans different regions, multiple strategies may need to coexist.
4. Content Curation
The final pillar of a program manager’s role (and the most critical) is content curation.
The time requirements of this function can vary drastically across organizations.
Contributing factors include:
- The number of employees in the program. Twenty employee advocates require less content than a hundred!
- If senior leadership are involved. Executives often prefer (with good reason) to share unique content created in their tone of voice, e.g. thought leadership.
- Language requirements. Organizations in Canada, for example, may require French and English content.
- Whether your program has additional content curators to support with this.
- The content output by your marketing team.
- If you’re encouraging employees to create original employee-generated content themselves.
We have always encouraged our consultants to add their own unique take when sharing on LinkedIn. While we provide them with captions to use to encourage more sharing, we say ‘dare to be brave’ and empower them to write freely.”
Sofia Lönegård, Head of Marketing & Communications @ Mercuri Urval.
Typical Weekly Tasks
Now we’ve covered the core elements of an employee advocacy program manager’s role, let’s translate that into what a typical week might look like.
The pyramid above shows the most common weekly tasks for program managers, sorted by the amount of time investment required.
✍️ Unsurprisingly, content creation and curation will take up most of a program manager’s time. You can’t run an employee advocacy program without content!
🏆 This is followed by engaging employees in the program. This includes scheduled training/inductions and providing ad-hoc advice or guidance. Motivating employees and celebrating results are important, too.
📊 Next up is analytics. For some program managers, this may be just 30 minutes each week to ensure everything is on track, with more comprehensive reporting taking place monthly. For others, keeping a close eye on program performance every week is essential for maintaining buy-in and informing content strategy.
🗂️ The final part of the average employee advocacy program manager’s week is around maintaining the platform (or whichever technology is used). This involves everything from scheduling content and sending newsletters to providing access to new advocates and removing those who have left the organization.
With a tool like DSMN8, this only takes a few minutes each week, thanks to the helpful invites system, dynamic newsletter lists, and automation features.
In fact, we had a peek at DSMN8 usage to find that, on average, admin-level users only spend 20-30 minutes per week using the platform in total. This includes program management tasks, as well as time spent on other activities like sharing their own content and engaging internally.
Balancing Employee Advocacy with Primary Role Responsibilities
Time for the big question 👀
How do employee advocacy program managers balance this alongside their job?
From our conversations with program managers at a bunch of different organizations, these are the most common tactics implemented to help balance the workload:
⏰ Time Blocking: Creating structured schedules and dedicating specific time blocks to advocacy activities.
🎯 Setting Realistic Goals: Establishing realistic expectations for program management commitments without compromising their main role.
⚡️ Leveraging Automation: Utilizing tools like DSMN8 to streamline content sharing, tracking, and engaging employees.
📣 Leadership Endorsement: Securing executive support to reinforce the program’s importance and make it part of the company culture, reducing advocate recruitment efforts.
💻 Shared Responsibility for Content: Working with the marketing team to create and curate enough content to sustain program momentum. Encouraging employee-generated content and suggestions from advocates.
It’s incredibly rewarding to see how our people’s stories resonate beyond the channels we directly control, sparking conversations and engagement in third-party networks.”
Marcus Lier, Head of Marketing EMEA/Americas @ Synpulse.
Challenges and Opportunities for Employee Advocacy Program Managers
As with any company initiative, managing an employee advocacy program has challenges.
However, there are also plenty of career development opportunities that make the effort worthwhile for program managers:
Challenges
- Time management.
- Gaining and maintaining leadership buy-in.
- Keeping employees engaged.
- Consistently providing new content.
Opportunities
- Building a personal brand.
- Becoming known/recognized internally.
- An initiative to add to your resume.
- Demonstrating leadership skills.
I wear many hats and thrive on variety! My toolkit includes stellar communication skills, social media savvy, sharp analytical abilities, top-notch project management, and a knack for building strong relationships.
My day-to-day involves crafting and curating engaging content for our team to share, offering training and support, steering the program with precision, sparking enthusiasm among employees, and keeping a close eye on our progress to ensure we’re hitting our goals. It’s a dynamic role that keeps me on my toes.”
Tavis Coleman, Senior Social Media & Marketing Officer @ Mott MacDonald.
3 Most Important Success Metrics for Employee Advocacy Program Managers
The last aspect of an employee advocacy program manager’s role, but arguably one of the most fundamental, is monitoring and demonstrating success.
We’ll go over the essentials here, but for more in-depth guides, check out the following:
1. Employee Participation Rates 📣
Of course, spreading the word internally about the program is a key part of an employee advocacy program manager’s role.
But monitoring user adoption is important, too.
A program manager needs to know whether the content resonates with employees.
They should be aware if employee advocate engagement drops off, and be prompted to find out why. Gathering feedback from advocates is essential in understanding how to best support them.
2. Content Reach and Engagement 📊
Employee advocacy content isn’t just about how well the content resonates with employees.
Is it resonating with their audiences? Their networks on LinkedIn? Your ideal customers?
This is where social media analytics comes in.
Employee advocacy program managers should understand which content topics, styles, and formats perform best for their advocates.
Metrics like impressions, engagement rates, and website traffic answer these questions. They help program managers focus on the content that works for their organizations and adjust their strategy as needed.
Anecdotal feedback, such as comments and messages, is important too. Maintaining regular communications with advocates is essential for gathering these insights.
3. Business Impact: Leads, Sales, Job Applications! 🏆
I’ve saved this one for last because it’s the most important.
What impact does employee advocacy have on the business?
I’m talking about leads, sales, and attracting talent.
At the end of the day, no other metrics or feedback matter more than those tied directly to business results.
When it comes to gaining buy-in for scaling employee advocacy across business units or investing in an employee advocacy platform, the bottom-line results matter most to leadership.
Additional Resources
I hope this gave you a useful insight into the key responsibilities of an employee advocacy program manager and tips for managing the workload effectively.
More guidance on managing an employee advocacy program 👇
Emily Neal
SEO and Content Specialist at DSMN8. Emily has 10 years experience blogging, and is a pro at Pinterest Marketing, reaching 1 million monthly views. She’s all about empowering employees to grow their personal brands and become influencers.
