So, you’re looking to launch an employee influencer program in your organization, and you want to know how you’ll measure its effectiveness.
Well, to measure its future success, the first step you should take before implementing your employee influencer program is to set goals that identify what it is you want to achieve from the initiative.
There should be one or two admin-related metrics, such as adoption rates and active users, but think primarily about what your company hopes to achieve from the initiative. Identify your main goals and set targets based on those.
Here are the metrics we consider essential in measuring the success of an employee influencer program:
Adoption Rates
One of the most effective ways of measuring success will be monitoring the percentage of your employees that sign up for the platform.
Having dealt with companies of all sizes, DSMN8 has seen an average adoption rate of 20-30% of a companies total employee count. This number alone will have a significant impact on your content engagement and would inundate you with original content, but we say aim high! DSMN8 has seen adoption rates as high as 65% of a company’s total employee count.
Think of adoption rates simply, and remember that the more employees you have engaging with the platform, the higher your engagement rates will be, and your cost per click will be lowered substantially. However, we say to keep our numbers in mind and use our most common sign up rates as an indicator of how your employee influencer program is being received.
Chinese tech-titans Huawei took onboard 20% of all Huawei employees in Europe (82% of those invited) when they rolled out an employee influencer program with DSMN8 back in 2018. Huawei’s employee count sits at 188,000, which goes to show that adoption rates need not slip due to company size when the program is implemented correctly. Read the full Huawei case study.
Though fear not, it’s not always detrimental for companies to see high adoption rates, so don’t become disheartened if you don’t see the 20-30% average. After all, getting one C-Suite employee involved could have just as much effect as a handful of less-senior staff. In that, the C-Suite team tends to have more significant social followings, and typically have a lot more influence. So much so that 65% of consumers say their purchasing decisions are influenced by the words, values, and actions of a company’s leader.
Active Users
Adoption rates are the first step, but what’s most important is ensuring that employees who have signed up to the platform remain active long after the initial launch process.
Decide firstly how many active users you’d like to see within the platform, this target should be slightly lower than your adoption rate, as not all who sign up will remain active.
The critical method of maintaining engagement is to incentivize further use. Incentives might include senior leadership interactions, gamification, individual case studies, new content notifications, among other things.
Share Rates
If advocacy, reach, and engagement are your main focuses with your initiative, then you’ll want to monitor how many pieces of content are being shared per week.
As always, we say aim high, we believe that users should be encouraged to share as much content as the company sees fit, but bear in mind that the average typically seen with DSMN8 is 2.2 pieces of content per employee per week.
DSMN8 has seen a strong correlation between the amount of content that is uploaded/approved by admin users and share rates, which is likely because if there is less content available, it is less likely to tick all the right boxes. Employees will share content that they feel is helpful or relevant for them, so if you have content that is vast and diverse, employees are more likely to find something pertinent to share with their networks.
Having vast amounts of content will be vital in increasing share rates for larger companies, as employees and departments will vary drastically.
Content Uploads
Before rolling out an influencer program, check your blog and social media pages to note and get an idea of how much content is being produced. Knowing your current output will give you a number to work towards improving through employee-generated content.
It would also be insightful for your company if you were to compare employee-generated content against your corporate content. The demand for user/employee-generated content is set to be a big trend in 2020 as brands begin to rebuild trust with consumers whilst attempting to display authenticity.
Measuring the success of your employee influencer program will show you in real-time the benefits of starting the initiative. As mentioned in the beginning, the key is to identify how your company is currently performing and deciding what you want to achieve going forward with the program.
Additional Resources
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Lewis Gray
Senior Marketing Manager and Employee Advocacy Program Manager at DSMN8. Lewis specialises in content strategy, growing brand visibility and generating inbound leads. His background in Sales lends itself well to demand generation in the B2B niche.
