Third-Party Content Curation for Employee Advocacy Programs: Best Practices

Effective employee advocacy programs thrive on engaging, shareable content, but creating it all in-house to meet constant demand isn’t always feasible.

That’s where third-party content curation comes in.

By strategically sourcing and sharing high-quality, relevant content from external sources, you can empower employees to build trust on social media and position themselves as thought leaders.

In this article, we’ll explore the best practices on third-party content curation for employee advocacy programs, drawing on our years of experience supporting organizations with this.

Content creation involves producing original material. This can include blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, or social media content.

Creating content is valuable for reinforcing your brand’s voice and messaging but can be time-intensive and resource-heavy.

On the other hand, content curation focuses on strategically finding, organizing, and sharing existing content from trusted third-party sources 🔎

It’s important for organizations to create their own original content to build their reputation and demonstrate expertise. But when it comes to employee advocacy programs, curating helps strike the right balance between quality, relevance, and efficiency.

There are many benefits to curating third-party content for your employee advocacy program. Here are the three main ones:

Providing employees with high-quality content is the foundation of a successful program. The right content will add value to your employees’ networks while helping position your brand as a credible thought leader.

But the internet is a busy place! Identifying relevant sources can feel a bit overwhelming.

In this section, we’ll explore practical ways to find content that aligns with your program’s goals, engages employees, and resonates with their audiences.

Following these steps will help you build a continuous pipeline of shareable content.

You’ll already be aware of the major publications in your industry, but spend a few minutes creating a list of these.

If your list is coming up a bit short, ask your colleagues!

Most importantly, these should be reputable sources that you and others in your industry trust.

Follow your chosen publications on social media, add them to an RSS feed, or simply bookmark them in a folder in your browser.

Make it a habit to check these sources for relevant industry news or educational guides that would provide value for your advocate’s networks.

Perhaps the easiest way to stay in the know about industry happenings and news is to set up relevant Google Alerts.

Be particular about your alerts because you’ll receive email updates with articles mentioning these keywords! Something like ‘social media’ is likely too broad: be specific.

You don’t have to tackle this alone! Make sure your advocates know that you’re open to ideas.

As Bradley points out in the podcast episode above, your employee advocates can be a great source of content ideas. After all, they know their networks and the types of industry content they’re most likely to engage with.

The DSMN8 platform has a ‘Suggest’ button, where users can submit content ideas to admins for consideration. As a content curator for our own program, I love it when my colleagues suggest ideas and share great articles they’ve read 🥰

If you’re not using DSMN8, you could set up an internal comms channel for employees to share relevant articles they think would work well for your program.

Joining relevant social media communities for your industry or content pillars is a great way to discover sources you might not have considered and relevant news articles.

Depending on your niche or industry, you can find groups on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Reddit.

You can also create custom feeds on platforms like Bluesky or Threads to keep up with relevant topics, accounts, and hashtags in one place.

Finally, you could use content/news aggregation tools like Feedly to stay up-to-date with industry trends and find timely pieces for your colleagues to share. The media mentions tool, Buzzsumo, is also a helpful resource for this.

By following these steps, you’ll have found plenty of third-party content pieces for your team to share 🙌

The next step is the how.

It takes a bit more work than just copying and pasting a URL but significantly less time than crafting original content.

Below, you will find our top 5 best practices to follow when curating employee advocacy content 👇

One of the most important things to remember when you’re curating content for employee advocates is that they are not companies.

If you’re a social media manager in your main role, you’ll probably use the word ‘we’ when creating content all the time.

You’ll want to avoid this for advocacy content. The posts should sound like your employees have written them.

It just won’t come across as authentic if the posts sound like they’re coming from a company 😫

If the most important thing to remember when curating is that employees are not companies, this is the second-most:

Create multiple post captions (and preferably images) for every post.

Even if your advocacy program only includes 10 employees, you still wouldn’t want them all sharing duplicate posts, right?

Not only will this come across as disingenuous to those connected with multiple members of your team on social, but it’s a sure-fire way for algorithms to consider them as spammers 😬

We’re big on encouraging employee advocates to adapt content to fit their own tone of voice. Even better if they can add their own relevant experiences to the posts!

But we all know that people are busy. So, it’s your job as an employee advocacy program manager or admin to do some of the heavy lifting. We recommend creating 5 captions and images for every post. This creates 125 content variations!

DSMN8’s Dynamic Display feature makes this as easy as possible: employees can simply pick and choose their favorite combination to share immediately or schedule 👌

While we’re talking about creating multiple caption variations…

Try to write them with different personas in mind.

Perhaps you could write a more fun and casual caption with emojis from a marketer, contrasting with an authoritative voice from an executive leader.

This will add a nice variation to your posts, making it easier to appeal to as many employees as possible. The ideal scenario would be for all of your advocates to find something that suits them.

Using AI can significantly streamline your content curation workflow. Tools like ChatGPT or Claude can help generate ideas for captions, identify trending topics in your industry, or summarize articles for you.

DSMN8’s built-in AI Content Assistant can generate new post captions based on the captions you provide. This makes it easy to create variations efficiently.

However, keep in mind that AI works best as a support tool rather than a replacement.

Always review the content and adjust your posts to maintain authenticity and follow your organization’s values.

While many employee advocacy programs focus on LinkedIn, you may encourage your advocates to be active on other platforms such as X/Twitter, Bluesky, Threads, or Facebook.

If so, make sure the content you’re curating is suitable for these platforms. While Facebook and Threads allow longer captions like LinkedIn, X/Twitter and Bluesky have lower character limits. These platforms are designed for short, snappy posts.

Here at DSMN8, we like to include 1 ‘Twitter-style’ caption for every piece of content curated. For those in our team who like to share on X or Bluesky, this means they don’t have to make the post more concise themselves.

You should also consider the media requirements of each platform. For example, Bluesky currently doesn’t allow videos longer than 60 seconds. Check out our social media image sizes guide if you need some guidance!

The final thing to consider when curating third-party content is definitely not one to skip: compliance.

It’s so important to do your due diligence here. All curated content should be sourced from reputable sources.

The last thing you want is to unintentionally spread misinformation. That’s a surefire way to damage your (and your advocates’) reputation 🫣

Double-check for copyright compliance before sharing images, videos, or articles: the original source of the content should always be credited. Not doing this is theft.

Once you’ve checked this, you’re all set to ask your advocates to share! 📢

More helpful resources and guides on employee advocacy content strategy:

• The 3-Step Employee Advocacy Content Strategy.
  
• What is Evergreen Content and Why Do I Need It?
• How Segmenting Employee Advocacy Content Boosts Results.

In the podcast episode below, Bradley and Lewis dive into the three most important content types for your advocacy program:

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Don’t have time to curate employee advocacy content?

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