What is Employee Advocacy and Why Is It Important?

Last Updated: 15th June 2026.

If you’re here, it’s because you’re at the start of your employee advocacy journey.

And frankly, that’s awesome. Prepare to have your mind blown and rethink how you promote your company on social media!

Today, we’re covering everything you need to know about employee advocacy: what it is, examples, results you can expect, what an employee advocacy platform does, and best practices.

You’ll also find free resources to help you start and scale your own program.

Employee advocacy is the promotion of an organization or its products/services by its employees.

An employee advocate creates positive exposure for your company by sharing content or “advocating” for your products or services.

These employee brand ambassadors amplify your company’s online presence by sharing brand messages with their own professional and personal social networks. This typically occurs on platforms known for professional networking, such as LinkedIn or X/Twitter.

In a nutshell, employee advocacy is word-of-mouth marketing by employees on social media.

When you think of brand advocates, you might think of bringing in external people or influencers. However, unlike traditional influencer marketing… employees aren’t being paid extra to do it.

Employee advocacy is simply an employee sharing company content with their social media network.

We’ve covered the definition of employee advocacy. But in practice, it takes many forms. Let’s look at some examples to fully understand what employee advocacy is:

If one of your colleagues shares a blog post or news article by your company on LinkedIn, that is employee advocacy.

Or maybe they’re writing an original post, sharing their insights on a recent industry development. In this case, they’re building their personal brand, establishing themselves as a thought leader. In turn, this activity increases your company’s credibility and trust. So that’s also a form of employee advocacy.

Perhaps your organization has recently participated in volunteer work or hosted a charity fundraising event. When your colleagues share photos from the event on LinkedIn, it supports your organization’s positive reputation and its corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives.

You guessed it, that’s another form of employee advocacy.

If you share a behind-the-scenes photo from a company away day on Instagram… that is also employee advocacy. You’d be promoting your company culture, elevating your organization’s employer brand to showcase the organization as a great place to work. Depending on the nature of the photo anyway!

Now you know what employee advocacy is and the various forms it takes, let’s look at some specific examples.

Here’s our VP of Marketing, Jody Leon, doing the most! 💪

He shares a graphic featuring data from a report we put together about the impact employee advocacy has on internal communications. This is an educational and informative post, providing value to his network of marketers.

Here’s a completely different style of employee advocacy content, by Gymshark’s Chief Brand Officer, Noel Mack.

Noel’s post is a great example of authentic employee-generated content. His photo, shared on Instagram, shows off a Gymshark sign while he wears sports clothing.

Finally, here’s an example from DSMN8 client, Dropbox. Here, Masha reshares a post by her colleague about their paid volunteering days, adding her own commentary.

This is a great example of showcasing corporate social responsibility and company culture, all with authentic employee-generated content 👏

For more employee advocacy examples, check these out:

• 8 Social Media Advocacy Examples.
• 5 Companies Championing Employee Influencers.
• The Porthole Effect: How the World’s Biggest Brands Showcase Company Culture.
• DSMN8 Success Stories.

By now, you know what employee advocacy is, and you’ve seen what it looks like. But why are so many companies investing in it right now?

It comes down to one shift: the old playbook for reaching people online no longer works the way it used to.

Organic reach for company pages has been quietly shrinking for years. Social algorithms increasingly favor content from people over content from logos — a post from a real person on your team will typically travel further than the same message posted from your company page.

The numbers back this up. Employee-shared content has been shown to reach up to 561% further than the same content shared through brand channels alone. And Gartner predicted that 90% of B2B marketing strategies would include an employee advocacy component by 2023, a sign of just how mainstream this shift has become.

In practice, this means: if your competitors are activating their employees on social and you’re not, they’re reaching significantly more of your shared audience for free.

Want the full picture? Read The Business Case for Employee Advocacy for the data, the objections you’ll hear from leadership, and a checklist for getting buy-in.

Candidates research companies the same way buyers research vendors. They look at the people who work there, not just the careers page.

What do you want prospective candidates and customers to see when they check out your company on social media?

A) Nothing.
B) Corporate updates.
C) Genuine moments from employees — insights, wins, behind-the-scenes glimpses of what it’s actually like to work there.

If you answered C, you’re already thinking about this the right way.

When employees naturally share what it’s like to work somewhere — wins, projects, day-to-day moments — it gives candidates an authentic view that a polished employer brand campaign can’t replicate.

It also means your existing team becomes part of your recruitment marketing, without extra spend.

Employee advocacy isn’t just something that benefits the business; it benefits the people who share, too.

Employees who participate build their professional visibility, develop a public track record of expertise, and often find new opportunities come from it — from speaking invitations to career moves.

In DSMN8’s 2026 Benchmark Report, 94% of employee advocates said social media had positively impacted their careers.

Want the full picture? The Benefits of Employee Advocacy for Employees covers this in depth.

Employee advocacy has become a trending topic in marketing over the past few years.

With the rise of influencers over the past decade (and, more recently, B2B influencers), forward-thinking brands recognized the power of internal or in-house influencers. They started encouraging their teams to build a social media presence.

When 2020 hit, brands had to adapt. Networking and marketing shifted to a 100% digital strategy.

And companies quickly realized the role their employees could play, leveraging their networks for marketing, sales, and recruitment.

Combine this with increasing costs for paid social media advertising and influencers, and you can see why many marketing teams with reduced budgets are leaning on employees for content distribution instead.

Most of this activity happens on LinkedIn, and for good reason. It’s a professional network, which means employees are far more comfortable sharing company content there than on platforms they consider personal space.

We’ve seen good results from brands experimenting on Instagram and Facebook, too, but LinkedIn consistently delivers the strongest results for B2B employee advocacy.

Each team has distinct reasons to participate — from reach and pipeline for marketing and sales, to employer brand for HR. For a full breakdown, see The Benefits of Employee Advocacy for Every Team.

To put it bluntly… yes.

Here’s why:

People want to hear from people, not brands.

This is especially true on social media: we’re much more likely to follow a company’s employees or their CEO than the company itself.

Buyers want transparency and authenticity now more than ever. A message from a “regular” employee has a much more trustworthy feel to it than a post from the company channel.

And that’s not all. Trust in brands is declining year on year.

The Edelman Trust Barometer found that almost two-thirds of people are inclined to distrust organizations.

In fact, 76% of people say they’d trust a message from someone they know over any form of branded content.

But that’s only half of the story: it’s also about the ability to reach the right audience.

Edelman & LinkedIn’s 2025 B2B Thought Leadership report revealed that:

“95% of hidden decision-makers say that a piece of thought leadership makes them more open to sales outreach.”

Employee advocacy doesn’t just build trust: when your people are the ones publishing that thought leadership, it puts your brand in front of buyers who weren’t actively looking, and makes them more receptive when they are.

And let’s not overlook the influence your senior leaders can have.

We analyzed 11,107 employee LinkedIn posts, and the results were clear: executive influence is huge.

The CEO of a civil engineering organization generated the same level of LinkedIn engagement with under 5,000 followers as the company page with over 300,000 followers.

That’s the same results, with 98% fewer followers.

🔸 Amplify company messages via employees’ networks, building trust in your brand.

🔸 Offer an inside look at life at your company to attract top talent. Employee advocacy is one of the most effective tools for employer branding, turning your team into ambassadors.

🔸 Enable your employees to build personal brands, positioning themselves as subject matter experts and thought leaders.

So what does an employee advocacy platform do? 🤔

Simply put, an employee advocacy platform helps you manage your employee advocacy program. It provides a space for all your company content, so employees can easily find and share it with their networks.

Some platforms offer only the essentials for managing your advocacy program, while others include features such as gamification, user segmentation by department or region, internal comms tools, and comprehensive analytics.

The goal of an employee advocacy platform is to make it as easy as possible for employees to participate. Things like having a mobile app for employees who aren’t desk-based and delegating access for time-poor executives make a huge difference.

We’ve written a guide to choosing the right employee advocacy platform based on your organization’s requirements, so give it a read if you’re looking to learn more.

Well, strictly speaking, no. Not to begin with anyway.

But, speaking from experience… scaling an employee advocacy program is really tough without a platform.

We’ve written a detailed guide on the ways to manage an employee advocacy program, from taking a ‘manual’ approach to using a combination of social media management and employee communications tools.

But for now, let’s cover the basics:

If you’re starting a small program with around 20 employees, you can manage it manually, e.g., using your existing internal comms solution or email to provide your team with fresh content to share.

But once your program grows, particularly across departments and regions, providing advocates with tailored content suited for their audiences becomes essential.

The last thing you want is 50 employees sharing identical content on social media!

An employee advocacy platform makes it easy for your team to find and share content, while including engagement features such as gamification and automation.

Plus, without technology in place, you lose the ability to monitor the performance of your employees’ social media efforts and demonstrate ROI.

Sure, without a platform, you can track things like employee followers and content impressions in a spreadsheet, for example.

But what about the really good stuff, like impact?

You’ll want to track website clicks and comparative cost-per-click, and identify which content is generating the most engagement to level up your content marketing strategy.

Not to mention that monitoring metrics manually becomes extremely difficult with more than 5-10 employees, as it requires them to enter their data consistently.

With DSMN8, you can centralize all of your company content, making it easy for every employee to find and share relevant content with their networks.

You can even offer multiple pre-approved captions for employees to use when sharing to social media.

This ensures your advocates stay on-brand and compliant, reduces the time they need to invest in social media, and creates endless variations on the same piece. No more identical posts!

You can also incentivize people to share with gamification features, including claimable rewards and leaderboards to highlight top performers and incite friendly competition.

Most importantly, our analytics suite allows you to measure the advocacy program’s performance as a whole, at the team level, and for individual users.

You can measure everything from clicks generated to comparative cost-per-click and earned media value (ROI) in real-time.

Related post: Employee Advocacy Metrics to Track for Measuring Success.

Check out the 90-second product tour video below for a peek into the DSMN8 platform and how it works! 👇

Learn More about Employee Advocacy:

• The Benefits of Employee Advocacy for Employees
• Employee Advocacy Isn’t Just For Marketing!
• The Content You Need For Employee Advocacy

For expert insights and bite-sized tips, grab a copy of Employee Advocacy: 101 Cheat Codes by Bradley Keenan.

To become an employee advocacy pro yourself, I recommend signing up for the Employee Advocacy Certification Course.

It’s free, and will teach you everything you need to know about starting your own program, no platform required. Plus, you’ll achieve a shiny new certificate to add to your LinkedIn profile!