But empowering other teams to tap into social for business insights and create content—for your channels or theirs—requires the right training. In this article, you’ll learn about the core benefits of social media employee training, and what you need to get started.

The benefits of a social media employee training process

There are likely many employees at your company who want to get involved in social—on behalf of your brand, or to build their personal one. According to Sprout Social research, 56% of employees would share company posts simply because their company encouraged them to.

Whether it’s done during onboarding or throughout the year—in person or via webinars—social media employee training removes many of the common barriers that prevent employees from getting involved, or prevent brands from encouraging them to. Think: posting anxiety or brand risk.

Let’s get into a few ways employee social media training can empower staff and put brands at ease.

Organic brand advocacy

Your employees are some of your best brand advocates. Delivering training that empowers them to share company content on social means your brand and posts get amplified, while your team saves budget on paid advertising.

Brand advocacy leads to some of the most authentic promotion you can ask for. And in the age of authenticity, organic social posts are more important than ever. People trust real people—39% of consumers say real customer testimonials or demos are the content they prefer seeing from brands, according to The 2022 Sprout Social Index™.

If more reach even in a time of tight budgets sounds like a pipe dream, consider Vizient. Their use of employee advocacy led to a 10x audience reach from employee networks on a recent campaign. Vizient’s Social Media Director Elida Solis advises team members to “Share what’s most relevant. Don’t think of it as ‘promoting content.’ Consider what your network wants to learn more about. When you share a post, customize the copy to infuse your experience and make it relevant for your audience.”

Improved lead generation

On a day-to-day basis, this helps your sales team find success with direct social selling. But broadly, educating other teams to use social intentionally can reshape a brand’s entire go-to-market approach. According to The State of Social Media 2023 report, 43% of business leaders say that social data and insights currently inform their lead generation strategy.

You already know that social media is a direct line to your customers. Training your sales team to be more strategic on social can help them harness social as a tool to generate pipeline.

For example, Facebook is the most popular platform for social commerce, which is powerful for making sales via social. And LinkedIn business pages have a lead generation form, plus ad capabilities like sponsored content and Message Ads that make it easier to connect with your ideal audience. Training your sales team to use platform-specific tools like this can give them new avenues to capture prospects, and new ways to learn about the customer.

In the end, this benefits the marketing team, too. Proving ROI is a top challenge for social teams. Teaching other teams to use social for lead generation gives you and your team one more way to ladder social media efforts up to broader business goals.

Regulatory compliance

There’s always some risk when employees post about your company—from simply misrepresenting the brand, to violating confidentiality agreements. And if you work in a regulated industry, these risks may give you pause.

But just because your industry is highly regulated doesn’t mean you need to avoid or give up on social entirely. You need a system in place to mitigate brand risks, and a social media employee training program can safeguard against legal or compliance violations.

Work closely with your legal team as you create your training and employee advocacy programs. And if you have a social media policy, ensure the best practices documented in it are reflected and reinforced during your social media trainings.

For a deeper dive, read our social media compliance guide.

Data-driven decision-making

Social media intelligence is business intelligence. According to The State of Social Media report, 85% of business leaders say that social data and insights currently inform their company’s larger business strategy. Social data can empower every team to make smarter decisions—if they know how to use it.

For example, social listening can help product teams get ahead of market trends. 97% of business leaders agree that the use of social data to understand market trends will increase over the next three years—something clothing brand River Island is already doing. Using Sprout’s Social Listening solution, River Island works with their product team to research trends mentioned on social and to identify which products to promote.

Training other teams on how to interpret social data and use it to inform their strategy is essential to getting the most out of your channels. Using sharable dashboards (like those available in Sprout, or built in BI tools like Tableau) breaks down silos and makes your data accessible across teams.

Alleviated social team workload

It’s no secret that social media teams are stretched thin. Running company-wide social media employee training opens the door for other teams to provide post ideas and even film or stand in as social video talent.

This approach also expands the voices and expertise feeding your channels. According to The State of Social Media Report, marketing, customer care/support, communications, operations and sales and the C-suite are the top six teams who influence companies’ social strategies—these teams can harness their customer learnings and surface fresh ideas that enhance your content calendar.

And this is in addition to posts shared and amplified through employee advocacy. In tandem with advocacy content, employees you train in social can alleviate workload and extend the life of your content.

Get a template to train your social customer service team

6 components of effective social media employee training

The elements of your employee social media training will differ based on your business goals and needs. But here are six core components to get you started.

1. Executive sponsorship

Your executives set the tone for the rest of the business. Encouraging employees to get more involved on social starts with executives establishing that social media matters at your company.

If your executives are not social savvy, your social media employee training starts with them. At the very least, they should understand the business impact of social, and why it’s a cross-team asset.

At most, encourage them to actively post or offer to ghostwrite content for them. If they need convincing, consider this business impact: according to our #BrandsGetReal research, 70% of consumers feel more connected to brands with CEOs who are active on social. Active C-suite executives on social set an internal standard, while improving external brand perception.

Take it a step further: To foster an environment where social media is valued, its importance should be baked into your overall company culture. Establish an employee advocacy program plan to make posting easier for employees, including your executive team members.

2. A clear social media policy

Your social media policy is a guiding light of do’s, don’ts and best practices for social. For your marketing team, this is a great tool for onboarding new staff. But a policy also empowers employees from other departments to post confidently, while protecting them and your brand.

Your social media policy will be unique to your company and industry. Here are just a few items to consider:

• Are there words you must/must not use when referring to your business, brand and products?
• Are there topics you want to avoid mentioned alongside your brand?
• What are the do’s and don’ts of talking about your brand?
• Are disclosures needed around any topics or stories your brand discusses? (E.g., If you’re a news brand and you post a story about an affiliate, or parent brand.)
• Does your company react or comment on breaking news, or political and social issues?
• For curated employee advocacy posts, can employees add their own copy or are there specific captions that must be used?
• When posting about your brand, are there certain images to avoid? (E.g., behind the scenes areas that may be sensitive.)
• For employees creating posts for your brand channels, what is your brand voice? Are there any words or tones you should stay away from?

Take it a step further: Check out our article about brand safety tools to find out how you can further protect your brand’s online reputation, and teach others to do the same

3. Live and on-demand training options

Offering live trainings in tandem with on-demand options ensures everyone can learn based on their availability. But this also allows employees to revisit trainings, request access to specific social media management app—like Sprout—and find documentation that outlines how to post and engage the social team.

For example, at a previous company I worked for, the PR team held quarterly social media trainings for new employees. These sessions covered brand voice and values, the do’s and don’ts of images and brand-friendly language. If you weren’t able to attend one day, there would always be a later date to participate in. Here at Sprout, our social media team delivered a robust training for our content team on social copywriting best practices, enabling our writers to assist with post creation.

Similarly, IT software company Ivanti curates internal social resources for their employees to reference. Through blog posts, videos and how-to guides, employees can learn about how to use their employee advocacy platform—Sprout’s, specifically. They even created a social media-centric culture by baking this training into their onboarding process.

Take it a step further: Identify and lean on a small group of social savvy “internal influencers.” They can lead the employee advocacy charge or support content creation for the social team. Then, as you expand your employee social media training, these influencers can serve as go-to experts. Use this employee advocacy influencer program template to get started.

4. A tailored training “curriculum”

What we mentioned above is a “social media 101” training for all employees. But beyond employee advocacy, different teams will have different needs and uses for social—so a blanket training just won’t do.

Develop tailored employee social media training sessions for specific teams. For example, if your content team wants to support Reels creation, train them on video production and curation in your social media management platform.

If your HR team wants to tap social to build their employer branding strategy, recruiting efforts and employee engagement, train them on employee advocacy and LinkedIn tactics.

And if your product team needs social for market research and customer feedback, get them up to speed on social listening. Using a tool like Sprout, you can always provide different levels of access to specific members of different teams to democratize social insights across your business.

5. Provide tool training

When it comes to getting other teams comfortable with using social, ensuring they can access and use the right tools in your martech stack is half the battle. Incorporate those demos into your tailored team-by-team training sessions.

The tools certain employees need will depend on how they’re going to be using social. For example, staff across departments should know how to use your employee advocacy platform.

If your product or customer care team needs to tap social for customer and market insights, train them how to use social listening, or how to pull analytics reports from your social media management platform.

And if you have employees from other teams who want to contribute social content, teach them how to use design tools, like Canva. If you use Sprout, you can even have them submit drafts of content for approval.

6. A continuous feedback loop

This step is less about training your employees, and more about training yourself and your team to share the impact of a more social savvy employee base.

Sharing the performance of employee-created content shows them that their posts have business impact.

And this goes beyond employee advocacy. For example, you can create reports featuring HR-led employer brand content to highlight the engagement they received, or their impact on inbound applications. On the sales side, Google Analytics can highlight leads that came in through social and converted.

Here at Sprout, our content team contributes a handful of social posts to the social team’s production calendar each month. We regularly create mini-performance reports, sharing how the content team’s posts fed the larger social strategy.

Take it a step further: Separating employee posts and their metrics by hand is extremely tedious. In Sprout, Tagging employee-created content enables you to immediately report success metrics for those posts specifically and their individual—and combined—impact.

Start a social media employee training program that grows your entire business

For companies to flourish today and in the future, investing further in social media is crucial.

Leaning on other teams to create or share content is a win-win-win. It expands your reach, alleviates social team workload and creates new ways for employees to build their personal brands.

And it all starts with reliable employee social media training that provides your colleagues with the right skills.

Use our social media policy template to shape a policy that you can use to guide all of your social media training sessions.

The post Social media employee training: A playbook to get everyone involved in extending your brand appeared first on Sprout Social.

Edgio provides powerful solutions across web apps, content delivery and video streaming—servicing approximately 4% of global internet traffic and clients in 38 countries worldwide. While the company isn’t new, its brand name is. Previously known as Limelight Networks, Inc., the business rebranded in June 2022 following its acquisitions of Layer0 and of Yahoo’s Edgecast. What followed was a year of significant change for the company as they pivoted from a CDN vendor to an edge company providing applications and solutions that take advantage of their global edge network.

When Lindsay Moran, Senior Manager, Content and Brand Strategy, joined Edgio in the summer of 2022, her challenge was to amplify the company’s new brand on social media with a strategy that could deliver results quickly and cost-effectively. Moran led the charge to implement Sprout Social’s Employee Advocacy platform, a decision that not only drove employee engagement, but helped the company generate $126,000+ in earned media value (EMV) in just three months after launching its advocacy program company-wide.

The extra reach from our employees—not paid advertising—is helping us grow our audiences on social. Our earned media value was over $126,000 in the first three months of our program

Lindsay Moran
Senior Manager, Content and Brand Strategy

Reinvigorating employee advocacy during a time of significant transformation

Before its rebranding, Edgio had tried to launch an employee advocacy program, but it did not gain much traction internally. Moran said she recognized that the time was right to try again after helping Edgio develop a host of new assets, from blogs to web content, to help the business “rebuild” its position as an industry thought leader. Delivering consistent messaging about the company’s products, solutions and brand across social media channels was also a priority.

“Social media is a no-brainer for sharing this quality content,” said Moran. “We have small audiences on our key corporate social media channels, like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. But we knew we could amplify our reach by inspiring employees to use their personal networks to help promote our brand.”

Helping employees feel connected to our brand and aware of our news was also a top factor in the decision to reinvigorate employee advocacy at Edgio. “When merging companies and pivoting to new value-added capabilities for our customers, there’s a lot to share,” she said. “Employee advocacy is helping us stay abreast of all the good news and stay focused on the future by inspiring our employees to play a front-line role in telling our brand story.”

Employee advocacy needs to feel natural and authentic. What’s great about Sprout is that we can equip our employees with the content we want them to share, but they still have the opportunity to put their individual spin on it and make it their own.

Lindsay Moran
Senior Manager, Content and Brand Strategy

Impressive post-launch results that inspired a “happy dance”

To get the new employee advocacy program off to a successful start, Moran said she leaned on the team from Sprout to provide training to a select group of handpicked brand enthusiasts at Edgio who took part in a 30-day pilot program in February 2023. “It was a great experience,” Moran said. “Sprout let us record the pilot training session, and we’ve since turned it into an internal training tool for our new hires.”

She added, “The pilot program helped us to ensure we had plenty of content prepared going into our company-wide rollout of Sprout’s Employee Advocacy platform. And through a post-pilot survey, we gathered more valuable insights on how to make our program successful from the outset.”

Edgio officially introduced the new employee advocacy program to its workforce through a monthly sales awareness call and a companywide “EdgeTalks” presentation (Edgio’s version of a TED Talk). Moran said these forums were a vital way to communicate the “why” for the program clearly, and to offer a solid overview of program basics plus “tips and tricks” for users to make the most of employee advocacy.

Moran also emphasized that the “tremendous support” of Edgio’s Chief Marketing Officer, Nancy Maluso, who played no small part in helping to build momentum around the employee advocacy effort. “She continues to promote and encourage the program among our leadership teams,” Moran said.

With Sprout’s Reports, Moran tracks the impact of Edgio’s employee advocacy program and shares the results with employees to help them stay motivated “cheerleaders” for the brand.

There’s been new business activity percolating at Edgio, too, which can be attributed to the company’s use of Employee Advocacy by Sprout. “During a recent team meeting, our sales leader in EMEA told us she’d received a lead from content shared through Advocacy,” said Moran. “I did a happy dance! It’s so exciting that we’re already starting to see fruit from our labor. It validates what we’re trying to do as a company, and why we’re working so hard to promote this program.”

Sprout makes it easy to jumpstart and grow employee advocacy

Moran said the employee advocacy program at Edgio is blooming, and the sales, marketing and customer success teams are particularly active in sharing content. But several product specialists and other subject matter experts have also become frequent users, and Moran said their outreach is particularly valuable for helping Edgio grow its reputation as an innovator.

“The ease of adopting a tool like Sprout helped our team embrace the new employee advocacy program quickly. After just the first month, the adoption rate was 34%,” Moran said. “Today, 20% of employees are active users, sharing content with their audiences more than three times per month, on average. Over time, I’d love to see our adoption rate hit 50%. That’s my aim.”

To learn more about how Employee Advocacy by Sprout can help amplify your brand’s social presence and engage your team—without spending more on paid promotion—request a demo today.

The post Edgio sees $126,000+ in earned media value with Employee Advocacy in just 3 months appeared first on Sprout Social.

Employee advocacy empowers employees to share smart, quality content with their social networks. But, getting there takes more than a well-crafted email encouraging your team to share branded content on their social networks. Employee advocacy tools streamline the process of transforming your employees into brand ambassadors.

These tools don’t just make it convenient to organize posts—the best ones elevate your overall employee advocacy strategy so you produce and promote content that your workforce will be proud to share with their connections. And get results that fuel your brand awareness and social strategy.

In this list, we break down five best employee advocacy platforms (including our own, of course) and how they’re different from the standard tools you might come across.

1. Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social

Sprout Social offers an advocacy solution (previously called Bambu) that helps you amplify employees’ voices to drive real business results.

From enabling employees to quickly share posts to equipping them with industry-leading content, Sprout helps brands turn employees into thought leaders and expand the reach of your brand story.

With our social media management platform, your team executes seamlessly across tactics to maximize your reach and engagement. Plus, social media integration with Salesforce enables your sales team with the functionality to share content with prospects and build a profile that attracts key customers.

Together these solutions offer three distinct benefits that will help scale your strategy and expand your social presence:

Identify and distribute content that resonates most

Employee advocacy is more than just curation—you need to know what content is resonating with employees and how their connections are engaging with it.

Our analytics features help you uncover which content is driving the most engagement and, in turn, inform future content strategy. For example, Medallia, an enterprise customer experience platform, used Sprout to hone in on relevant metrics that informed them how to use content more effectively to better engage their customers in different industries. Plus our automated content distribution enabled their internal team to curate and deliver relevant content to employees across the globe to share within their networks. The result was a 48.6% year-over-year (YoY) increase in engagements with Sprout.

Increase employee participation with curated, personalized content

According to Sprout’s Employee Advocacy Report, 72% of engaged users post about their company if the content is written for them. Sprout’s pre-approved message ideas give your employees a starting point that helps them stay on-brand, while having the freedom to edit their voice and choose their preferred social network.

Employees can also customize their feeds by following topics relevant to their roles and suggest content for others to share. This encourages adoption by creating a tailored experience for employees.

West Monroe, a digital services firm, was able to use these features alongside executive support to scale their employee advocacy program to 400 active users and 10,863 shares in the first six months.

Increase social ROI

Per The Sprout Social Index™, more than 1,000 marketers revealed employee advocacy helped them drive more qualified leads, establish thought leadership and create new networking opportunities.

Advertising success platform Simpli.fi used Sprout to leverage employee networks for these very reasons. “Our potential reach from the sales department alone is at almost a million unique users because everyone has such large networks online,” noted Spencer Traverm, Director of Content at Simplifi.

With Sprout’s employee advocacy program, the company was able to align its brand transformation with a new social media strategy and overcome resource limitations, earning them almost $90,000 in estimated earned media value.

Sprout is suitable for businesses of all sizes—enterprises and small to medium-sized businesses—that have built a social presence and are continuing to invest in social media marketing. It’s also great for all industries including regulated industries like healthcare.

If you’ve just started building your social presence, alternative all-in-one platforms include:

• Sociabble
• ClearView Social
• Hootsuite Amplify
• PostBeyond
• Oktopost

2. “My Company” Tab by LinkedIn

LinkedIn’s “My Company” Tab transforms how your employees connect, communicate and celebrate with each other, all within a single, well-established social network.

This built-in feature provides a dedicated, employee-only space and enables your team members to stay updated about company milestones, coworker achievements and more.

LinkedIn’s “My Company” Tab allows your marketing and talent branding teams to recommend organic posts and curated content for employees to reshare. This feature helps build an employee advocacy culture and increases your brand’s social footprint.

The tool is more than just a space for sharing company news—it’s also a platform for interaction. Employees can engage with trending LinkedIn posts from their coworkers, which drives a sense of community and inclusiveness. These interactions spark meaningful conversations that enhance your brand’s reach and credibility.

Also assign a “Curator” who manages the experience for your employees and curates content for them to share organically on Twitter and LinkedIn.

The “My Company” Tab is an excellent option for B2B businesses (like B2B SaaS platforms) who want to improve their LinkedIn employee advocacy and build a presence there. It helps your business access the right circles and directly reach key decision-makers through your employees.

Plus, Sprout also connects with LinkedIn. A combination of LinkedIn and Sprout’s powerful analytics and listening features enables you to take your strategy to the next level and drive more meaningful conversations with a wider audience.

3. EveryoneSocial

EveryoneSocial solely focuses on employee advocacy. Its freemium model makes it one of the best employee advocacy platforms for businesses looking for a low-cost or even no-cost introduction to employee advocacy.

The freemium model also opens doors for small businesses or startups that want to test advocacy without making a substantial initial investment.

A central feature of EveryoneSocial is its content hub. This digital space aggregates all the content your company wishes to disseminate through its employees. From the latest blog post to an important company announcement, everything is organized and accessible in one place, so it’s easy for employees to find shareable content.

EveryoneSocial also has social selling features. The tool integrates with sales tools like Salesforce and HubSpot to empower sales teams to build their personal brands and track leads at the same time.

4. Haiilo

Haiilo is an employee communications platform that includes advocacy features but primarily focuses on creating an internal community.

The platform offers a centralized space for employees to share experiences and achievements and connect their social media channels, which simplifies content sharing.

What makes Haillo’s features different from other platforms is its comms and advocacy analytics. The tool analyzes comms across any employee segment and notifies you about critical developments.

These insights give you data to calculate your advocacy ROI.

Find your most influential employees with this analysis and push them toward the forefront. Plus, set up automated reports to ensure you’re up-to-date with the latest trends and insights in your internal community.

Haillo’s gamification features help employees see how well they’re driving engagement and traffic compared to their colleagues. Make employee advocacy fun with leaderboards and offer perks to encourage active participation.

5. Firstup

Previously known as Dynamic Signal, Firstup, amplifies your brand’s voice through advocacy and offers internal collaboration and communication with a robust employee experience ecosystem.

Firstup specifically uses the platform to connect with job candidates. Employees can get in touch with candidates, promote relevant listings and maintain brand consistency at the same time.

What really makes Firstup different, though, is how it’s available in 30 different languages. This makes it a perfect fit for global teams that want to position their employees as ambassadors in different regions.

Firstup also lets site administrators draft multiple versions of a social post and randomly distribute them among employees for sharing. You can tailor these posts to globally distribute your brand’s message and make sure it’s locally relevant and sensitive to cultural nuances.

Firstup is a good choice for companies that want to encourage their global teams to promote their brand’s message. This is a great way to get everyone talking about your company’s mission and values, all while connecting with potential customers and candidates on a local level.

Amplify your social presence with employee advocacy

People trust other people more than they do companies. It’s a natural tendency for us to trust our peers, friends and people we admire more so than faceless corporate entities.

This makes employees your most valuable brand ambassadors. Employee advocacy platforms empower employees to share your brand’s message in their unique, authentic voice. They make it effortless for employees to share content and extend your brand’s reach far beyond what you could achieve alone.

Amplify your brand presence while staying connected to your overall social strategy with Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social. With its robust analytics, you’re never in the dark about your program’s performance and your team is always equipped with the insights they need to iterate and improve.

Ready to turn your employees into your biggest supporters? Learn more how Sprout’s advocacy features will help you.

The post 5 top employee advocacy tools and platforms to drive growth appeared first on Sprout Social.

One of the best ways to jumpstart an effective advocacy program is to identify internal “influencers” to champion your brand on social. We created this employee advocacy influencer plan to empower you to build an influencer program from the ground up, earn buy-in from across your team and maintain long-term success.

This comprehensive template will help you:

• Identify a group of internal influencers
• Fuel a sustainable content pipeline
• Craft dedicated influencer communications at a regular cadence
• Measure your business-wide impact

Download this program plan template to maximize the success of your employee advocacy initiative.

The post How to Create an Effective Employee Advocacy Influencer Program Plan appeared first on Sprout Social.

This post serves as a comprehensive guide on using LinkedIn for business marketing. We show you all the essential steps starting from how to build your business page. Let’s dive in.

Table of contents:

• How to create a LinkedIn business page
• How to use LinkedIn for business
• Benefits of using LinkedIn for business

How to create a LinkedIn business page

If you’re going to build a strategic presence on LinkedIn, the first thing you need is a business page. This page will serve as the go-to source of information on anything related to your business. Prospective clients will check out your content to gauge your expertise. Meanwhile, job applicants will use it to understand your company culture.

Follow the steps below to create a LinkedIn company page for your business.

Step 1: Start by creating a company page

Go to your LinkedIn homepage and click on the “For Business” drop-down menu at the top right-hand corner of the screen. Then select “Create a Company Page.”

Step 2: Select your page type

Select the type of page that represents your business–a company page, a showcase page or an educational institution page. If this is going to be the main company page, select the “Company” option. Showcase pages are sub-pages that you can later create to link to your main page.

Step 3: Fill out your company profile

You’ll need to provide your business name, industry, organization size and organization type. Optionally, you can include a website URL, add a tagline and upload your company logo. On the right-hand panel, you can see a preview of your page to see what it’ll look like to others.

Step 4: Create the page

Click on “Create Page” to finish creating your LinkedIn business page. Now your page is all set up.

From here, you’ll have the option to follow additional steps to improve your chances of success. This includes adding a description, including a location, following relevant pages and more.

Beyond these essential steps, check out our guide on how to build the perfect LinkedIn page for more help. This will provide you with additional best practices and tips to set your page up for success.

How to use LinkedIn for business

Now that you have a proper LinkedIn business page set up, it’s time to focus on how to use it. Check out the video below for a crash course on using LinkedIn for business, including content types and employee advocacy.

Decide on goals

To build a more effective LinkedIn presence, you’ll need to create specific goals for the platform. Take time to meet with representatives from your sales, product, customer service and human resources teams. That way, you’ll be able to identify the top priorities across different departments.

For example, sales team members might be more interested in how LinkedIn can increase web traffic and drive sales. Meanwhile, the human resources department might want to attract more quality hires from the platform.

These conversations will likely result in a lot of ideas. If you’re not sure what to prioritize, here are some questions to guide the process:

• Which audience are you trying to reach?
• What are they interested in?
• What is the action you want them to take after seeing your content?

Engage with your target audience

Just like on other social media platforms, engagement matters on LinkedIn.

Engage with your target audience by participating in relevant conversations. Comment on their posts to add valuable insights or answer important questions. So when their connections see your comments, they might want to learn more about your business.

Moreover, when you engage with others, they might want to reciprocate and engage with your content. This means you get to drive more engagement on your posts, which could boost visibility and get your content in front of the right people.

When people engage with content on LinkedIn, their activity sometimes shows up in the feeds of their connections. That means when someone comments on your post, there’s a chance that their connections will take notice of the post. That way, you could grow your reach and attract a relevant audience.

Maximize reach and visibility

Using LinkedIn for business is all about amplifying your reach so that more people can discover your brand. It is helpful to understand how the LinkedIn algorithm works to maximize your brand visibility. Another effective approach is to get your employees involved.

Chances are your employees already have a solid professional network on LinkedIn, and you want to tap into it to maximize your reach. One employee advocacy study found that branded messages had a much higher reach when employees share them. In fact, branded messages shared by employees had a 561% higher reach than when shared through branded channels.

Have your employees reshare your company’s LinkedIn posts and latest articles. And make sure they’re regularly providing their connections with the latest company updates. As representatives of your brand, they serve as a reliable source when it comes to information about your company. At the same time, they add a more personal touch to the message since it’s coming from real people.

At Sprout Social, team members regularly share product update info and branded content on LinkedIn. This puts a human face to the brand and helps us to build a more personal connection with our audience.

Showcase your expertise

People aren’t going to follow your company page just because it exists. They have to be able to derive some value out of it. That means you need to showcase your expertise and give them a reason to tune into your brand’s updates.

You can share thought leadership pieces that address relevant and trending topics in your industry. Follow LinkedIn best practices and make sure to add original thoughts and ideas to give these pieces a unique touch. This is a great way to show your audience that you know what you’re talking about.

Additionally, you could use native documents such as how-to guides, reports and case studies. These types of content are a great way to address the needs of people who are looking for helpful information. How-to guides will show that your team has expertise in the field. Surveys and reports show your in-depth knowledge of the industry. Meanwhile, case studies serve as proof of your team’s capability.

For example, Semrush regularly shares how-to guides and practical tips related to SEO. It provides informative answers to pressing questions and guides the audience on how to do certain things. This has helped to establish the brand as an authority figure in all things related to SEO.

Track ROI with LinkedIn analytics

To maximize the potential of LinkedIn for your business, it’s important to make data-driven decisions. Best practices and assumptions can only get you so far. Instead, you need to look at what your LinkedIn data is telling you to fine-tune your strategy and get more out of the platform.

The native LinkedIn Analytics tool can provide you with valuable data about your page performance. You’ll be able to learn about how many people visited your page, how many followers you gained and more. You can even look at the performance of your content in terms of impressions and engagement.

Use these insights to understand how certain strategies impacted your performance. For example, did you see a spike in visitors after sharing your latest report? Or perhaps you might notice that certain types of posts are getting significantly more engagement than others. This should be able to inform how to improve your strategy and get more out of LinkedIn for your business. If your company requires more detailed data, a third-party LinkedIn analytics tool may be a better solution.

Benefits of using LinkedIn for business

So if you follow the tips above, what do you have to gain? How can you benefit from using LinkedIn for business marketing? Let’s take a look.

Builds influence and credibility

An active presence on LinkedIn helps you demonstrate your credibility. People can go to your LinkedIn page to find all the information they need about your business.

LinkedIn lets you update your page with all the essential details such as your company size and location. Plus, you can include additional details about your social impact, work-life balance and so on. By providing easy access to this information, you can showcase your credibility and earn the trust of your audience.

Moreover, you have the opportunity to use your LinkedIn business page to build your influence. This may involve consistently showcasing your expertise through valuable content. You could share thought leadership pieces and practical information related to your industry. Eventually, this will help you establish your authority in the field and build your influence.

Grows your audience

LinkedIn gives you access to a massive network of job seekers and B2B consumers. According to the latest LinkedIn stats, the platform has over 900 million members worldwide. While they may not all be relevant to your business, you still have millions of people you could potentially reach. With the right tactics, LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to exponentially grow your audience.

Develops relationships with your community

LinkedIn is the hub of conversations in the professional community. You’ll find people discussing everything from job opportunities to the impact of ChatGPT. These conversations serve as an effective tool to build relationships within your community.

You could join relevant LinkedIn Groups and participate in trending conversations. You could even start the conversation yourself and encourage people to share their thoughts. All this engagement eventually helps you build a relationship with the right people.

Ready to use LinkedIn for your business?

As the largest online professional network, LinkedIn is a goldmine for businesses that want to reach B2B consumers. Make the most of the steps provided above to get started with the platform.

Already have a LinkedIn strategy but not sure if you’re doing it right? Use our LinkedIn for Business worksheet to see where you currently stand.

The post The complete guide to using LinkedIn for business appeared first on Sprout Social.

Brand advocacy is when individuals who love your brand share their positive sentiment about your product or service to their followers and audience. These are loyal brand followers who can sing your praises.

Harnessing and amplifying this advocacy should be an integral part of your social media marketing strategy. And, with the right brand advocacy strategy, you can realize a stunning ROI.

In this article, we define what brand advocacy is, examine different types of brand advocates, and highlight the many benefits of brand advocacy. We also show you how to measure the effectiveness of your program.

Table of Contents

• What is a brand advocate?
• Is brand advocacy right for you?
• Who is a brand advocate?
• What does brand advocacy look like?
• Why brand advocacy matters for your company
• How to determine if brand advocacy is effective

What is a brand advocate?

Brand advocacy occurs when people become excited about your product or service and they share that excitement with others. This could be through word-of-mouth, or by posting to their social media networks, in blog posts, on review sites and other corners of the internet.

But did you know customer service is a huge part of brand advocacy? When you please your customers and clients, they will be more likely to share their experience with you with others.

But brand advocates aren’t limited to customers. In fact, there are several groups of individuals who can be advocates for your brand, including employees and partners.

The best thing about brand advocacy is that it costs little to nothing to obtain. Even if you have yet to launch a brand advocacy program, you likely already have advocates working on your behalf. They post positive content about your brand simply because they love what you offer.

Is brand advocacy right for you?

Brand advocacy can be one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. With it you can extend your reach, find new audiences, generate leads and find top talent all while amplifying brand awareness. Enthusiastic brand advocates can help new brands get before larger and more engaged audiences. With the boost by advocacy, brands can magnify their market share much more easily, faster and farther.

For customers it’s about products, services and customer service. It’s about the relationships brands develop with their customers through engaging with them on social media or other customer care channels.

For employees it’s about loving their work, the company culture and, of course, the product.

Advocates can create enough buzz on social media to reinvigorate a brand’s position in the market. Of course, you still need a great product or service for people to get excited about.

More and more people are turning to social media to research products and services. Studies show that the vast majority of people will trust recommendations from people they know. So think word-of-mouth, and reviews and ratings as well.

And, considering most of this type of organic marketing is free, or of little cost to you, brand advocacy has a lot to offer any brand.

Who is a brand advocate?

Clients and customers

These are some of your best brand advocates. Their user generated content (UGC) is considered to be much more authentic than brand messaging. Their contacts, family and friends trust this content. In fact, recommendations of this type, earned media, are trusted by 92% of consumers around the world beyond all other types of advertising. And 70% of consumers will trust other consumers’ opinions posted online.

This type of advocate works for you right now because they love your product or service. They do this without any thought of reward. Imagine what they could do for you with a little incentive.

Employees

Employees know all about your company, your product or service and your culture. This makes them powerful brand advocates, and perfect to represent you to consumers and potential hires. Not only does this increase brand awareness, but it helps bring in top talent. And, research by LinkedIn has shown that employees have an average of 10 times the connections as their company’s Page followers. This means that what your employees post about the company reaches 10 times more people, and their message can continue beyond that. By encouraging your employees to share news, updates and successes, your brand’s reach can extend to audiences you might not have been able to reach before.

Industry partners

Any other organization or company affiliated with your brand can also be a brand advocate. What they say or post about you can improve brand awareness and influence buying decisions. Think: comarketing or cobranding campaigns with your industry partners as an opportunity to also increase your reach.

Influencers

Influencers make great brand advocates because of their large audiences. Harnessing them as part of your marketing and advocacy strategy allows you to target audiences who are interested in your brand’s offerings. Influencers as brand advocates can help you raise brand awareness in specific markets and help you capture a new cohort of consumers.

What does brand advocacy look like?

Some ways clients and customers advocate are by talking up your product or service in person and online and by posting positive reviews. They act as your customer service representatives by answering questions for other customers. Whether on your website or elsewhere, this is powerful PR for you. But how can you harness this advocacy and amplify it?

First, you need to find out who you already have as advocates. Look for those who are leaving positive reviews. Who is liking and sharing your content? Who is producing content about your brand? One excellent way to identify brand advocates is through social listening. Sprout Social’s Social Listening tools let you search for specific terms and hashtags related to your company. You will then be able to tap into conversations online.

Once you have an idea who your advocates and audience are, offer incentives for further engagement. Some incentives could include running social media contests, sending company swag, or shout-outs on the company website or social media.

To maintain relationships with current or prospective advocates, respond to reviews, comments and posts quickly. Provide excellent customer service. Conduct surveys and ask for reviews in newsletters, chats, receipts and phone call confirmations. Google provides an easy way for you to get Google reviews through a direct link.

Remember, with brand advocates, it’s all about the relationships you forge.

When we talk about employee advocacy, it’s a bit different. What is employee advocacy? As mentioned earlier, your employees are some of your best advocates because they know about your brand inside out. Some will already be posting about you, but you could harness their networks to increase brand awareness, create a wider personal network for sales team members, and showcase subject-matter expertise for industry leaders. Having employees in an employee advocacy program will be to your benefit.

Data from Sprout’s Employee Advocacy Report reveal that 72% of all employees would post company content on their personal pages if their company wrote it for them. And engaged users (spending 60 minutes or more daily on social media) are 11% more likely to post this content than casual users.

In their role to increase brand awareness, 73% of employees (engaged users) believed that posting company content helped. And 72% believed that it helped them in their social selling. It’s clear from these employee advocacy stats how valuable an employee advocacy program is.

The easiest way to institute such an advocacy program is to use Sprout’s Employee Advocacy. With Advocacy platform, you can provide curated, branded content to your team that they can share with a click or two. You can even create approved message ideas for your employees so they can post with confidence that they are staying on-brand.

With Advocacy by Sprout Social, it’s easy to upload photos, videos and links for your employees to share to their networks. And, you can use the “Send to Advocacy” feature from within Sprout to duplicate social posts you’re already sharing to your brand’s social networks.

Why brand advocacy matters for your company

1. Improved brand perception

Brand advocacy improves how people view your company. It increases trust. Instead of your company, a “real person” – a customer, employee or influencer – is extolling the virtues of your company, product or services.

2. Reflection of brand authenticity

For the same reason, people see the information provided by the advocate as more authentic. This reflects well on your company, conferring authenticity to your brand by virtue of this perception.

3. More organic brand awareness

Advocates provide an organic way to grow brand awareness. Brand advocacy creates positive, enthusiastic conversation around your products and services. This is invaluable to increasing your visibility, which can lead to more leads, sales, hiring prospects and growth for your company.

4. Higher likelihood of media attention

The more conversation your advocates generated about you, the more likely the media will notice you. News outlets and publications may start writing about you because of all the talk. Not only does this attention open the potential for new and broader audiences, but it also helps boost your brand’s trust levels in the community.

5. Wider audience reach

Your reach becomes more extensive with brand advocacy. Brand advocates post excited, positive content about your product or services to their own social networks. This gives you access to their friends, family and followers, and to untapped markets.

6. Saves you money

With all this free or low investment marketing, brand advocacy saves you money. Imagine what it would cost you to produce all that organic marketing yourself. This is money you can allocate elsewhere, if needed. Despite what advocacy programs might cost initially to implement, the ROI would be more than worth it.

In fact, read how we use Sprout’s Advocacy to overcome social media challenges and its payoff.

How to determine if brand advocacy is effective

It’s important to have clear goals for your advocacy program. Once those are set, you can better determine which metrics you need to track. Some common metrics that help determine generally if your advocacy program is effective are

• Number of likes, shares, impressions, hashtags and mentions, as a measure of brand awareness
• Number of likes, shares, clicks and comments, as a measure of social engagement
• Conversion rates based on completed CTAs
• Number of posts and actions of your advocates, which relates to your overall reach. It gives you a sense of an advocate’s number of connections
• Online reviews and ratings, as they affect buying decisions
• Where your advocates are posting, as this helps understand which channels work best
• Net Promoter Score (NPS), at minimum a measurement of customer loyalty, helps to predict the number of brand advocates you have
• Earned media, which is publicity or media generated by organic means aside from your marketing efforts
• Employee conversion rate, as the percentage of employees actually participating in your employee advocacy program

Sprout’s Employee Advocacy measures shares, engagements, potential reach and earned media value automatically. With this dynamic tool you can monitor effectiveness in real-time.

And with Sprout’s Advocacy ROI Calculator Tool you can clearly see the benefits of your program.

Amplify brand advocacy on social media to launch your brand to the next level

Brand advocates work for you enthusiastically with or without incentives. Why not take this enthusiasm and ensure that it not only continues, but intensifies? Getting your social advocates to continue and even increase their efforts on your behalf can be as easy as posting their UGC on your company’s social accounts. How far will your social advocacy strategy take you?

With the might of your employee advocates behind you, you can use advocacy to overcome social media challenges. Your social strategy ROI and organic reach can be dramatically improved with brand advocacy. Don’t you think it’s time you upped your advocacy game? Try with a free trial of Sprout Social today.

The post The power of brand advocacy and its uses appeared first on Sprout Social.

A well-crafted social media policy can do much more than protect your brand’s reputation—it protects your company’s security, privacy and legal interests. The internet never forgets, so it’s better to be safe than sorry.

An effective social media policy also supports your employee advocacy content strategy. When employees post about a company on social media, it can improve brand awareness, drive qualified leads and establish thought leadership.

We’ve created a customizable social media policy template to help you build rules and protocols for representing your brand online including:

• Personal account do’s and don’ts
• Security and privacy guidelines
• Company association rules

Our social media policy template is a starting point for creating standards that will protect and grow your business. Empower your employees with the right guidance so they have the space to advocate for themselves while staying true to the brand and its values online.

The post Set Clear Standards With an Employee Social Media Policy Template appeared first on Sprout Social.

Employee advocacy empowers employees to amplify your brand message in a way that’s consistent with your business’s voice and tone. With a strategy behind it, advocacy will help drive sales, attract talent and position your team members as leaders in their respective networks. It’s a win-win-win, and the companies that capitalize on the opportunity are reaping the benefits.

The time to build your social advocacy program is now. Kick off your process by taking inspiration from these four brands that have mastered the art of employee amplification.

How advocacy can strengthen your social media strategy

Social media algorithms are constantly evolving. While the path to a perfectly curated feed is paved with good intentions, there’s bound to be some trial and error along the way. As networks work those kinks out, marketers have to adapt.

Now that most networks are moving toward content recommendation algorithms, many social media managers are headed into 2023 asking a new question: “If our followers aren’t seeing our content, who will?”

That’s where employee advocacy comes in.

Whether we like it or not, seeing an original post from a familiar face in our social feeds has become a novelty. It piques interest. Factor that interest into the 842 social media connections each of your colleagues has on average, and you’ve opened your brand up to a whole new world of potential impressions.

According to our research, engaged social media users already think it’s essential for employees to post about their company and vice versa. This mutually beneficial relationship can help build brand awareness for your company while helping employees build up their personal brand.

4 social advocacy program examples to inspire your strategy

If you want to get a program started but you’re not sure where to begin, look no further. We’ve gathered these four proven social advocacy examples for tips and inspiration to coach your next crop of brand advocates.

1. Vizient

Vizient, the largest healthcare performance improvement organization in the US, saw a 200% increase in engagements within the first six months of launching their social advocacy program.

Results like these don’t just happen on their own. They happen when a dedicated team member—like Vizient’s Social Media Director, Elida Solis—gets equipped with the tools needed to power their strategy. For Vizient, that tool is Employee Advocacy Software by Sprout Social.

To get the rest of #TeamVizient up to speed and ready to post, Solis and her team put together an advocacy resource hub, complete with product demos, instructional videos and on-demand webinars. These provisions made it easy for individuals to understand how they can build their personal brand through their company’s advocacy program.

Since we started using Sprout’s Employee Advocacy solution, my network has become more engaged. I get asked about my company more than ever and people comment on how active I am on LinkedIn. It makes it easier for me to interact with my connections on social. I would highly recommend Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social to other companies considering it.

Carl Taggart
Vice President, Zone Leader NE & SE US—Spend Management Services and Delivery, Vizient

These efforts created a solid foundation for a program that sets a new standard for social advocacy. It even helped earn them the 2021 PR News Digital + Social Award for Best Use of LinkedIn (Community Engagement).

Takeaway: What you get from social advocacy is directly related to what you put into it. Dedicate staff time and resources to understanding what will make a program thrive at your organization. Then, keep iterating. If you set it and forget, you risk losing impact down the line.

2. Ivanti

Setting goals without benchmarks is like trying to shoot an arrow blindfolded. You might hit your target—but it won’t be easy. That’s why the team at Ivanti turned to Sprout for the tools and performance insights needed to revitalize their social advocacy program.

Jamie Laliberte Whalen, Ivanti’s Director of Social Strategy, knew exactly what she was looking for when she connected with Team Sprout. “I wanted Sprout to tell us where we are and where we need to be so we could set reachable goals to move us toward becoming best-in-class. I told the customer success team at Sprout, ‘Give me the key performance indicators and other metrics that we can hold ourselves accountable to, so I can bake that into our social strategy for the year.'”

With Sprout’s help, Whalen identified program adoption as an area of improvement. After retooling the program with a new incentive structure and revamped internal resources, Whalen kicked off an internal communications campaign to drum up excitement for the program.

These efforts resulted in a newly thriving ambassador program. “By the end of the first month of revitalizing the program, we had 17 million reach and an adoption rate of nearly 46%—which is well over the 30% benchmark for a best-in-class program,” said Whalen. “Also, after launching our incentive program, we went from 1,000 to 3,000 shares in the first month, and then up to 17,000 shares within the first quarter.”

Takeaway: You need to measure employee advocacy to gauge where you’re succeeding and where there are opportunities to improve. Use your performance data or industry benchmarks to create meaningful goals for your social advocacy program.

3. ZoomInfo

To Caroline Salis, Social Media and Community Manager at ZoomInfo, social advocacy groups are a type of community.

And why wouldn’t it be? ZoomInfo’s employee advocacy program boasts around 1,000 members who lean on each other for tips and inspiration on how to best position themselves and the ZoomInfo brand online.

“Praise is our best incentive,” says Salis. “People use our employee advocacy Slack group to get traction on their posts or gut check humor. The support and excitement you get from your teammates is natural and authentic. That’s an incentive in itself.”

This positive feedback loop has done wonders for ZoomInfo’s share of voice. “We have so many people who are proud to work at ZoomInfo, but they don’t know how to share. Advocacy and our Slack community empowers them to do something they’ve wanted to do all along.”

Takeaway: Experiment with incentives beyond gift cards or prizes to understand what really motivates your team. More than half of engaged employees say they would share company posts on personal accounts if they’re happy with their job (59%), and if they’re proud of the content they’re sharing (52%).

4. Salesloft

If you’re familiar with Salesloft but you’re not exactly sure why, it’s probably because you’ve seen Tom Boston come across your feed.

Tom Boston, Salesloft’s Brand Awareness Manager, has over 24,000 followers on LinkedIn. His most recent video received more than 3,000 likes, 500 comments and 200 shares. He’s a content creation powerhouse and a major asset to the Salesloft brand.

Boston started his content creation journey with general sales advice content. During a webinar on building a personal brand on LinkedIn, he revealed that he workshopped his humor-driven persona through experimentation.

His efforts show what’s possible when you take a chance and hit post—not just for Salesloft, but for other B2B sales leaders, too.

Takeaway: Tap a group of internal influencers to help your program take flight. Lean on these individuals to promote the program internally by showing what’s possible with advocacy.

Learning from social advocacy examples  

Hopefully, these advocacy program examples will inspire you to design your strategy that plays to your business’s strengths. As you pull this off, remember that content is only half the battle. You’ll need the right tools—like Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social—to empower your colleagues to be the best brand ambassadors they can be. 

Sign Up for a Free Demo

The post 4 social advocacy examples that prove authenticity pays off appeared first on Sprout Social.

When taking an employee advocacy program up the chain, employee advocacy stats should be the backbone of your pitch. Decision makers want to see proof of success and the measurable benefits your company will gain by launching a brand amplification program.

Keep reading for statistics on employee brand advocacy that will grab the attention of multiple leaders across your C-suite.

Explore other latest social media stats that reflect social media’s influence on consumer behavior.

The employee advocacy statistics your boss needs to see

According to The Sprout Social Index™, more than two-thirds (68%) of marketers report their organization already has an advocacy program.

While many advocacy programs are informal side projects, sophisticated brands will find ways to formalize and evolve them through dedicated staff, tools, processes and employee training.

Of the 1,000+ marketers we asked, those that had an advocacy program stated their top three objectives were increasing brand awareness, attracting qualified job applicants and having more control over brand messaging. Other reasons included driving more qualified leads, establishing thought leadership and creating new networking opportunities.

And employees want to post about their companies. According to Sprout’s Employee Advocacy Report, 72% of engaged users would post about their company if content was written for them.

Your C-suite pitch: Traditional social media tactics are becoming less reliable. Organizations leading the advocacy charge have an edge over their competitors. In the face of limited resources, changing algorithms and congested feeds, an advocacy program is a company’s greatest asset to amplify content, increase ROI and recruit top talent.

Using Sprout’s Employee Advocacy platform is the easiest way to launch a brand advocacy program. In the platform, you provide pre-approved messaging that your team can share from one centralized hub. And your internal team can curate the articles directly in Sprout. Employees are empowered to post authentically, while feeling confident they’re staying on-brand.

Stats that prove the impact of advocacy on brand amplification

Advocacy supercharges your brand awareness efforts and enables you to amplify your reach beyond what you could achieve with organic tactics alone.

Take IT software company Ivanti. After creating a brand ambassador program with the help of Sprout’s Advocacy platform, the organization reached 16 million people on social media in the first month.

We had similar results at Sprout. In 2022, content shared through our Advocacy platform earned more impressions than all our social networks combined. In fact, 95% of the 740,000 impressions earned from our recent Salesforce global partnership announcement were driven by posts our employees shared.

Your C-suite pitch: Across industries, organic social performance has taken a hit. Tapping into employee networks is the most impactful way to amplify your best performing content and spike impressions—without stretching your bandwidth or ad budget.

Sprout’s Advocacy platform automatically measures shares, engagements and reach, so you can see your amplification impacts in real-time.

Stats that prove the impact of advocacy on revenue

Enlisting your employees as brand advocates isn’t just key to increasing awareness, it has serious effects on your bottom line and sales targets.

First, advocacy enables you to scale and amplify your best performing content so you can generate qualified leads without straining your ad budget. For example, at Sprout, we reached almost $450,000 in earned media value in 2022, while Ivanti achieved more than $500,000.

Second, according to Sprout’s Employee Advocacy Report, posting company content helps employees accomplish their day-to-day tasks and long-term goals—including social selling. About 72% of engaged social media users and 62% of casual users say sharing company posts helps their social selling efforts.

Empowering your employees to share meaningful content positions them as thought leaders in your industry, helping them generate new business opportunities. As LinkedIn reports, salespeople who regularly share about their company on social media are 45% more likely to exceed their quota.

Your C-suite pitch: Advocacy unlocks revenue gains by complementing your demand generation efforts. From achieving earned media value to empowering your team members to do their best work, investing in an employee brand amplification strategy pays in dividends.

Sprout’s Employee Advocacy reporting tools give you the data needed to quantify your advocacy program, and to connect results to leads, event registrations and more.

Stats that prove the impact of advocacy on hiring (and keeping) top talent

Potential new hires will research your company on social, keeping an eye out for what your current employees think about it. Afterall, your employees’ perspectives matter three times more to prospective candidates than your CEO’s. When employees celebrate your company culture, they elevate your employer brand and increase interest in your company.

In a recent Sprout survey of 1,000 consumers, 87% of Millennial respondents indicated that they feel more connected to brands when they see employees sharing information online, and 81% think it’s important for employees to post about their company (up from 72% in our previous survey).

Advocacy also invites your current employees to be stewards of your brand, fostering a sense of ownership, loyalty and belonging. When employees have a stake in your company, it improves their long-term morale, engagement and retention.

Your C-suite pitch: Creating employee advocates strengthens your recruitment and retention strategies. Advocacy expands your candidate pool and generates positive social sentiment and buzz that increases your application volume.

From Sprout’s platform, you can draft and send custom internal newsletters. Broadcast curated stories about open roles, company achievements and employer brand content so your employees can share the posts from their inbox with one click.

Why Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social is worth the investment

Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social is the easiest way to extend your social reach, increase brand awareness, drive sales and attract talent—while satisfying your employees with an easy-to-use platform.

Like one Sprout customer in the healthcare industry who increased their engagements by 200% in six months after launching their advocacy program. Their employees also reported 98% satisfaction with the platform.

Calculate how your business can benefit from using the Employee Advocacy platform with our ROI calculator.

The post Employee advocacy stats to secure C-level buy-in appeared first on Sprout Social.

But a poorly timed or worded social post could harm your brand reputation. Yet, 45% of companies don’t have a social media policy for employees in place.

Although people may forgive your brand, the internet never forgets, so it’s better to be safe than sorry! Implementing a social media policy will help protect your company and give employees the space to advocate for themselves while staying true to the brand and it’s values.

What is a company social media policy?

A social media policy is part of a company’s business code of conduct that tells employees how they should represent themselves and the brand on social media. It includes guidelines to protect the brand’s security, privacy and legal interests.

Social media platforms provide avenues for brand promotion, but they also present opportunities to misrepresent your brand, which is why a good social media policy is so necessary.

Why do you need a social media policy for employees

Here are several reasons organizations should adopt a social media policy:

Create brand advocates

Social media policies allow you to unlock all the benefits of employee advocacy, without putting your brand credibility at risk.

When your employees post about the organization online, it can increase brand awareness, establish thought leadership and drive qualified leads. Along with helping social selling, employee posts can support social recruiting efforts, attracting top talent to your company.

Your social media policy is a critical advocacy tool, giving your employees the guidance they need to represent your brand accurately within social networks.

Promote DEI

Brand diversity in social media is more important than ever. According to the 2023 Sprout Social Index, 21% of consumers follow brands on social because their values align with their own.

Amplifying diverse voices via social media is an actionable step brands can take to prioritize representation and attract top talent from marginalized communities. An inclusive social media policy will empower and encourage voices from all backgrounds to advocate for the brand.

Maintain a consistent brand identity

A social media policy ensures that whenever someone interacts with your company online, either through a brand channel or an employee, they get the same consistent experience. This develops a more reliable, trustworthy identity for your company, turning customers into loyal fans and ambassadors.

Minimize legal action against your brand

Social media presents complicated considerations such as privacy law and copyright law. A well made social media policy will protect the company from potential lawsuits.

Consult with your legal counsel and outline a list of do’s and don’ts for the company to follow. These rules of thumb will help ensure the organization and contractors are compliant with laws, reducing the risk of legal action against the company.

Protect your brand from privacy and security risks

There are many privacy and security risks involved with using social media. The larger your team is, the larger those risks become. A good social media policy combined with security protocols will protect your accounts against hacking, phishing and fraud accounts.

And since social media is a common resource for scammers and criminals, it’s imperative your social media policy includes guidelines that protect both your employees and company. Whether it’s defending against phishing scams or ransomware attacks, make sure that everyone in your organization is vigilant about online protection.

Prevent a public relations crisis

Many organizations make the mistake of waiting until they’ve faced a public relations disaster to put a policy in place. Be proactive and implement a strategy in advance to minimize crisis.

Your social media crisis plan should align with your social media policy. For example, the policy can designate which teams are responsible for handling a PR crisis.

What every social media policy should include

A well-crafted social media policy will provide a variety of benefits, like empowering your staff and protecting your brand. But to relish those benefits, your policy needs to outline clear, comprehensive guidance.

Here’s some essential components every social media policy should have to get you started:

The purpose of the policy

Explain why the organization uses a social media policy. Be transparent and illustrate why your brand needs it. Here’s an example from our social media policy template:

Who the policy applies to

Emphasize how the social media policy applies to everyone from executives and managers to interns and freelancers. An example from our template is below:

Note how this section also provides the brand’s definitions of company-related information and social media. These clear distinctions ensure everyone within the organization is on the same page.

Personal account guidelines

You can’t control everything your employees do and say on their personal social media accounts. However, it’s important to show them why their behavior on personal profiles affects your company and how they can avoid conflict.

Regardless of whether or not your employees are speaking for you, the world might view them as a reflection of your brand. If your employees are acting questionably online, this raises suspicion about your business too.

Your social media policy will have a list of rules to follow, but the most important thing to remind your employees is that whatever they say on social media, they’re representing the company—even when on their personal accounts.

Outline basic expectations for behavior. For instance, they need to:

• Check their facts
• Respect the law (including copyright law)
• Avoid saying negative things about your brand or other companies

Company association rules

It’s also a good idea to include a disclaimer on personal accounts to remind customers that your employee is an individual, not a spokesperson for your organization. Many social media policies ask team members to state all of their posts are based on their own opinions, like Best Buy:

By separating themselves from their employees’ opinions, Best Buy reduces their risk of a PR crises.

Security and privacy guidelines

Your social media policy should also defend against security risks and privacy issues. Robust social media policies outline the dangers of sharing online and help keep your employees out of trouble.

At a minimum, these guidelines should include details about:

• Sharing proprietary or confidential company information
• Posting defamatory, derogatory or inflammatory content
• Posting information or pictures that imply illegal conduct
• How to create secure passwords, including two-factor authentication for brand and personal social media accounts
• How to keep software updated and devices secure
• How to identify potential social media risks and attacks
• How to respond if a security breach takes place

The safer your employees are with their social media actions, the more secure your business becomes.

Legal guidelines

Your social media policy must provide clear guidelines on how to handle sensitive areas, particularly regarding the law and industry regulations.  Legal requirements vary by country and state, so make sure you consult with your legal counsel.

Your policy can cover, but isn’t limited to the following:

• Credit sourcing: What is the source of the information your employee is sharing? Crediting images and other information is crucial.
• Privacy and disclosure procedures: Let your employees know what is considered confidential, such as customer information.
• Disclaimers: Let your staff know what a disclaimer means when they use it online. As the City of Edmonton outlines in their social media guidelines, even if someone states that their opinions are their own, they’ll still be seen as a representative of the city by the public.
• Regulatory challenges: Certain industries like finance, government and healthcare have specific regulatory requirements. Outline any rules that may be associated with your industry.

Responsible engagement

Clarify who can speak on behalf of your company on social media. A small problem could snowball if not handled appropriately. If someone leaves a negative comment about your brand online, make sure your employees know how to respond.

The degree of freedom you give your staff will depend on the nature of your business. If you do allow your team to offer advice to customers, it’s a good idea to train them on the following:

• Brand guidelines: How to talk about your products, services and company.
• Etiquette: How to respond to comments from customers (tone of voice, customer escalation strategies, etc.).
• Confidentiality: Which details should absolutely not be shared on social media.
• Consequences: What will happen if they fail to follow the company’s social media policy.

For some businesses, the best option will be to direct the situation toward the staff trained to manage PR matters and conflict resolution. You may have members of your team responsible for crisis response, message approval, customer service, public relations management and social engagement.

An excellent way to ensure conflicts are always handled properly from the start is to set up pre-approved responses to common issues in a social media management platform like Sprout Social. These responses show your brand is aware of their concern and will direct them to the right person to resolve the problem.

You can even use Sprout’s social listening tools to ensure you’re the first to know when someone says something negative about your brand. The faster you’re aware of a problem, the easier it is to fix it before the fire spreads.

Social media policy examples

If you’re looking for inspiration, many social media policies are publicly available. Here are a few great social media policy examples that are specific and comprehensive:

Dell

Dell’s social media policy is digestible, yet still meets the requirements of the company’s needs.

The policy is broken down into several sections: purpose and scope, related policies and consequences of violations, social media account ownership and Dell’s five social media principles.

Notice how Dell uses these sections to define expectations and ties the policy back to the company’s code of conduct and equal employment opportunity policy.

For example, Dell Technologies’ Five Social Media Principles mentions the guidelines are reiterated in onboarding. This section also lists zero-tolerance behavior, rules of thumb and specific steps to protect security, privacy and legal compliance.

Playstation

Along with implementing a social media policy for employees, some brands create a separate policy for content creators and influencers. Playstation has a great social media policy for influencers.

Playstation begins by stating influencers must follow their rules whenever they post about Sony Interactive Entertainment products and services on any social media platform. Notice how they define collaboration as “free product, event tickets, or any other benefit or if you have an ongoing relationship with us.”

From there, Playstation lists specific guidelines that fall underneath four main principles: be responsible, be transparent, be specific and be yourself.

For example, under the “be transparent” section, Playstation lists how to disclose the relationship. They note the disclosure should be visible to viewers without having to click a link or a “see more” prompt. Influencers must include #ad at the beginning or end of the post. They also include caveats for video content:

Walmart

Walmart has a comprehensive set of guidelines and is an excellent model for enterprise companies with sophisticated social media presence across several channels. The retailer breaks down guidelines for both customers and associates for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

The retail company states that no employee outside of the Walmart social team should answer customer complaints or questions directed toward the company. This kind of rule might seem restrictive, but it’s often best for larger companies to err on the side of caution.

Target

Target also does a great job of breaking down their social media policy in a way that’s clear and easy to understand. Their policy begins with a purpose, definition of social media and policy application:

Their guidelines are brief, but provide specific dos and don’ts for employees to follow:

They include examples of potential policy breaches and best practices when using social media:

The retailer also includes a summary of the social media policy within their code of ethics, with actionable steps to follow for specific scenarios and forms of communication:

Social media policy tools for employee advocacy

Social media is a powerful tool for your business, but it takes intention to enjoy its benefits. A social media policy will help guide employees across the organization on how your brand should be represented on social.

Social media in the workplace is manageable—you just need to dedicate time and effort into developing a social media policy that works.

Take control of your brand’s social identity by showing employees they have the power to deliver incredible results for your company. Give them the tools they need to best represent the brand and themselves by downloading our social media policy template.

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