What is employee advocacy and does it really work?

What is employee advocacy?

Employee advocacy is the promotion of a brand or company that an individual works at. In this video, we dive deeper by defining how employee advocacy can supercharge your social strategy and show you how to start a successful program in five steps.

A good employee advocacy strategy will enable your employees to:

• Amplify company messages and promotions, which increases brand awareness
• Positively share about their experiences and work life, offering an “inside look”
• Act as an expert and recommend the company’s products and services to friends and family

Types of employee advocacy

There are a few ways that employees can become advocates. Some don’t even require a formal program and might already be in action in your company.

Company swag & merch

Sending out swag and merch is a classic technique for enabling your employees to get the word out. While it predates social media, posts sharing swag on social media are common and another great way for employees to highlight company culture.

Useful and well-designed swag are always hits with employees. Put on a branded cozy sweatshirt or slap a cute branded sticker on your laptop cover and you’re instantly, subtly promoting that company.

Internal incentives & recognition

Happy employees naturally become brand advocates. Which means that your company culture and workplace environment need to be set up in a way that celebrates accomplishments, privately and/or publicly.

One classic example of this is an employee of the month program, where a valued employee receives public recognition and sometimes, monetary compensation or some other reward. Employee recognition software programs also exist where anyone can send out compliments or rewards to others within the company. Even starting small, such as setting aside some time in a meeting for recognition, is a step towards more effective employee advocacy.

Social media advocacy

Social media has become a valuable component to a successful employee advocacy program. Social media advocacy is when the employee posts about the company in a positive way on their personal accounts. Coordinating an effective social media advocacy strategy can involve more work than the other two types, but it can also have a high ROI.

In a recent Edelman study of consumer trust, 63% of 18-34 year olds surveyed trust what influencers say about brands more than the brands themselves. When both your customers and your employees are already on social media, it makes sense to utilize this channel for advocacy.

What are the benefits of employee advocacy

Both the company and employee win in the right employee advocacy scenario.

The benefits of a program crosses multiple departments:

• Increased brand awareness for marketing
• Wider personal network for sales
• Positive workplace environment for recruiting and HR
• Subject-matter expertise for industry thought leadership

Benefits for the company & brand

Having an employee advocacy program in place offers many benefits for the company and can be used in conjunction with an employer branding program.

• Increases brand awareness reach. One study found that company branded messages had a 561% reach when shared by employees compared to branded channels. Think of it as another way to organically grow your brand.
• Improves employee performance. The same study also found that companies that had high employee engagement outperformed those with no engagement by 202%.
• Maintain control over brand messaging. When you have a formal program in place, content is provided for your employees to redistribute out. The important core parts of brand messaging can be retained while employees are encouraged to personalize individual details.
• Drives more qualified leads. When employees post positively about their workplace and company culture, others passively absorb this information. It’ll be easier for recruiters to find more people who are already knowledgeable about the company and are interested in working there or doing business as customers.

Benefits for the employee

Because a large part of this program involves continuous execution from the employees, the benefits need to be substantial. Luckily, they are.

• Easy, ready content to use. When you provide the links and copy that can be used for social media, employees can either use it as-is and save time, or add a personal touch if they prefer to be more active on social with their own voice. Neither takes that much time, making it easy for someone to post.
• Helpful for those who aren’t social media power users. Some people aren’t on social media all the time but still want to be an advocate. They might feel hesitant at posting, which is why having available content is great for them. In addition, the more they post, the more familiar and comfortable they feel with using social media.
• Establishes thought leadership. A recent study with B2B decision-makers on their perception of thought leadership found that 89% of them say it has enhanced their perceptions of an organization. Branded content is not the only content that can be shared. Articles within your industry, when shared with commentary by employees, helps establish them as a knowledgeable person in the field.
• Networking opportunities. Posting on social media naturally creates networking opportunities. The more you interact with others, the more connected they feel to you.

Tips for launching an employee advocacy program

If you’re starting from scratch, it might seem overwhelming to set up your own employee advocacy program. That’s why created a checklist to take you through setting up an employee advocacy program step by step.

1. Incentivize participation

While benefits like networking opportunities and thought leadership are nice to have for employees, they aren’t always immediately rewarding. To encourage participation in the program, offer perks and incentives.

In a Social Media Today study on methods of recognition, the top two most successful were company recognition (39%) and monetary incentives (19%).

These types of rewards could go along with a program like being awarded employee of the month. For recruiting, an employee referral bonus is common. You can use employee recognition software tools to encourage team members to recognize their peers’ efforts, such as by highlighting shoutouts throughout the wider team or developing rewards and incentives.

2. Encourage authenticity

An employee advocacy benchmark report found that social media posts from employees that were personalized generated 64% more engagement than those that did not. Once employees are comfortable with sharing branded content, encourage them to edit the copy and put their own touch on the post.

Just like how brand voice matters to the company, your personal voice also matters. Adding a line or two to a post encourages authenticity and establishes your personal brand.

3. Provide training

If someone is not a Very Online person, they won’t be as comfortable posting on social media. Providing social media training goes a long way in establishing confidence in their skills.

Regardless of what type of program you choose, you’ll need to train employees on how to navigate it. Software like Sprout Social's Employee Advocacy tool will need an introduction so people feel comfortable using it but the benefit is that all the components of a successful program are in one place.

Training does not stop, either. You’ll want to constantly evaluate how the program is performing, make sure that you’re communicating well internally and do additional training as needed, especially as platform features evolve and change.

4. Set goals & KPIs

Like any other strategy, you need to establish the “why” and “how” of your program. Earlier, we discussed the benefits of having an employee advocacy program and provided resources on how to create one.

Now, it’s time to determine what you will use to measure its success. A benchmark study found that the average adoption rate across all industries was 53%. However, keep in mind that this average did vary across industries and that you should not expect this when you first start out.

Other factors like company size and use case also affected the adoption rate. Let’s explore additional metrics that help you track the performance of employee advocacy.

How to measure the success of your employee advocacy program

When you use tools like Employee Advocacy for employee advocacy, your entire program lives there. That means that as a brand, you are able to curate content, distribute branded material and keep an eye on analytics. On the employee side, you receive on-brand suggestions for copy, topics that you can follow and ready-to-post social media content.

As a manager of the employee advocacy program, it means you also get insights into key metrics that help demonstrate the success of your efforts.

Here are a few of the most significant KPIs for employee advocacy:

Adoption rate

As discussed earlier, adoption rate is important for knowing how successful your program is. This can be assessed through how many invites are sent out, how many accounts are created and how many are active.

Active participation

As social media marketers, we know that just being on a network doesn’t mean you’re actually on it. Is the account just sitting there or are actions being taken by the user?

Top contributors

Are certain teams or people providing interesting content and receiving a lot of engagement around it? Recognize and thank your top performers.

Organic reach

The employee advocacy benchmark study mentioned earlier found that the average reach for employees is 459 connections on LinkedIn, 433 friends on Facebook and 772 followers on Twitter.

Organic reach is tough to achieve already, so taking a look at how employee advocacy increases that metric should be part of your KPIs.

To make it easy for you, Employee Advocacy tools automatically generate these metrics so you can spend more time making meaningful refinements to your program.

Organic engagement

What kind of discussions are being prompted by employees posting? Are their followers interacting with their content? People are more comfortable talking to individuals online than with a face-less brand. Track how organic engagement is with the content that is shared through employees.

Referrals

This can cover a few different activities. Your sales strategy probably already includes where your leads are coming from. Add a referral source that identifies that it’s from an employee’s social media post. In recruiting, when an employee refers a potential hire, their names are usually documented. And finally, check if your social media referrals to your website have increased since you began the program.

Practical employee advocacy examples

At Sprout Social, we're fortunate to help industry leading clients with their employee advocacy programs. And it's a badge of honor when we see our customers thrive as a result.

In this section, we present inside examples from successful employee advocacy programs from our clients' internal campaigns.

Medallia doubles employees sharing content with weekly email newsletters

Medallia schedules a weekly email digest in order to notify employees about relevant content they can easily share on LinkedIn. As a result, their content marketing team has seen employee shares of content essentially double starting on day one of starting this initiative.

This is a great way to remind employees of the opportunities they have to further amplify your brands' content on a consistent cadence.

Simpli.fi launched employee advocacy before its rebranding

In 2023, Simpli.fi was in preparation for rebranding and revamping its social media strategy at the same time. Simpli.fi decided to get its employee advocacy program live a few months before the launch of the rebranding. This set up their new social media marketing rhythms to be in place with employee advocacy baked in from the start.

Simpli.fi's strategy also established more visibility than before. It ensured people getting involved with their story at the jumpstart of the launch.

Planning ahead, like Simpli.fi did, to make employee advocacy a priority internal process can pay dividends in the long run. Not to mention, choosing the right tools to help you get there can accelerate your brand's success all the more.

Simpli.fi used Sprout Social's Employee Advocacy platform to enhance its online presence and employee engagement in April 2023 with its rebranding initiative. Simpli.fi piloted the employee advocacy program and achieved almost $90,000 in estimated Earned Media Value (EMV) within three months.

"Our employee advocacy has returned nearly $90,000 in Earned Media Value in just three months. That means we're already 7x our ROI. So, communicating the value of our investment in the advocacy program internally has been straightforward."

--Spencer Traver, Director of Content at Simpli.fi

Ivanti's employee advocacy incentive program boosted social shares by 16,000% within the first quarter

Invanti uses contests like gift card giveaways and other special events to incentivize employee advocacy. As previously mentioned, this is a brilliant strategy to drive employee engagement within a brand ambassador program.

And, the results speak for themselves. After launching Ivanti's incentive program, the brand went from 1,000 to 3,000 shares in the first month, and then 17,000 shares within the first quarter. Yes, that is a 16,000% increase within the first quarter!

Edgio shares the "why" and "how" behind a successful employee advocacy program to rally employees company-wide

Edgio, formerly known as Limelight Networks, launched a new employee advocacy program with assistance from Sprout Social.

During her monthly sales call and company-wide presentation, Lindsay Moran--Senior Manager of Content and Brand Strategy--laid out Edgio's new protocol for her team. She made it clear why the employee advocacy program matters and shared simple tips to make high employee engagement happen.

Edgio's got it right: telling employees why and how their advocacy program works boosts participation. As a result of good communication, they saw high employee participation. We can all learn from them.

Vizient puts audience needs and employee interest at the forefront of their content strategy

Vizient, the largest healthcare performance improvement organization in the US, collaborated with Sprout Social to amplify its social media impact during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vizient put the needs of their audience at the forefront of their strategy. The company maximized the effectiveness of employee advocacy by ensuring their content resonated with the Vizient team members and their target audience alike. By doing so, Vizient saw significant performance improvement--from their engagement rate to follower count.

Vizient's end goal was wise. They wanted the content to make a positive impact on healthcare and the lives of professionals in the brand's community and beyond. Vizient's Social Media Director, Elida Solis, ensured it a top priority to provide her team members with 10 to 15 insightful content stories they actually want to share.

What's the lesson here? Valuing content resonance for both audience and employees can significantly boost the impact of your employee advocacy efforts.

Edina Realty used Sprout's Employee Advocacy tool to empower its realtors to market themselves with their unique voices

Edina Realty, a real estate leader, faced the challenge of enabling its real estate agents to effectively use social media for marketing.

When agents asked the marketing department for help, they were pointed to Edina Realty's Facebook page to share posts. It was quickly recognized that this wasn't ideal for building their brands as real estate agents.

That's when the quest for an employee advocacy tool began, and shortly thereafter, Edina found a solution in Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social. Employee Advocacy quickly became the primary resource for agents to find industry-relevant content and share that content out to their social networks using pre-populated messaging from Marketing. It's a solution to set up each realtor to market their business and share their expertise and insights with followers.

Edina Realty sets a great example of using Sprout's employee advocacy tool for its own specific use case. They use employee advocacy to amplify their realtors' voices as opposed to amplifying its own. At the same time, they take advantage of the tool's capabilities that help unite realtors to regularly post and provide its team with set and ready ideas.

Time to launch your employee advocacy program

Are you convinced yet that you need an employee advocacy program of your own? Don’t be one of those 70% of companies that don’t have a program in place. These programs offer benefits for both the brand and employee: brands enjoy increased awareness and controlled messaging while employees earn rewards and establish themselves as thought leaders in their field.

Sign up for a demo of Sprout Social today for an all-in-one solution to making the most of employee advocacy.