Employee Advocacy Best Practices: How to Get Started in 2024

Did you know that your employees can be your biggest advocates?

Not surprisingly, an increasing number of businesses are looking to adopt employee advocacy best practices to boost their brand’s visibility, leads, and conversions.

As you might’ve guessed, employee advocacy is when employees become your ambassadors and promote it to their connections on various social media channels.

Employee advocacy can take many forms but typically includes things like sharing company news, blog posts, or other relevant content with the employees’ personal networks.

It’s a strategic and cost-effective way for companies to amplify their reach and improve their employer brand.

However, as it is with most things in life, planning is the key to acing your employee advocacy program.

This is why it is important to adopt the best practices of employee advocacy.

But before talking about employee advocacy best practices, let’s see what its benefits are.

Benefits of an Employee Advocacy Program

Let’s look at some numbers that can help showcase the benefits of employee advocacy.

Boost Your Reach

With over 300 million active social media users in the US in 2024, you can see the immense potential of a well-crafted employee advocacy program to reach your target audience.

Image via Statista

This means you can reach more people and build brand awareness in a cost-effective way if you create an advocacy strategy based on best practices.

Build Trust And Loyalty

Studies show the trust consumers place in advertisements is declining at a steady pace. Ads seem to be the main culprit in hindering consumption experience.

According to a survey conducted by Wunderkind, a whopping 92% of users feel that ads have become more intrusive than ever before.

Image via Wunderkind

What’s more?

About 63% of them are concerned that businesses (and governments) deliberately mislead them by making gross exaggerations, according to the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer report.

So, who do they trust?

Consumers trust their friends and family for brand information. Along with that, they also believe the testimonies of employees, influencers, and other shoppers.

Since the promotion is done by your employees, employee advocacy becomes a trusted and effective form of marketing, especially if you follow the top employee advocacy best practices.

Increase Leads and Sales

Unlike a business, employees would be connected to people they know on social media. This makes their audience more receptive to their posts.

According to research conducted by GaggleAMP, 74% of total sales are influenced by employee advocacy efforts.

Generally speaking, employees would have a lot more followers in total than the company’s business page. When employees share credible and relatable content with their connections, they can generate qualified leads for their brand.

Boost Employee Engagement

By adopting employee advocacy best practices, you can ensure employees have a better understanding of the company’s goals and direction. Most importantly, they’ll feel valued and connected to its vision.

The result of these employee advocacy best practices? Happy employees and improved brand health.

So, if you adopt the best practices to design your employee advocacy program, it can also be a powerful tool for recruiting and retaining top talent.

Save Costs

Make no mistake. Social media advertising is getting costlier.

Here’s an example of how much it would cost you to generate clicks, impressions, and views on popular social media platforms:

Image via WebFx

That’s not all.

According to an estimate, a small or medium-sized business would spend anywhere from $100 to $10,000 on monthly Google Ads campaigns. The cost would vary based on whether you’re calculating the clicks or impressions.

By following employee advocacy best practices, it’s possible to reduce your marketing costs by getting your employees to talk about your brand costs next to nothing.

These stats must have now convinced you of the benefits of employee advocacy best practices.

So, let’s take a look at the best ones.

Employee Advocacy Best Practices

By adopting these employee advocacy best practices, you can ensure a buy-in for your program and its sustained success.

1. Create a Positive Culture

The first among the eight best practices is to create a culture in the workplace where everyone feels supported and valued. A positive company culture is the foundation for employee engagement.

When employees are happy and engaged, they:

• Go the extra mile when needed
• Help out colleagues
• Seek learning opportunities and extra responsibilities
• Are more productive

Needless to say, engaged employees are more likely to enthusiastically participate in your employee advocacy initiatives.

So, how to boost employee engagement?

Here are some best practices to create a positive workplace culture and boost employee engagement:

• Encourage open communication
• Make sure employees know their work matters
• Create a positive work environment
• Reinforce values with ongoing communication and training sessions

2. Establish Employee Advocacy Goals and KPIs

Establishing goals is one of the most important employee advocacy best practices.

Your goals could be related to any of the following:

While on the topic of employee advocacy best practices, we can’t ignore the importance of making a list of the metrics that will help you measure and track your goals.

These include:

• Number of participants
• Number of social media posts per week/month
• Number of comments, impressions, likes, shares
• Total reach
• Which employees are posting the most?
• Number of leads, conversions, and sales
• Brand mentions and sentiment
• Social media advocacy program ROI

3. Train Your Employees

To beat the competition and build a positive brand reputation, you need a solid plan. Before you leverage employee advocacy benefits, training them to execute the plan is critical.

Once your employees enroll in the advocacy program, they need to get a full understanding of the process and their role in making it successful.

Here are a few expert tips on how to train your employees:

• Communicate your social media advocacy policy clearly and simply. Walk them through the process to show it needs to be done. Provide templates and training videos to get your employees started confidently.

• Give a hands-on demo of how the employee advocacy platform works. Address queries to avoid hiccups.

• Establish clear and firm guidelines. Employees should understand what content they can share and who they can reach out to. Make sure that confidential company information is not disclosed on social media.

• Connect the participants with the manager or the HR who is in charge of the program. That person would be the point of contact for all guidance and information.

4. Create a Social Media Policy

The next employee advocacy best practice in this post relates to having well-defined rules and guidelines for social media advocacy programs.

Here are a few tips on creating social media guidelines and best practices:

• Define the do’s and don'ts: List the things employees can and can’t do on social media.
• Provide guidelines on brand style: Your employees should know about branded hashtag, company logo, brand colors, tone of voice, and links to use.
• Seek input: Before finalizing the rules, seek input from employees who will be participating in the program.

Look at how Intel has specified the best practices for social engagement for its employees:

Image via Intel

5. Identify the Right Advocates

If you can spot employees who are:

• Already engaged with your brand
• Usually passionate about their work and always looking for ways to improve the company
• Have a strong social media presence and connections
• Respected by their peers
• Love taking up PR activities

…you already have your best brand advocates.

But, what if you can’t identify such employees?

The best way to find your advocates is to use an anonymous survey tool and ask them:

• What social media platforms they use
• How frequently they use them
• How many followers they have on different social platforms
• How they engage on social channels (do they skim content, engage with others’ content, or create content?)
• If they are willing to become your company’s brand advocates

Be sure to explain what your objective is for starting such a program and what benefits or incentives are available to employees who join the program.

By now, you may have a list of employees who are willing to participate.

Now, go ahead and create content for them to share.

Note: If most people say that someone else should do it, then maybe it's time for the leadership to look into the reasons why no one is willing to promote your company.

6. Create Engaging Content

What does “engaging content” really mean?

One way to define it is to say that it’s the content that your audience wants to read. Be it your blog post, social media posts, videos, or newsletters, they should be crafted creatively to grab the reader’s attention right away.

One of the employee advocacy best practices would be to create brand-centric content without sounding sales-y. It should be a good mix of brand-related content with relevant topics.

To achieve that kind of quality, you can create content strategy templates that employees can customize. You can also allow them to craft their own content while keeping the brand guidelines in mind.

However, things get a little tricky when your employees are sharing third-party content like industry insights, reports, educational resources, and so on. Make sure that they don’t promote contradicting or competitor content.

An important component of employee advocacy best practices is to get your content strategy right.

Here are some best practices to fine-tune your content strategy:

• Find out which social platforms have the most reach and engagement in your industry or niche.
• List the social platforms where your employee advocates have a strong presence.
• Find the best time to post on social media platforms. According to a CoSchedule survey, the best time to post on social media is generally around 8:41 a.m., 3:15 p.m., and 7:00 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

You can also leverage the best social media analytics tools to dig deeper into each platform and see how much user preferences vary.

Image via CoSchedule

• Create interesting content that features company news, employee accomplishments or recognition, new hires, and humor.

For instance, Derrick Meer, the Executive Strategist at Aloe Group, a logistics company, promotes his company’s synergistic approach with this LinkedIn post:

Image via LinkedIn

Starbucks has dedicated a page for its employees to share news and fun stories.

Image via Instagram

It doesn’t have to always be about the brand or new hires. Dunkin Donuts encourages its employees to regularly post content that’s not about the brand.

Image via Instagram

• Get the balance right by mixing up different types and formats of content. LinkedIn’s research recommends a 4:1:1 ratio where:
  • 1 piece of content is about your brand
  • 1 is an industry update
  • 4 pieces of content from trusted third-party sources

7. Use the Right Employee Advocacy Platforms and Tools

You've followed employee advocacy best practices by identifying your goals, knowing your audience, and creating a content strategy. Now it's time to choose the right employee advocacy platform.

Needless to say, you need to make it easy for employees to share content on social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook.

However, to make the most out of your employee advocacy program, you need to have the right employee advocacy tools and platforms in place that allow you to create content, promote it, and track the results.

You also need a strong training program to teach employees to build brand credibility and personal brands. This increases the brand's reach and ensures the success of the program.

Luckily, there are plenty of great options to choose from, depending on your company's needs.

LinkedIn Elevate: This is a paid service from LinkedIn that allows companies to create an employee advocacy program.

You can create custom groups and pages for your brand ambassadors, as well as post updates and content that can be seen by all members of their network.

Hootsuite Amplify: With Amplify, your employees can automatically post and track content, while measuring engagement. There is a library of content to help you plan and execute your social media campaigns.

PostBeyond: This popular employee advocacy platform allows you to easily post updates, articles, and other content to your company's social media accounts.

Apart from a built-in recognition system, it makes it easy to onboard new employees and provide them with relevant content.

What’s more?

Apart from a built-in recognition system, it makes it easy to onboard new employees and provide them with relevant advocacy content.

For example, if you're looking to reach professionals and executives, LinkedIn may be the best platform.

If you want to build brand awareness through videos, YouTube is the ideal platform.

Here’s a guide you can use.

Image via Wordstream

Once you determine the social media tools, platforms, and brand advocacy content you are going to use, ensure you train your employees on all aspects of employee advocacy to get started with your formal employee advocacy program.

8. Motivate Your Employees with Rewards And Recognition

When you implement an employee advocacy program, one of the best practices to adopt is to engage your workforce to get on board through extrinsic motivation in the form of rewards.

These rewards are often what drives employees to opt into an advocacy and social selling program in the first place.

The reward can be as simple as a social media shoutout for a birthday or work anniversary. See how Starbucks does it:

Image via Instagram

These rewards can also appear in the form of bonuses, vacations, tickets to events, gift cards, and other tangible rewards.

One of the most useful employee advocacy best practices, rewards provide a sense of healthy competition among teams, encouraging employees to put their best efforts forward. They also motivate employees to work harder.

A word of caution here:

Putting too much emphasis on rewards and incentives can backfire.

If your staff becomes fixated on large rewards, they might start becoming more focused on results than doing advocacy right.

Be sure to let your employees know that employee advocacy has its intrinsic value in terms of:

• Helping them build their personal brand
• Expanding their network
• Transforming them to thought leaders
• Increasing conversations

When employees realize the importance of strengthening their personal brand and connections, they are more likely to sustain their employee advocacy efforts.

9. Track Your Results

The next successful employee advocacy best practice is to track the results of your employee advocacy strategy.

Most social media platforms allow you to track data, such as clicks, likes, impressions, views, and leads.

Tools such as Hootsuite’s Amplify or LinkedIn Elevate also provide detailed analytics on your employee advocacy programs. These tools offer insights on:

• User adoption, which allows you to see the number of employees who are participating in the employee advocacy program
• A comparison of the employees’ posts by topic, reach, social network, etc.
• Specific engagement metrics on each social media platform

Image via Hootsuite

FAQ

Q1. What is an example of employee advocacy?

A. Employee advocacy is when employees use their personal social media accounts to promote their company's products or services.

This can be done by using employee advocacy best practices, such as sharing company-related content, writing positive reviews, or simply talking about their company in a positive light.

To guarantee its success, you’ll need to adopt employee advocacy best practices.

Q2. What is the most important aspect of employee advocacy?

A. There are many best practices of employee advocacy to consider, but the most important one is employee engagement.

Advocacy programs are only successful if employees are actually willing to follow the employee advocacy best practices and are willing to promote the company’s message.

Q3. How do you build employee advocacy?

A. The first step is to identify your company's core values and what you want your employees to advocate for.

Then, you need to find the right advocates and create content that is shareable. Give your employees the tools and resources they need to be successful advocates. Finally, leverage best practices to drive advocacy further.

Q4. How can employee advocacy be improved?

A. You can improve employee advocacy by incorporating employee advocacy best practices like:

• First, refine your employee advocacy strategy by adopting the best practices listed here.
• Ensure employees understand the company's mission and values.
• Create an environment that promotes trust and engagement.
• Provide employees with training and resources on how to effectively advocate for the brand.
• Offer incentives for employees who participate in advocacy programs.

Q5. What are the benefits of employee advocacy?

A. By following employee advocacy best practices, you can:

• Build brand awareness
• Generate more leads and drive conversions
• Save on social media marketing costs
• Boost collaboration and team spirit

Q6. How to Incentivize employee advocacy? 

A. Appreciation and positive reinforcement act as great motivators when it comes to enhancing employee participation in brand building. One of the important employee advocacy best practices is to find the right balance when incentivizing employees.

You can opt for some of these rewards:

• Public recognition
• Featuring their contribution in your newsletters
• Redeemable points
• Prizes, trophies and badges
• Monetary incentives
• Exclusive discount coupons

Q7. How do you measure the success of your employee advocacy program? 

A. To measure the success of your employee advocacy program, you need to monitor specific KPIs. Here are some important ones:

• Employee participation rate
• Social reach
• Content share
• Impressions
• Website traffic
• Leads generated
• Sales increase
• Employee satisfaction
• Total cost and ROI

Develop Your Successful Employee Advocacy Program

To build an effective employee advocacy program, you’ll need to adopt these best practices mentioned above. This is the key way to build a strong company culture of collaboration and commitment within your organization.

It is also a long-term strategy, so you'll need to provide training and align it with business goals. If you see a dip in performance, take action by reviewing employee feedback and making changes to your strategy where necessary.

On the other hand, if you see a jump in performance from your employees—or even just one person—take action to celebrate this win and encourage employees who might be feeling hesitant to promote your company.

By teaching employees how to advocate for themselves and their colleagues, you can set them up for success in the long term—and they’ll be happy to help you along the way! Additionally, integrating content marketing strategies can amplify your employee advocacy efforts by providing valuable resources that employees can share.

Have any questions about the best practices for employee advocacy mentioned above? Ask them in the comments below.