Based on running hundreds of employee advocacy programs across different company sizes, markets and verticals we have created a list of the do’s and don’ts of employee advocacy.
Employee Advocacy Do’s
Make a plan and involve all stakeholders
- Involve relevant stakeholders in the program. Usually, the relevant stakeholders are; Communication, HR and Marketing
- Define the social media objectives; Employer branding, Company branding, Recruitment, the value of keeping employees engaged
- Define the list of people who will be involved
Make a thorough introduction to employees
- They are under no pressure to share company sponsored or created content. What’s most important is, that they share content that they personally care about.
- The company will not/can not monitor or taking ownership of the employees personal, social media accounts.
- That the primary goal of employee advocacy is for companies to empower their people as conversation starters, influencers, and even thought leaders—companies benefit as an indirect, but very tangible byproduct, rather than a direct goal.
Aggregate all your digital assets (automatically) to a central place
- You need to make it easy and intuitive for your administrators to create posts to be shared. Based on experience, many companies are unaware of how much great digital content they actually already have, when they gather feeds from LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, career websites and cases.
Make sure you give frequent feedback to employees about the results
- To keep employees engaged and enthusiastic about the program, you must give frequent feedback, detailing the results achieved and how their engagement is making a difference
Employee Advocacy Don’ts
Running your program without a proper tool
- You need a tool that makes it easy and intuitive for employees to share content on behalf of the company
- You need a tool that makes it easy for administrators to create posts and invite relevant employees
- You need insights detailing what works and what does not
Spray and pray
- The worst you can do is to invite all employees to all posts. You need to exercise the basic communication disciplines, purpose, relevance and relation
Treating employee advocates like marketing
- Driving ROI from; web traffic, Employer branding, brand awareness, lead generation, social recruiting, and sales, are the commercial outcomes of your employee advocacy program. However, you need to design and manage your Employee Advocacy program around the benefits to your employees – ONLY
Asking all employee to be social
- It’s an illusion to believe that all employees are “social people”, so don’t press employees to share company content, but from your insight you will figure out who your advocates are and what’s the specific interest of employee groups and individuals