The biggest misunderstanding about employee advocacy? That it’s all about sharing content. You mail out a bunch of social posts, ask people to share them on LinkedIn or Twitter, and boom — job done.

Except it isn’t.  In fact, you’re far more likely to annoy the hell out of your employees — and their connections — when their LinkedIn feed fills up with dozens of identical posts. 

In other words, employee advocacy is not a mass cut-and-paste exercise across social media. It requires time, training and careful planning.

In this article, I’ll lay out the steps that you should take to build an effective employee advocacy programme. Having worked with several clients over recent years, I’m going to focus on one project that involved every level of the business - including the CEO.

1. Find your social media champions

First, I carried out an audit of employees and identified those people using Twitter and LinkedIn to promote their professional profiles. These individuals already had a strong social brand and were used to sharing posts and content that matched their personality and professional outlook.

It took time to win their trust. They’d already invested a lot of time into building their online brand. “Why risk diluting all this effort?”.

I pointed out that, by joining the programme, they’d get instant access to a fast-growing network of fellow professionals - plus a steady stream of premium content that they could personalise and share with their followers.

Then I assembled a second, larger group: people who had social accounts but were much less active and ‘articulate’. Some were already retweeting or commenting on posts from the first group. Others contacted me directly, keen to sprinkle a bit of social media magic dust over their professional profile.

To make sure that we always had new faces in the group and to keep up with employee churn, we also put the employee advocacy programme at the heart of our social media induction sessions.

By the end of the year, I had about 60 active social media advocates sharing content in a business of about 5,000 people. These were posts that I had first distributed via email and then via a dedicated employee advocacy platform (see #5 below).

As for the content itself, I provided the links and then half-a-dozen short bulletpoints that could be used as a basis to craft solid, original posts.

I also divided employees into groups and shared content with them across the course of a week to keep distribution as even as possible - and avoid the spamming situation described earlier.

2. Encourage networking

I next set up a series of coaching sessions, encouraging participants to widen their network, especially on LinkedIn.

Here, the trick is to gradually widen your horizons. Connecting with workplace colleagues and former co-workers first allows people to start getting comfortable with the idea of sharing content and engaging with posts. As you strengthen your profile (and the LinkedIn algorithm starts to take notice) you can begin to search for people with similar professional interests. The more niche, the better - if you want to stand out.

There are no shortcuts. These days you need to send a note with a LinkedIn connection request to avoid being ignored. So, anyone serious about building up their network needs to spend about half an hour per day to keep up the momentum. I found this wasn’t suited to everyone, and we had a few dropouts at this stage.  But their places were quickly snapped up, as word got around internally.

3. Company-wide ‘hygiene’

What about the wider workforce?

We encouraged every employee to check their LinkedIn profile and update the most important elements... For example, did they have a professional photo? Was their current employee status up to date?

We didn’t mandate these steps but provided guidance for those that wanted to optimise their profiles.  

4. Get buy-in from the top

It’s important not to forget senior management. Getting 15 minutes with the CEO was always a struggle, especially when the CEO in question thought that social was something for celebrities and viewing cat memes.

With little time to waste, instead of showing him Twitter or LinkedIn, I Googled his job title and industry.

Up came page one: a list of his peers and rivals including links to their LinkedIn profiles, profile photographs, and even one or two Twitter handles. But my CEO client was nowhere to be seen.

That got the message across. Within a week, we'd revamped his LinkedIn profile and he was sharing updates daily. Six months on, and he’d doubled his connections and profile views. His example also encouraged other employees to take part, helping us to increase the advocacy network by one third.

The important lesson about C-suite-level participation is that these individuals tend to have the most connections - especially on LinkedIn. And in many cases they have more influence than the company’s own branded accounts, so it’s vital you get colleagues such as your CEO involved.

5. Introduce a bit of competition…

To help manage the programme as it expanded, we acquired an employee advocacy platform that we to coordinate content sharing and posting. Every employee had access to their own dashboard and could therefore view and measure their progress from posts shared, to engagement. There was also a league table feature (native to the tool) which led to some serious competition between offices - as they vied for a top position every month.

As the lead on the project, I used my admin access to retrieve data and analytics for the head of marketing every quarter - while also using the results to help recalibrate my thinking when it came to next steps. Which posts and articles got the most shares? Who was most active, by demographic and location? How could we encourage less active employees to participate with more energy?

🔍 Related: How to kick off your own employee advocacy programme

Your employees have changed. Have you?

Having got so far through this article, you’re now probably wondering whether employee advocacy is the right tactic for your business. In today’s pandemic-affected world, I think it is.

Over the past few months, we’ve seen how people have shifted even more of their lives online.  What they used to say at the water cooler, they now share on social media. Most of all, lockdowns have brought home to people the importance of their online brand. Employee advocacy isn’t just about widening the distribution of a brand’s content; it’s about helping people to make the most of their online presence.

Help your colleagues to build themselves a productive and positive digital presence, and they’ll be more willing to support their employer in return.

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