Over the past several years, PostBeyond has powered employee advocacy programs for a number of customers ranging from large multi-enterprise to fast-growing companies. With customers in 14 different industries using our platform, we wanted to aggregate this data and uncover new insights for you. That’s how the Customer Benchmark Report on Employee Advocacy was born.
There’s a lot of amount of data that comes out of employee advocacy programs such as social media reach, likes, shares, comments, engagement, adoption, and more. But one helpful way to understand your metrics is to compare with others in your industry.
One of the most asked questions by customers is now answered.
“How does our employee advocacy program compare with others that are just like us?”
The data geeks at PostBeyond took a careful approach to data preparation for this report. We tracked over 350,000 pieces of content shared to calculate the benchmarks for adoption, shares, reach, engagement and more. Now that’s a lot of content!
You can use this report and make more informed decisions about your performance based on what your peers are doing. Through this data, we’ve uncovered best practices, on how to implement a world-class employee advocacy program.
Let’s start with adoption.
Adoption is the total number of active users in the time period (those that shared) compared to the total number of users (based on employees enrollment in a program), measured on a monthly basis.
Convincing employees that they need to go all-in with employee advocacy is one thing, actually getting employees to adopt a new platform, tools, and behaviors is another. We are creatures of habit. Adoption can be a make or break challenge for many employee advocacy programs and it can result in misaligned expectations and ROI measurements. This is why adoption is a critical metric for our customers.
Here are the top 10 industries by adoption rate:
In the chart above, we’ve ranked the top 10 industries who have the highest adoption levels from our sample. The top-ranked industries all follow best practices which have been listed at the end of this report.
The average employee adoption rate of PostBeyond customers by company size:
The average employee adoption rate of PostBeyond customers by use case:
With each new program launch, companies must be aware of all the factors that ensure a new implementation goes smoothly and is welcome by all.
Tips to improve employee adoption:
- Securing executive buy-in. For certain departments, getting leadership bought-in to employee advocacy is more straightforward. In the sales team, expectations are that sales professionals use platforms such as CRM, PostBeyond and other solutions to drive and track customer engagement. For other groups there may be no specific mandate, so determining the engagement strategy is different.
- Employee adoption strategy. It is important to consider an overall rule of 15-25% of the overall employee group as a maximum initial metric to achieve. We would recommend actually segmenting sales & marketing and human resources into one cohort and the balance of the company in another when estimating the likely total number of sharers. This can guarantee that your employee advocacy initiative and its outcomes are well aligned.
- Clear measurement. We’ve seen many programs challenged due to the misalignment outlined in the adoption strategy and a poor determination of what success looks like. Ensure there’s a pathway to measurement by having the right KPIs to measure against at the start of your program. Visual dashboards and reporting can inform how your program is doing and where you can improve.
- Employee training and development. While the use of social is a more natural tendency the younger demographic, many professionals still require social media training. Whether it is an older demographic that has a limited social experience, or savvy social users that need to be aware of aspects of personalizing content (especially in regulated industries), training is essential.
- Vendor support. We recommend companies don’t take a “set it and forget it” approach. Having the expertise to support your employees as they become experienced is critical. Importantly your vendor should be a consistent source of best practices and benchmarking data.
High-impact and relevant content deserves to be shared.
Employees want to share content on social media but they often lack the knowledge on how to share or even what content to share. Make sure your employee advocacy program has a clear objective and employees have the necessary resources to adopt a program like this.
Find out about more employee advocacy benchmarks such as social media reach, engagement and best times to share by downloading our report below.
