Top Advocacy Questions: Common Employee Advocacy Questions

1. What incentives have you implemented in order to encourage employees to participate?

Great question. Our favorite strategies for increasing employee advocacy engagement is to make the program something people want to be a part of. When thinking about incentives, most marketers quickly jump to the idea of offering prizes, gift cards, and bonuses. Here are five proven approaches to incentivization that will engage, encourage and motivate your employees without overspending on incentives.

i. Employee Recognition

Recognizing employees with monetary prizes can promote an unhealthy advocacy, as employees may start to share content for the wrong reasons. That’s why it’s important to celebrate employees with recognition rather than monetary rewards. An easy way to do this is to offer special in-office perks such as a shoutout during your next team stand-up meeting, a trophy, or even a small in-office celebration.

ii. Executive Support

Having leadership support is undoubtedly powerful for an employee advocacy program to flourish, even more so when they play a hand in recognizing top performers. Executives can boost morale and encourage employees to join an advocacy program. Make sure you get executive buy-in as early as possible.

iii. Leaderboard

Leaderboards really ramp up the competitive nature amongst employees and is a great way to gamify your employee advocacy program. A leaderboard makes it easy for employees to see their own performance and it pushes them to hit their sharing goals as well as drives overall employee advocacy performance.

For example, Drift frequently uses the leaderboard to encourage employee participation because they have a super competitive team who are all fighting for the number one spot.

iv. Contests Rewards

Give awards to employees who are performing the best. Awards can be given for being number one on the leadership and even for employees who generated the most shares or traffic from your content. You can hold week-long mini-contests or for longer periods to reflect any compelling events such as quarter end. Keeping a consistent cadence of contests can keep employees motivated and engaged.

v. Making Employee Advocacy Exclusive

One interesting way to incentivize an employee advocacy program is to make the entire program an exclusive membership. For example, BCD Travel positions their program internally as a privilege. Users are hand-selected to be a part of the program and are encouraged to participate as much as possible. This exclusivity keeps the program tightly knit, promotes word-of-mouth about the program internally and ensures employees are always engaged.

2. How do you keep your employees engaged?

Keeping employees engaged in your employee advocacy program is a challenge for many organizations. Here are four proven ways to get your employees back into the platform and sharing content.

i. Provide Employee Recognition

Show appreciation for the individuals who have been very active on social media and engaging with your brand’s content by highlighting them in meetings or through your company’s internal newsletters.

ii. Internal Marketing

Another proven tactic is to promote this program internally in a way that’s fun for your team.

For example, one customer branded their program The Share Station, presenting employee advocacy as a fun program and something that people are interested in. As a result, employees don’t feel like it is an additional ask; it’s a fun way for them to get involved. Definitely keep that in mind as you think about your advocacy program and how you can internally market the program differently and creatively.

iii. Email Updates

Email updates are a great way to circulate content that you would like your employees to share on their social networks, and it’s a good way to ensure employee advocacy is top-of-mind.

iv. Gamification

Making employee advocacy fun and rewarding is another strategy to ensure usage rates continue to drive positive benefits for the business. Gamification encourages participation and friendly competition.

3. Do you have any anecdotal information about using employee advocacy as a recruiting tactic?

A few months back, we did a webinar with employer branding expert, Kasey Sixt, Vice President of CKR Interactive. Her and our CEO, David Lloyd, discussed how companies can build a compelling brand to attract, recruit and engage top talent.

One great example is from our customer, Starbucks and how they reach top talent through employee advocacy. Starbucks had the goal to sit at the same table of employment with brands such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google. With employee advocacy, Starbucks’ Talent Recruiters looked to gain a competitive edge for engaging top talent. The Starbucks team used PostBeyond to streamline communications to engage & empower their recruitment team.

Even at PostBeyond, our number one recruitment source is through our own employees sharing employer branding content. We believe our people know good people so employee-shared job posts have helped to generate a very good talent pool (just ask our seven newest hires).

4. What type of measurement should you use?

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to measurement of an employee advocacy because each organization has their own use case and what metrics they want to measure. For most organizations, who are keen on employee advocacy, they want to correlate the impact back to the marketing funnel. In these instances, leading marketers are looking beyond vanity social media metrics such as Likes and Comments.

When launching a program, here are the core KPIs you should be measuring to benchmark your success so far:

Total Reach
% Adoption
% of Invited Users Registered
% of Active Employees
# of Articles Shared/Week
Earned Media Value
Website Traffic
Paid Social Media Savings

Once you get a handle of your initial launch metrics, you’ll want to dive deeper into optimizing the current status of your program. Here are several KPIs to keep your eyes on:

% Website Bounce Rate
% Website Traffic
% Lead Conversion
Time on Website

You’ll also want to monitor the performance of your program participants and content with metrics such as:

Top Performing Content
Most Shared Content
Top Sharers

Finally, when determining the ROI of your employee advocacy program, you’ll want to go further down the funnel for these KPIs:

Sales Close Rate
Pipeline Influence and Attribution
% of Leads to Closed Won
Earned Media Value

The measurement framework you set in place should include early indicators of success such as adoption to keep the momentum going. Adoption and users sharing are also indicators for deeper metrics such as website traffic and lead generation. For example, Turbonomic had four KPIs in mind:

Percentage of Users Sharing
Overall Adoption Rate
Earned Media Value
Website Traffic

Turbonomic knew the best KPI to measure success was the percentage of employees sharing content within one quarter. They knew if a high percentage of employees shared content then they knew earned media value and website traffic would also increase.

5. Do you see the corporate social channel as complementary to an employee advocacy program?

Yes, employee advocacy isn’t a replacement for corporate social media channels, instead look at it as an amplification of the content you would have already distributed through your regular channels. We find that buyers just don’t trust corporate brands as much as they used to which is why employee advocacy can help put faces to your brand. They both work in tangent.

In working with several of our customers, they’ve seen employee advocacy directly increases the engagement of their corporate channels.

6. Do you find that social selling is more successful in certain industry verticals?

What determines the most successful industries for social selling depends on who your potential customers are. For example, the majority of our customers are within Technology, Travel & Tourism and Financial Services. On the surface, these three industries may not have many similarities; however, one thing they have in common is how their consumer and professional buying behaviors are reflecting each other.

Social selling adoption has been steady, LinkedIn’s cumulative Social Selling Index Growth shows both leading industries and the growth rates for emerging industries as well.

Cumulative SSI Growth

7. We’re finding it difficult to get people to engage with social media training content. Have you had better success with different formats than others?

It can definitely be a challenge to get all your employees to engage on social media. Your employees actually want to get active but may not know how. We often hear these concerns:

I don’t have time
I don’t want to
I don’t know what I’m allowed to share
I don’t want to mix my personal life and work

Being active on social media is like a muscle, you have to continuously train it and build a routine to ensure you have success.

In-Person Training

You want to make sure you offer social media training in a way that will help employees absorb the information as easily as possible. We personally recommend offering an in-person social media training because you’ll have the most attention and fewest distractions. The team will be in the same room, focusing on absorbing that information. It’s also helpful for you to be able to answer their questions live.

We’ve had several customers conduct social media roadshows across multiple offices. This gives the program manager an opportunity to connect face-to-face with employees and to address any concerns before they arise.

Virtual Training

Webinars are a good option if your team is remote and scattered across the globe. Webinars still have that live engagement, but you don’t necessarily have to all be in the same room at the same time.

In addition, create an overview of the different social networks and some examples of what employees might want to post there. Make all of the content easily available after your Webinar as well. Recorded webinars can be repurposed as a resource that you can share with your team.

Post-Training

After a training session, you can reinforce the learnings through dripped email campaigns. Create a drip campaign with digestible, bite-sized pieces of information on social media. Posters are also effective. If you have posters up in your break room, people will read them. Some of our customers who have used posters around the office have had significantly higher adoption of employee advocacy programs. A visual reminder is a great way ensure social media becomes a habit.

8. What about the legal liability issues that have been brought up when we have discussions about employees posting on behalf of the company?

Good question. For many of our customers in regulated industries such as Financial Services or Pharmaceuticals, there are several regulatory compliance guidelines to abide by. Whether it’s FINRA, HIPAA, SEC, or the FDA, each has its own respective social media guidelines for how companies (and employees) should conduct themselves.

Depending on your industry, the first course of action is to know your regulations for social media. For example, FINRA regulatory Notice 17-18, which outlines all the ways you need to manage sharing, storing, and auditing messages on social networks.

By working with your compliance officer, you can equip both parties with enough information on guidelines and how your business should conduct itself on social media. You can then determine the right policies and procedures to address regulatory compliance requirements.

9. Is there a certain ratio of employees that should be a part of the advocacy program or should a company just include as many as it can afford?

There isn’t a golden ratio for the number of people to include in an employee advocacy program. However, best-in-class organizations all have one thing in common: they start with a pilot program then scale across the organization.

Implementing an employee advocacy pilot helps you get a better understanding of what content your employees will engage with. It’ll also help you organically learn what works, what doesn’t and even help you determine new metrics as you scale.

For your pilot, identify who your social champions because starting off with a group of active employees can build momentum internally. Here’s how you can identify your internal social champions.

Survey your team to see who is interested in being active in a program like this and who would actually want to share on their social networks
Ask managers to identify top-performing employees
Assess your social channels to see which employees are already re-sharing the content from your brand
Do a social media audit of your staff to identify who currently has a very strong social media profile and following, because these are the people who will likely see the benefit of employee advocacy

You don’t have to win everyone over, but you want to make sure that it is easy for those who are already active on social and are excited about it. Make it easy for them to be a social advocate for your brand.

You have questions, we have answers

Well there you have it, the top questions asked and answered. For many organizations, employee advocacy is still a relatively new concept. Yet for some leading organizations, employee advocacy has been ingrained within their social media and marketing strategy. There will always be an endless sea of questions to be addressed so look no further for the next time we tackle your questions. Keep them coming!

Top Questions We’re Asked About Employee Advocacy