5 Easy Steps to Launch Your Employee Advocacy Program

The key to launching a successful employee advocacy program is planning ahead. This step-by-step guide is based on our experience helping hundreds of B2B marketing teams get social advocacy up and running in their organizations.

1. Define your employee advocacy content strategy

Start with finding out what company content your employees are already sharing or want to share. See how their interests align with your overall social marketing strategy, so you can outline appropriate topics and formats for your program.

The best performing content either entertains, enlightens or educates your audience, and in a perfect world, all three.   The prevailing rule of thumb for a social content strategy is “6-3-1”: for every 10 social posts on your employee advocacy board, six should be curated, three owned and one promotional.  This lightens the burden on producing a high volume of new content internally, and also keeps the right balance in not overloading your audience with too much promotional content.

2. Secure executive buy-in

As with any other initiative, the success of your advocacy program will require buy-in, most critically from your C-level executives who can lead by example. Take the time to explain what’s in it for them and why the company should encourage employee participation. The best results come when employee advocacy is deeply embedded into company culture – when it’s not just another initiative but an important part of your employee experience.

3. Start with your social champions

Don’t try to enlist the entire company at once, just focus on those employees who can be your most effective early-adopters.  Many companies have people on staff who are already active on social media,  and may even have large networks. Perhaps they’re already sharing company content and enthusiastic about sharing even more. Ideally, they are thought leaders or social influencers in your industry. Look for your social champions among senior management and customer-facing employees (sales, customer success, marketing). Inviting these folks to your program first is your best bet for achieving success from the get-go.

4. Offer social media training

Be aware that some of your colleagues may not be comfortable on social media or don’t know where to start with sharing corporate content on personal profiles. Make sure you provide guidance and training required to answer their questions, counter concerns and boost their confidence. It could be a series of social media workshops, an explainer internal newsletter or even one-on-one sessions.

A good social media training should cover the following:

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• Tour of the company’s social profiles
• Quick overview of your social media goals, target audience and content strategy tips for building a top-notch profile
• Your advocacy platform onboarding
• Review of your company’s social media policy

That being said, even if your team is quite comfortable with social and doesn’t need basictraining, you still should hold a company-wide social media policy review – to make sure everyone is aligned on dos and don’ts and aware of things that can inadvertently damage the company reputation.

5. Run a pilot

Once you’re all set, it’s time to pilot your employee advocacy program, which is the best way to identify any issues and weaknesses in your strategy and implementation. To keep things manageable, focus on just one social media channel first.  Run your pilot at least for a month before checking the numbers. Keep an eye on these helpful metrics, so you can adjust as needed:

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• What content is the most popular among your advocates (the number of shares from the board)?
• What content is the most engaging with their audiences (the number of social clicks, conversions, likes and comments)?

If you’re consistently seeing positive trends, you’re ready to scale up and gradually invite more advocates, and expand to additional channels. If you don’t, it’s possible that some details need tweaking and further testing: go back to step 1 and revisit your approach.

[Source: The B2B Marketers Guide to Employee Advocacy, Oktopost]