The Complete Guide to Employee Advocacy

It’s a fact: traditional advertising and marketing just don’t work the way they used to. Consumers aren’t buying into it anymore. And at a time when organic reach and trust in corporate communications are declining, authenticity is a valuable asset in the face of competition. 

Companies that engage their employees and encourage them to share online know it all too well: brand trust and digital word-of-mouth are based primarily on recommendations. For consumers, this often means suggestions from their close circle, but it also can include company employees who offer advice on the brand and its products as thought leaders. This strategy is called employee advocacy. In this guide, we will explore every aspect of employee advocacy, from its definition to its implementation, with tips on how your company can launch its own advocacy program.   

All set? Good. Let’s dig in.              

What is Employee Advocacy? And Why is It Important? 

Employee advocacy is a strategic approach where companies empower their employees to become brand ambassadors, leveraging their personal networks to promote the company and its values on social media and other platforms. The company gives its employees the means to become brand ambassadors by sharing content related to the business, its values, its company culture, or its news across their personal social media accounts.   

Ultimately, employee advocacy is based on a simple principle: your employees are your best assets when it comes to organic reach on social media. The shared content has the advantage of being perceived by your audience as more authentic and more human.

The Benefits of Employee Advocacy for Business

Your company’s employee advocacy strategy will come with a host of benefits for employee and employer alike. It’s a win-win, when executed correctly on social media. Here, we’ll cover the benefits that the company can expect from a successful employee advocacy program.

1. Increases Organic Reach and Brand Awareness

A brand’s visibility on social media is now a strategic pillar of its growth. However, if you don’t invest heavily in sponsored publications, your reach may be insufficient, and increasing your number of followers can be a tedious task. Fortunately, employee advocacy has changed the game.

On average, your employees’ social media posts on key platforms, including LinkedIn or X (Twitter), receive 8 times more engagement than those from your brand. This is due to two reasons:

• A physical person is perceived as more credible by users of social media platforms
  
• Social media algorithms favor personal content over that of companies. As a result, businesses are forced to invest in paid social media to be seen.

And when it comes to reach, expect a huge increase there as well. In fact, studies have shown that posts shared by employees can result in a 561% higher reach on social media than conventional corporate posts alone. 

2. Boosts Brand Trust and Authenticity 

A peer-to-peer voice builds credibility because it is seen as coming from an equal; someone in the same boat. It’s viewed as sharing, not as advertising. 

Likewise, when an employee shares content, it creates a cognitive bias: if the employee shares it willingly, it means they believe in the company and the values it represents. The corporate message delivered by the employee becomes more credible, and the prospect is more likely to buy based on their recommendation.

3. Drives Quality Web Traffic and Sales Leads

Employee advocacy is extremely effective in the context of social selling, serving as the first step in a B2B funnel for potential clients, and generating web traffic and leads in the process. The employee recommendation on social media is the hook that will first attract the interest of readers who may become clients. 

These leads, coming directly from employee networks, are among the best quality leads a company can get. By nature, messages will be more relevant, and better received because they are in the same social media ecosystem or industry. 

4. Enhances Employer Branding and Attracts Talent 

The positive brand awareness that employee advocacy spreads will also translate into improved recruiting for HR, attracting top talent who begin to see the company as a great place to work. 

In addition, employee social media networks often contain the best candidates, because they frequently have contacts in the same field and sector. Company news regarding new job openings will reach interested, qualified candidates with laser focus.

5. Reduces Paid Media Spend Over Time

Relying on an employee advocacy strategy also allows you to reduce your dependence on paid advertising on social media. Your employees become your primary communication channel on the web, significantly reducing your paid social media expenses through organic amplification. 

For example, the Sociabble platform not only allows you to implement your employee advocacy strategy but also to calculate your savings. Thanks to its EPM (Equivalent Paid Media) functionality, you can precisely measure your return on investment and the added value of your program.

The Benefits for Employees

But here’s the best part: in addition to the company benefits, employees participating in your employee advocacy campaign also enjoy numerous advantages. It helps them in critical ways related to their careers and professional growth. 

1. Builds Their Personal Brand and Online Presence

Employees who share professional content on their social media networks offer real added value to their communities. They position themselves as experts in their field. By publishing regularly, they naturally increase their visibility and build their personal brand as references in their industry. This expertise can even transform them into thought leaders—in other words, social media influencers.

2. Creates Thought Leadership and Networking Opportunities

The more employees participate in your company’s employee advocacy initiative, the more they work on their personal branding, and the more legitimacy they gain. This expert image facilitates the development of their social media network, enabling more strategic connections. They can thus reach decision-makers and potentially attract new clients.

3. Gives Them a Voice and Sense of Ownership

An employee advocacy strategy allows everyone to contribute to the company’s communication. By taking part in this effort, they collaborate in a larger-scale mission, highly beneficial for both the company and the people who work there. 

With a platform like Sociabble, you can highlight and reward your employees with gift points, badges, and a leaderboard of top ambassadors. You can even align rewards with your CSR goals: Sociabble Trees allows you to offer your staff trees to plant in reforestation projects around the world.

4. Opens Up Career Advancement and Visibility 

It’s rare in this day and age for an employee to spend their whole life at one company, or in the same role. It’s a fact of modern corporate life: people move. But by participating in employee advocacy and enhancing their public profile, workers will be laying the groundwork for future opportunities and paths, both at your company and potentially outside it. Maybe even one day becoming future clients themselves of your brand! It happens.

5. Encourages Pride and Alignment with Company Mission and Company Culture

Of course, sharing company content doesn’t necessarily mean sharing only commercial offers. Employees can share any topic dear to the company: its successes, CSR commitments, innovations, dynamic company culture, etc. Being an ambassador is also a way to express pride in contributing to the company’s mission and being part of a community larger than their team, built around a unifying company culture that encourages employees to feel like they belong. 

How to Build an Effective Employee Advocacy Program

Like any strategy, implementing a formal employee advocacy program must be methodical to ensure success. What are your goals? What tool should you choose? How do you recognize your ambassadors? These are the questions we’ll answer here by outlining the key steps to building a structured, long-term, and engaging employee advocacy program.

1. Define Your Goals

To stay on track, it’s extremely important that your goals are clear. This allows you to focus your employee advocacy efforts on high-value actions.

Do you want to increase your visibility and grow brand awareness? Are you looking to strengthen your employer brand strategy to attract new talent? Is your goal to generate more traffic to your website to convert more leads? Do you want to increase employee engagement and align them with the company strategy?

We recommend prioritizing 1 or 2 objectives initially and only adding new ones once your ambassadors are comfortable. This makes the initiative more accessible to employees.

2. Find the Right Tool

If you don’t provide the right employee advocacy software and tools to your employees, even the most enthusiastic will eventually lose interest in your company’s employee advocacy program. For example, if you want to use a collaborative platform, that would mean having to download and/or copy-paste your content before finally uploading it. That’s one step too many.

Instead, offer your ambassadors a dedicated platform like Sociabble, which simplifies sharing on social networks:

• Thematic channels and categories allow you to offer ready-to-share, relevant content by effectively targeting your internal audiences.
  
• Sharing is easy: just one click to post company content on major social networks (LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads) without leaving Sociabble.
  
• Employees can personalize the text of company social media posts and rely on Ask AI, Sociabble’s AI tool, to ensure the company’s tone is respected.

3. Offer Employee Advocacy Training for Your Employees

At first, it’s essential to explain your employee advocacy program’s strategy and the benefits employees can derive from it. Few approaches are as effective in generating long-term enthusiasm and employee engagement when it comes to launching an employee advocacy program!

Then, remember that not everyone has the same level of digital maturity. Some will be very comfortable with social platforms, their codes, and trends. Others less so, or not at all. Offer your ambassadors support and training so they can master the employee advocacy tools and apply best practices. Support and training are key to securing employee buy-in.

Here are four suggested training themes:

• How to optimize your profile on different social networks
  
• How to engage with your community
  
• Company editorial guidelines and conduct rules
  
• How to create your own shareable content

Any one of these is a good place to start, or have a series of seminars and cover them all. Regular training is more effective than a one-and-done session.

4. Provide Shareable Content for Brand Advocacy

As mentioned earlier, employee advocacy can take two forms when it comes to content creation: original content created by employees, or sharing official content produced by the company. For the latter, offering regular content is vital for your advocacy program. So plan to create these types of communications in your social media strategy and content calendar. Regularity helps establish a routine that ambassadors can easily integrate into their day-to-day.

It’s especially important to vary your content types and formats to avoid boredom, for both employees and their audiences.

• Examples of content types: Company news, blog articles, CSR commitments, company life, etc.
• Examples of formats: Photo, video, GIF, carousel, podcast, downloadable PDF, etc.

A solution like Sociabble allows you to use all of these multichannel communication formats to ensure your employee advocacy program is effective. But the platform goes even further by offering each employee personalized content suggestions based on their role, location, and interests. Its artificial intelligence features also make your strategy more inclusive: instant translation allows your international employees to participate in your initiative.

5. Recognize Top Advocates

Thanks to your employees’ involvement, your company’s communication becomes more dynamic. It’s strongly recommended to thank them, especially if you want to maintain their engagement. And what better way to show gratitude than by rewarding them?

To do this, you can rely on two mechanics:

• Gamification: Incorporate fun elements to encourage employees to stay active. You can reward them with badges and points that contribute to a leaderboard ranking. This way, they can see where they stand compared to their colleagues and are encouraged to step up their participation to reach the top.
  
• Concrete Rewards: You can launch an employee advocacy campaign that allows employees involved with advocacy to earn points redeemable for company-branded gifts. Employees can choose between physical or digital items, or even make donations to a charity.

With a platform like Sociabble, employee rewards are built into the system, so it’s simple to establish point-based challenges as well as badges and kudos to recognize achievement. 

6. Track Performance and Iterate 

To assess the added value of your employee advocacy program, you need to establish KPIs that allow you to measure its outcomes with your own employees.

This usually includes both quantitative and qualitative data that you can use to your company’s advantage. How so? Good question.

By analyzing your indicators, you’ll be able to manage the project effectively, identifying what works and what needs to be improved or stopped. We’ll explore this in the next section.

How to Measure the Success of Your Employee Advocacy Program

A successful employee advocacy program requires hard work and resources. So it should have a noticeable impact on your company’s awareness, employer brand, and potentially even sales (social selling). So it’s not just about counting “likes,” but evaluating the entire strategy. Your return on investment (ROI) needs to be monitored in some form or other. Here’s why. 

Why Measure Your Program?

Measuring the outcomes of your strategy lets you know if you’ve met your goals. It gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your advocacy program’s added value to leadership. Positive results will inspire confidence in your executive team, who, convinced of the program’s effectiveness, can become important advocates for expanding employee involvement.

At the same time, you can show your ambassadors the impact of their participation. Sharing concrete results keeps them motivated and engaged in the project.

Your analytics will also reveal what worked and help you understand what didn’t. These data points give you everything you need to adjust your strategy, whether that’s the format, type of content, or audience targeting.

Key Metrics to Track

To measure the performance of your employee advocacy program, here are the most relevant KPIs:

• Reach & Impressions: The number of people who saw content shared by your employees. This helps you evaluate message reach.
  
• Engagement Rate: Interactions such as likes, comments, and shares are good indicators of how interesting your content is.
  
• Traffic to Owned Channels: This measures the number of clicks and sessions generated by shared content. This is made possible through UTM links. Sociabble also offers link tracking so you can easily centralize the data with your other indicators.
  
• Leads Generated: How many leads were generated from your ambassadors’ shares? Here, we’re leaning more into social selling than employee advocacy, though both strategies are linked.
  
• Employee Participation Rate: How many ambassadors do you have? What percentage of the total workforce do they represent? This shows you the advocacy program’s adoption rate, and how many are active.
  
• Ambassador Satisfaction: By collecting employee feedback, you can determine their satisfaction level. This includes ease of use for your employee advocacy tools, content quality, relevance, and how valued they feel. This internal barometer is crucial to improving both content and tools.

Tools That Help with Tracking

Of course, the power of your analytics lies in the quality of your dedicated employee advocacy tool. Which is when a communication and employee advocacy platform like Sociabble comes in very handy. Not only does Sociabble allow you to roll out your advocacy program, but it also lets you track all your KPIs via a customizable centralized dashboard. You can:

• Segment your indicators by country, department, or role
  
• Track content performance
  
• Analyze ambassador behavior

Interested in a real-world example of how employee advocacy powered by Sociabble can help drive concrete business results? We’ll cover this in the next section. 

Case Study: Morgan Philips Drives Business and Boosts Visibility with Employee Advocacy via Sociabble

Founded in 2013, Morgan Philips Group is an international leader in recruitment and talent management, operating in more than 20 countries with over 600 employees. The Group consists of a number of different brands, each with a special focus within the talent recruitment sphere.

The Challenge: Plenty of Brands, but Limited Brand Ambassadors

The challenge was to raise awareness of these brands and their expertise to maximize their visibility and facilitate the discovery of their services. In a recruitment company, consultants are on the front line. As they interact daily with clients and candidates, they naturally have the potential to be brand ambassadors. All that was missing was the right tool to help them do that.

The Solution: An Employee Advocacy Plan Powered by a Powerful Advocacy Tool

This led to the adoption of Sociabble, structuring the new phase of a fresh advocacy program, branded internally as MPG Voices. Sociabble met the following key requirements:

• Seamless daily use: Consultants should be able to share content in just a few clicks.
• A powerful amplification tool: Each social media post should reinforce the visibility of the group’s various brands by leveraging the vast reach of its ambassadors.
• Accurate performance tracking: The employee advocacy platform needed to measure the impact of shared content and optimize results.

Consultants adopted the Sociabble platform to share social media content and promote the brand, as well as specific job opportunities. The platform made all of this possible by providing them with targeted, relevant content, and giving them the ability to share it across their networks in just a few clicks. 

The Results: An Employee Advocacy Platform that Created an Army of Brand Advocates

Thanks to this strategy, Morgan Philips Group has been recognized multiple times for its influence on social media:

• #1 in Europe and #2 globally in the ranking of the most influential recruitment companies on social media
• Increased visibility for its brands: According to Marion Tonard, the company’s International Marketing Manager, “Content sharing has allowed our brand’s clients to discover our other services.” 

On an operational level, employee advocacy has become a strategic business driver:

• 12,000 LinkedIn interactions in 2024, boosting employee engagement and visibility
• 8,000 leads generated, proving its direct impact on the sales pipeline
• €1.2 million saved in equivalent paid media, thanks to the organic reach of its ambassadors

Want similar results? Talk to our team! You can sign up for a free, personalized demo and discover what Sociabble can do for your company. 

Conclusion: The Right Strategy and Tool Can Take Your Employee Advocacy Program Straight to the Top

As consumers grow increasingly skeptical of corporate messaging, employee advocacy stands out as a strategy to restore authenticity across social media. In this guide, we’ve highlighted the benefits of such an advocacy program:

• For the company: visibility, trust, leads, employer brand, savings in paid media
  
• For employees: personal branding, networking, recognition, sense of belonging
  

By following the key steps, we’ve seen how it’s possible to structure your own employee advocacy program and ensure its success:

• Defining objectives
  
• Choosing the right tool
  
• Providing training
  
• Creating relevant content
  
• Recognizing efforts
  

Finally, we’ve established that by tracking your key social media performance metrics (KPIs), you can measure the impact of your strategy, continuously improve it, and optimize your return on investment. By empowering your employees to speak on your behalf, you help your brand shine with credibility, consistency, and humanity. The best external communication starts internally.

Ready to embrace employee advocacy? At Sociabble, we’ve worked with industry leaders like Allianz France, ADP Group, and AXA in boosting their visibility with this strategy, and we’d be happy to discuss ways we can partner with your organization as well. 

Book your personalized demo now with our experts. They’ll be happy to answer your questions and support you in launching a high-impact employee advocacy program.

See you soon!