How to Set Yourself Up for Success with Employee Advocacy

By now, you’ve recognized the problems with your current social media strategy, and you understand how employee advocacy can help you fix them. But how do you get started?

For many marketers, salespeople, and HR professionals, launching an employee advocacy program is completely foreign. Here are six things every organization should consider before starting your program.

Your Goals and Objectives

Before you can launch your employee advocacy program, you need to understand your objectives. You have to assess where where you want to go and how quickly you want to get there.

Some key questions to ask yourself are:

• Why are you implementing an employee advocacy program?
• What are your goals for your employee advocacy program?
• What’s your timeline?

Once you’ve implemented your employee advocacy program, you’ll measure the success of your program against your goals.

Your Employees’ Goals and Objectives

Few employees will know what employee advocacy is – let alone care about how employee advocacy benefits your company. They will, however, care about what’s in it for them.

The question you should ask yourself is this: Why would your employees want to use social media for professional reasons? The answer to that question will vary from department to department and from employee to employee.

Here are a few possibilities:

• Build your personal brand
• Attain your sales quota
• Position yourself as a thought leader
• Attract more top-notch talent to your company
• Feel in touch with the company’s strategy

Your Organizational Readiness

Okay, you understand why your company wants to run this program and why your employees want to participate. You have a vision for the future. To get there, you need to understand where you are right now.

Here are a few questions you should ask yourself:

• How does your company use social media now?
• Which departments are going to participate in your social media program? How do they currently use social media?
• Which tactics are working in those individual departments?
• How much training will program participants need?
• How mature is your employee advocacy program?
• Do you have a social media policy in place?

Your Content Strategy

Your employees can’t post to social media if they don’t have content, so it is crucial that you have ample amounts of content for them.

Where are you going to get that content?

Don’t fret. You don’t need to hire another content creator to generate more content for your program. Sure, your employees will want to share company-related content from time to time. But most of them will want a variety of content types (e.g. blog posts, infographics, videos, etc.) from a variety of sources.

Learn about the 4-1-1 rule and how it can help your employees on social media.

The composition of your employee advocacy team is crucial. There are eight key roles that you have to fill. Before you launch your program and implement your solution, make sure you assign roles and understand who’s doing what to whom.

What can employee advocacy platforms do for you? Short answer: a lot. To drive adoption and results, you need to take your time and select the right employee advocacy platform.

There are a lot of considerations when it comes to starting an employee advocacy program. If you know your goals for the program, identify your employees’ goals, understand how your company currently uses social, are producing and discovering content to educate your audience, have assigned clear roles, and have identified your platform requirements, then you’re on the right track for successfully launching your employee advocacy program.