What is employee advocacy?
Employee advocacy is a programme in which a company’s employees post about their work on their own profiles, reaching audiences the company page cannot and carrying more credibility than the company’s own account.
Also called: employee advocacy program, employee social media advocacy.
The reason it works is arithmetic plus trust. The combined networks of a company’s employees are far larger than the company page’s following, and readers trust a named person describing their work more than a brand account describing itself.
The reason most programmes fail is that they are run as distribution. Handing employees pre-written posts to copy produces a feed of identical updates that readers ignore and employees resent. Advocacy only works when the words are actually the employee’s.
The operational problem is review. Communications teams need to see what goes out under the company’s banner, and employees will not participate in a process that takes a week. A programme lives or dies on whether approval takes minutes.
Participation should also stay voluntary. Mandated posting produces visibly reluctant content, which costs more credibility than the extra reach earns.
Measurement is where these programmes usually go wrong twice. They get judged on shares and impressions, which rewards the copy-and-paste behavior that kills them, and they get judged monthly, which is too short a window to see the thing that matters. The number to watch is how many people are still posting in month six without being asked.
The second question worth asking is whose posts are working. A programme where three people carry the reach is a programme with three advocates and a mailing list, and the fix is coaching those three into a pattern the others can copy rather than sending everyone another reminder.
12×
larger combined reach in employee networks than the company’s own following.
Common questions.
Do employees have to post from a company page?
No, and they should not. The whole advantage comes from posts appearing on personal profiles, which reach further and read as more credible than anything published by the brand account.
How do we keep advocacy posts on message without making them identical?
Give each person their own voice and a shared review step. In Depost AI every participant gets their own brand memory, and communications approves each draft before it publishes.
In the product
See also