If a C-suite executive says the wrong thing on social, it could snowball into a brand crisis and cost them their job. That’s why many leaders stay away from building a personal brand, whether by choice or corporate mandate. Despite the risk, many grow their followings by regularly sharing brand content, thought leadership and even a peek into their personal lives.

Because when executives approach social in an intentional way, it makes their brand seem more approachable, honest and trustworthy. With a focused executive social strategy, leaders amplify visibility and deepen connections with customers, employees, investors, media and partners.

Let’s dive into our lineup of executives (and the teams who support them) who are the most effective on social, and tips for developing your own successful executive communications program.

Salesforce: There’s a first time for everything

As the company behind a leading CRM software, Salesforce is a B2B marketing icon. With massive events like Dreamforce and millions of followers across platforms, the SaaS company sets the standard. Yet, up until recently, they weren’t able to do something pivotal: Leverage their CEO on social media.

When CEO, Marc Benioff, published his first LinkedIn post on October 30, 2024, it rocked the network’s algorithm. At time of publishing the post has over 18,000 likes, 800 comments and 1,900 reposts. Benioff’s post focused on an AI system update to their platform—a move that comes amid fierce competition in the AI landscape.

The post dramatically boosted the reach of the announcement through organic engagement and paid investment.

The PR lift from Benioff’s post and related commentary contributed to media pickups related to the launch, and reassured customers and investors of the company’s direction.

The play: For social and communications professionals who have struggled to get their executives (especially their CEO) on board with social brand advocacy, you’re not alone. Even some of the world’s biggest brands are figuring out how to overcome this challenge. Let Salesforce give you hope.

Make a case for creating an executive communications strategy by using Benioff’s post as a proof point. Tell a compelling story of what can happen for your brand when you tie a pivotal brand launch to a leader’s debut on social.

Symphonic Capital: Creating a sense of belonging

Symphonic Capital is a venture capital firm that invests in the next generation of institutions through serving overlooked and underserved communities. On LinkedIn, their founding general partner Sydney Paige Thomas has amassed a following by reflecting on what she’s learned investing in infrastructure technology and highlighting the firm’s events.

Thomas is consistent on social, which matters. But more importantly, she’s herself. She talks about her experiences as the daughter of the first Black Chief of Staff of San Diego Mercy Hospital. She shares personal anecdotes from her school years. She even mentions astrology in her posts.

Thomas demonstrates why executives can (and should) bring their full selves to their online personal brand. Humanizing your leaders creates confidence in your mission by allowing your community to see your leaders’ values first-hand. What motivates them, what their purpose is, why they think their work matters.

Thomas’ efforts helped her land on the AFROTECH™ Future 50 list. This accolade is one of a growing list of accomplishments she’s achieved as a trusted voice in the investment space. As she continues ascending in the field, so too does her firm’s profile.

The play: Take a cue from Thomas and Symphonic Capital by giving your leaders space to embody their full identities on social. Give them permission to talk about their upbringings, hobbies and families as well as their passion for their work. People trust people, and want to hear from them.

Raising Cane’s: From CEO to celebrity

In both B2C and B2B, it’s rare to see a CEO as involved in company marketing as Todd Graves. Graves is the founder of Raising Cane’s—the rapidly growing American chain known for their chicken fingers. He has shared the stage with Snoop Dogg, appeared as a guest shark on Shark Tank and gave Travis Kelce free chicken for a year.

The Raising Cane’s team uses Graves’ outgoing personality, likeability and popularity to their advantage, frequently featuring him in the brand’s social media content. Graves also has his own public Instagram channel (another CEO anomaly) where he is tagged as a collaborator on most of Raising Cane’s posts—amplifying their reach to his more than 500,000 followers. He appears in influencer posts, like this one where he shared a meal at Raising Cane’s with an influencer who had never eaten at one of his restaurants.

It’s difficult to articulate just how effective this strategy has been for raising Graves’ profile. His unlikely origin story became the bedrock of the brand’s image, forever intertwining Graves and Canes. Awareness of one inevitability creates success for the other. The company is on track to amass $5 billion this year and Graves was subsequently named to the Fortune 400 list.

The play: The “throw your CEO in the spotlight” strategy will not work at every company. Probably not even most companies. This playbook is only meant for founders who stick around for their entire career, until the next generation inherits their business. Even when brands fit into that bucket, they should only pursue this approach if they have a leader who has clearly defined values, flourishes in the limelight and is discerning about what to share publicly.

For brands with all pieces of that puzzle, your CEO might be the golden ticket to massive growth and outpacing the competition. For others, adapt what makes sense for your company. Maybe it’s encouraging your CEO to create an Instagram account managed by the social team. Or doing more media outreach for your C-suite.

Google: Sharing the spotlight across the C-suite

For a multinational, publicly traded corporation like Google, having executive thought leaders on social can be a significant risk (even more so than for startups or small companies). For this reason, some members of the C-suite might not be present on social at all, while others take a restrained approach.

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, chooses the latter, and shares well-curated content like highlights from earnings calls, clips from conversations with leaders at other companies and reflections about the future of global emerging technology on LinkedIn.

Similarly, Google’s Chief Sustainability Officer Kate Brandt shares how Google technology enables sustainable practices, like finding the perfect location for a solar farm, from her account. She also shares new pathways the company is creating for clean energy and AI-powered sustainability.

Melonie Parker, Chief Diversity Officer at Google, uses her voice on LinkedIn to draw attention to corporate initiatives tied to employee resource groups, partnerships with HBCUs and collaborations with nonprofit organizations.

It’s clear Google executives are in lock-step with their internal communications and content teams, and play an essential role in shaping their public narrative and steering attention toward their company roadmap.

The play: Though building an executive communications program on social can be a risk, the greater risk is zero executive presence on social at all. Even if leaders only repost existing brand content with a thoughtful message, that still helps companies stay ahead of and shape news stories, while multiplying reach and increasing employee engagement.

Take a cue from Google and create a posting calendar for your executives where they reshare existing content tied to their function. Suggest articles they should share and tie their posts to internal milestones.

Hilton: Pulling back the curtain on culture

For a well-established brand in the hospitality industry like Hilton, the need for a strong executive presence on LinkedIn might not be obvious at first. The brand is already widely recognized globally (they even have a celebrity spokesperson in the family). But as recruiting employees in the hospitality sector becomes a larger priority, so too does the need to strengthen their employer brand.

Hilton’s Chief Marketing Officer Mark Weinstein frequently posts content using the brand hashtag #EveryJobMakesTheStay, an ode to the Hilton ethos that every employee plays an important role in providing best-in-class guest experiences.

Weinstein also showcases Hilton’s awards, philanthropic efforts, and accessibility programs on LinkedIn, as well as leadership programs offered at the company.

Having leaders like Weinstein rally around recruitment and retention efforts—even indirectly—reinforces Hilton’s positive culture. His posts build upon stories in the media about Hilton’s partnerships with organizations like the U.S. Committee of Refugees and Immigrants, and underscores the brand’s commitment to investing in people.

The play: Building an indelible employer legacy is one of the most pressing reasons to kickstart or expand your executive communications program. No matter your sector, showing prospective employees what daily life at your company is like is key to hiring and keeping world-class talent.

Global spotlight: Telstra’s CEO is on the frontlines

Telstra is Australia’s largest mobile network, building, operating and fortifying telecommunications connections around the country. The brand’s CEO, Vicki Brady, shares scenes onsite while crews build network infrastructure. Like in this post, where she talks about the sacrifices those on the frontlines make and how their hard work translates to strengthening intercity fiber networks.

Through posts like this, Brady demonstrates her empathy for both the brand’s customers and employees. She proves Telstra’s commitment to providing reliable service as weather patterns become more extreme, and the appreciation she feels for the crew members who spend weeks away from their loved ones on the job.

She also shares reflections from sitting down with customers to learn more about their needs—especially those in remote places.

Telstra’s commitment to providing top-tier service and connectivity reflects in their earnings projections, even as they navigate tricky economic headwinds.

The play: Executives don’t just play a role humanizing your brand, they also humanize your customers and employees. As Brady illustrates, making people feel seen can go a long way. Consumers and team members are more than a number, and executives who reflect that on social earn their trust.

From the board room to the feed

That concludes this month’s installment of the PPR. Stay tuned for next month’s edition, where we’re rounding up brands we haven’t been able to scroll away from in 2024. In the meantime, remember these key takeaways:

Post Performance Report Takeaways

• Executive advocacy humanizes your brand. Your company seems more trustworthy and relatable when leaders share their authentic selves.
• Amplifying existing brand messages is a great starting point. It can be difficult to get executives on board with posting regularly. Giving them a low-lift way to do so still extends reach and generates attention for major updates.
• Social allows leaders to shape public narratives and reinforce company culture. Executives can use social content to align public perception with their corporate goals—a move that helps them win over consumers and potential employees alike.

Looking for step-by-step guidance on building an executive brand? Download our executive social media strategy cheat sheet.

And if you see a social post or campaign that deserves to be highlighted, tag us @sproutsocial and use #PostPerformanceReport to have your idea included in a future article.

The post Post Performance Report: Masterful examples of executive brand advocacy appeared first on Sprout Social.

Employee advocacy empowers employees to share smart, quality content with their social networks. But, getting there takes more than a well-crafted email encouraging your team to share branded content on their social networks. Employee advocacy tools streamline the process of transforming your employees into brand ambassadors.

These tools don’t just make it convenient to organize posts—the best ones elevate your overall employee advocacy strategy so you produce and promote content that your workforce will be proud to share with their connections. And get results that fuel your brand awareness and social strategy.

In this list, we break down even best employee advocacy platforms (including our own, of course) and how they’re different from the standard tools you might come across.

1. Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social

Sprout Social offers one of the top employee advocacy tools (previously called Bambu) that helps you amplify employees’ voices to drive real business results.

From enabling employees to quickly share posts to equipping them with industry-leading content, Sprout helps brands turn employees into thought leaders and expand the reach of your brand story.

With our social media management platform, your team executes seamlessly across tactics to maximize your reach and engagement. Plus, social media integration with Salesforce enables your sales team with the functionality to share content with prospects and build a profile that attracts key customers.

Together these solutions offer three distinct benefits that will help scale your strategy and expand your social presence:

Identify and distribute content that resonates most

Employee advocacy is more than just curation—you need to know what content is resonating with employees and how their connections are engaging with it.

Our analytics features help you uncover which content is driving the most engagement and, in turn, inform future content strategy. For example, Medallia, an enterprise customer experience platform, used Sprout to hone in on relevant metrics that informed them how to use content more effectively to better engage their customers in different industries. Plus our automated content distribution enabled their internal team to curate and deliver relevant content to employees across the globe to share within their networks. The result was a 48.6% year-over-year (YoY) increase in engagements with Sprout.

Increase employee participation with curated, personalized content

According to Sprout’s Employee Advocacy Report, 72% of engaged users post about their company if the content is written for them. Sprout’s pre-approved message ideas give your employees a starting point that helps them stay on-brand, while having the freedom to edit their voice and choose their preferred social network.

Employees can also customize their feeds by following topics relevant to their roles and suggest content for others to share. This encourages adoption by creating a tailored experience for employees.

West Monroe, a digital services firm, was able to use these features alongside executive support to scale their employee advocacy program to 400 active users and 10,863 shares in the first six months.

Increase social ROI

Per The Sprout Social Index™, more than 1,000 marketers revealed employee advocacy helped them drive more qualified leads, establish thought leadership and create new networking opportunities.

Advertising success platform Simpli.fi used Sprout to leverage employee networks for these very reasons. “Our potential reach from the sales department alone is at almost a million unique users because everyone has such large networks online,” noted Spencer Traverm, Director of Content at Simplifi.

With Sprout’s employee advocacy program, the company was able to align its brand transformation with a new social media strategy and overcome resource limitations, earning them almost $90,000 in estimated earned media value.

Sprout is suitable for businesses of all sizes—enterprises and small to medium-sized businesses—that have built a social presence and are continuing to invest in social media marketing. It’s also great for all industries including regulated industries like healthcare.

If you’ve just started building your social presence, alternative all-in-one platforms include:

• Sociabble
• ClearView Social
• Hootsuite Amplify
• PostBeyond
• Oktopost

2. EveryoneSocial

EveryoneSocial is a social media employee advocacy tool that solely focuses on employee advocacy. Its freemium model makes it one of the best employee advocacy platforms for businesses looking for a low-cost or even no-cost introduction to employee advocacy.

The freemium model also opens doors for small businesses or startups that want to test advocacy without making a substantial initial investment.

A central feature of EveryoneSocial is its content hub. This digital space aggregates all the content your company wishes to disseminate through its employees. From the latest blog post to an important company announcement, everything is organized and accessible in one place, so it’s easy for employees to find shareable content.

EveryoneSocial also has social selling features. The tool integrates with sales tools like Salesforce and HubSpot to empower sales teams to build their personal brands and track leads at the same time.

3. Haiilo

Haiilo is an employee communications platform that includes advocacy features but primarily focuses on creating an internal community.

The platform offers a centralized space for employees to share experiences and achievements and connect their social media channels, which simplifies content sharing.

What makes Haillo’s features different from other platforms is its comms and advocacy analytics. The tool analyzes comms across any employee segment and notifies you about critical developments.

These insights give you data to calculate your advocacy ROI.

Find your most influential employees with this analysis and push them toward the forefront. Plus, set up automated reports to ensure you’re up-to-date with the latest trends and insights in your internal community.

Haillo’s gamification features help employees see how well they’re driving engagement and traffic compared to their colleagues. Make employee advocacy fun with leaderboards and offer perks to encourage active participation.

4. Firstup

Previously known as Dynamic Signal, Firstup, amplifies your brand’s voice through advocacy and offers internal collaboration and communication with a robust employee experience ecosystem.

Firstup specifically uses the platform to connect with job candidates. Employees can get in touch with candidates, promote relevant listings and maintain brand consistency at the same time.

What really makes Firstup different, though, is how it’s available in 30 different languages. This makes it a perfect fit for global teams that want to position their employees as ambassadors in different regions.

Firstup also lets site administrators draft multiple versions of a social post and randomly distribute them among employees for sharing. You can tailor these posts to globally distribute your brand’s message and make sure it’s locally relevant and sensitive to cultural nuances.

Firstup is a good choice for companies that want to encourage their global teams to promote their brand’s message. This is a great way to get everyone talking about your company’s mission and values, all while connecting with potential customers and candidates on a local level.

5. GaggleAMP

GaggleAMP is an employee advocacy platform designed to engage employees in promoting their company’s content across social media channels. It offers flexibility by allowing administrators to create various “engagements” beyond simple sharing, like liking, commenting or participating in discussions on social media, aiding companies to achieve diverse advocacy goals.

GaggleAMP helps build a structured approach to employee advocacy that encourages active participation and makes it simpler to track effectiveness. With GaggleAMP, administrators can provide employees with a library of pre-approved content and clear prompts on how to engage with it. This makes it easier for employees to support the brand without having to do extra work.

The tool also provides detailed analytics, enabling companies to measure the reach and impact of these engagements and identify which activities resonate most with their audience.

6. Sociabble

Sociabble is a tool that helps employees support and engage with their company’s employee advocacy program. Its content calendar helps organize posts, ensuring that timely and relevant content is available, which encourages consistent participation without overloading employees.

Sociabble is best known for supporting a data-driven approach to understanding the impact of employee advocacy on brand awareness and reach. Detailed analytics provide insights into engagement metrics, showing companies how often content is shared, which platforms drive the most reach, and which employees are the most active advocates.

The platform also integrates well with communication tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack and Yammer, allowing employees to share content without leaving their familiar workflows. Sociabble’s features, such as leaderboards and point systems, help incentivize engagement and make advocacy more engaging.

7. DSMN8

DSMN8 is an employee advocacy tool that focuses on making it easy for employees to share company content to enhance brand visibility and engagement through employees’ networks.

Companies can choose and share a variety of content types, from articles to videos, in a content library format directly to employees. This library simplifies the sharing process, giving employees access to a ready-made collection of relevant, on-brand material. The tool also offers a mobile-friendly interface, which is convenient for employees on the go and encourages broader engagement.

DSMN8’s analytics features enable companies to track the reach and impact of shared content, providing insights into engagement levels and identifying top advocates within the organization.

With gamification elements like leaderboards and recognition, DSMN8 helps foster a culture of advocacy by motivating employees to participate. Also, the tool can be changed to match a company’s brand and communication goals, helping make advocacy efforts more cohesive and measurable.

Amplify your social presence with employee advocacy

People trust other people more than they do companies. It’s a natural tendency for us to trust our peers, friends and people we admire more so than faceless corporate entities.

This makes employees your most valuable brand ambassadors. Employee advocacy platforms empower employees to share your brand’s message in their unique, authentic voice. They make it effortless for employees to share content and extend your brand’s reach far beyond what you could achieve alone.

Amplify your brand presence while staying connected to your overall social strategy with Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social. With its robust analytics, you’re never in the dark about your program’s performance and your team is always equipped with the insights they need to iterate and improve.

Ready to turn your employees into your biggest supporters? Learn more how Sprout’s advocacy features will help you.

The post 5 top employee advocacy tools and platforms to drive growth appeared first on Sprout Social.

With the right amount of support, your coworkers can become your most essential brand advocates. Set them up for success with a thorough launch strategy that streamlines your efforts and theirs.

Use this checklist to plan a rollout that encourages maximum participation and supports your long-term business goals. This phased approach will help you:

• Outline how employees can benefit from an advocacy program through professional development, participation incentives and personal brand building.
• Secure the executive sponsorship needed to get people motivated to participate.
• Determine which metrics will be used to measure the internal and external success of your program.

Download this checklist today to jumpstart your employee advocacy program with a high level of engagement from day one.

The post 7 Steps to Launching an Employee Advocacy Program Your Team Wants to Participate In appeared first on Sprout Social.

Case in point, Sprout Social earned more than 28 million impressions from our Employee Advocacy platform last year.

From increasing brand awareness to building an employer brand that attracts top talent, employee advocacy helps brands achieve business goals.

However, many advocacy initiatives are informal side projects. Looking forward, building a sophisticated program requires strategic content planning and cross-functional collaboration.

In this article, we offer prescriptive recommendations for how you can curate a pipeline of content and ensure the long-term success of your advocacy efforts in 2024—and beyond.

Create goals and determine how to measure success

To create a robust content strategy for an employee advocacy platform, you need to first set clear goals for your employee advocacy program and choose the metrics you’ll use to measure success. Here’s a breakdown of how to do this.

Define clear, measurable goals

Understand what you aim to achieve with your employee advocacy program, and then lock it down. For example, is your goal to increase brand awareness and reach? Or do you want to improve employee morale and brand connection by involving employees in advocacy? Your goals could also be tactical, such as generating new leads through employee networks or positioning your company as thought leaders in your industry. Another great goal could also include the use of advocacy to attract star talent by showcasing your company culture.

Now to the brass tacks. Ensure these goals are quantifiable. For example, increasing brand awareness by having 50% of employees share at least one piece of content a week. Or aiming for a 20% increase in website traffic from employee-shared content within six months.

Make sure you can achieve your goals with your current resources and capabilities. Also ensure they’re relevant, by aligning them with broader business objectives, like increasing overall brand visibility or boosting lead generation.

Finally, establish a time-bound framework, like targeting a certain engagement rate within three months, to keep the goals on track and ensure timely progress.

Identify key performance indicators (KPIs)

Once you’ve set your goals, identify the KPIs you’ll use to measure success. These could include social media metrics such as reach, impressions, shares and engagement rates. Or, lead conversion rates to see how many leads are generated from employee shares. KPIs, like traffic sources, to track web traffic from social posts shared by employees, employee participation rate and referral rates are important as well.

Adopt tracking and measuring tools

Use social media monitoring tools to track and measure your program. For instance, tools like Sprout help manage, track and analyze the performance of your EA efforts. These metrics show the ROI of your employee advocacy program, and you can easily share core metrics with your leadership team to attract executive support.

You can also set up custom UTM parameters to track the specific impact of employee-shared content on web traffic and conversions. Plus, regularly collect feedback from employees to understand their experience and identify areas for improvement.

Review and adjust tactics regularly

It’s important to conduct regular, monthly or quarterly reviews of your KPIs. This will help you assess and ensure the ongoing success of your employee advocacy program. This also includes feedback from employees to keep them motivated and engaged because, after all, their collaboration is crucial. You should also aim to recognize and reward employees who actively participate and get great results. This will help foster a culture of involvement and appreciation.

The pillars of a content strategy for employee advocacy platform

According to Sprout’s research, brands report not having enough content as one of their greatest employee advocacy challenges. As one marketer said, “You need a lot of content to support a program. If your company’s not in a good place with content, then you’re going to struggle.”

The key is to curate the right content, not just a lot of content, that aligns with your brand’s goals and values. To fuel your employee advocacy program and build your content repository, make sure your content checks all the essential boxes.

Educational resources

Your advocacy content should be rooted in providing value to your audience. Share educational resources that’ll inform, engage and spark conversation. Focus on relevant topics that’ll help your community approach common industry challenges.

Share-worthy educational resources include in-house and third-party:

• Blog posts
• Videos
• Social media posts
• Data reports
• Templates and tools
• Case studies

Behind-the-scenes/company culture content

Employee experiences are the most compelling examples of your company’s culture. Share content that gives people an inside look at working at your company. Include blog posts or videos from the point of view of your employees. Ask your team members to take people behind-the-scenes of industry events, development trainings or volunteer opportunities.

This content will humanize your brand, resonate with your audience and give your team members a chance to cheer on their colleagues.

Executive thought leadership (owned and earned)

Strong executive communication plans are a must for managing brand identity, boosting employee morale and recruiting talent. Incorporate executive thought leadership into your advocacy strategy. Share blog articles, videos, social posts and other content created by your C-suite or leadership team.

Take your strategy to the next level by keeping track of the publications quoting and interviewing your execs. Prioritize curating earned media placements to build your brand’s thought leadership credibility.

Recruitment content

A compelling employer brand helps you convince talent that your organization is the best place for them to build their careers. Many of today’s candidates wish they knew more about what it’s really like to work at a company before joining.

That’s why employee testimonials are a powerful recruitment tool. By incorporating employee advocacy into your recruitment strategy, you can amplify your open job posts while inviting your team members to infuse their personal experiences into their social messages. Afterall, your employees’ perspectives matter three times more to prospective candidates than your CEO’s.

Candidates are also interested in industry awards and recognitions. Share award press releases, graphics and videos in your employee advocacy platform to spread the word. At Sprout, this content is our most widely-shared by employees.

Philanthropic announcements

Prospective candidates, current team members, customers and industry partners want to know that you follow-through on your corporate social responsibility commitments. While taking a stand through tactics like social activism is important, you must share what actions you’re taking to back up your words.

In your advocacy platform, share announcements related to scholarships you fund, off-site volunteer days or donations that support your philanthropic initiatives.

Product news/industry partnerships

One of the best ways to keep your team and your customers up to date on industry news and product changes is by tapping into your employee advocacy channel. Share press releases, blog posts and videos announcing product enhancements, new releases, seasonal launches and trend reports.

When announcing new partnerships with other industry leaders and brands, lean into employee advocacy to generate major buzz. For example, when Sprout announced our Salesforce partnership, 95% of our 740,000 social impressions related to the launch were a result of employees sharing content from the advocacy platform.

Evergreen content

Curating generic and evergreen posts for employee advocacy ensures your content remains relevant, engaging‌ and useful over time, regardless of current events or trends. Employees can share these posts throughout the year, offering ongoing value without needing frequent updates. Think: work anniversaries or personal milestones. It could also mean “Thank You” posts highlighting an employee’s journey and contributions to the company.

5 ways to ensure you never run out of content for your employee advocacy program

Gathering all the content you need for a successful advocacy program can seem overwhelming. You don’t have to do it alone. Here are a few tips on recruiting other departments to curate so you always have enough content on-hand.

1. Collaborate more closely across your marketing team

Work closely with your content, communications, product and customer marketing teams to stay in the loop on upcoming articles, important news and company updates. Have regular meetings and work in shared calendars to promote visibility.

Your content team can also help you curate. As the writers and editors behind blogs, videos, case studies and more, they can efficiently draft prepackaged social copy to accompany each curated post. Not only will their curation productivity fuel your advocacy strategy, it’ll help them meet their traffic goals.

2. Build relationships outside of marketing

Partnering with other teams in marketing is a great start, but to achieve an employee advocacy strategy that appeals to your entire organization, you need to go beyond marketing. Form cross-functional relationships across your business.

Ask yourself who can be your points of contact in HR, sales, engineering, R&D and operations. Work with them to surface content relevant to their team’s goals and find out what resonates with their external audience. Each team might have completely different content they want to share.

3. Source ideas across your organization

Your team members have a pulse on trending content. Use them as sources for interesting third-party articles, reports and analyses from your industry.

Sprout’s Employee Advocacy solution offers all users the option to curate content. By clicking the “Add Story” button in the upper right corner, you can suggest a content piece be added to your company’s current stories feed.

4. Find out what your employees want to share

Design an employee advocacy program your team members actually want to participate in by measuring your performance results at every stage of your program. Determine which stories are being shared the most, which topics resonate and where there are gaps in your content strategy.

Don’t be afraid to ask your employees for feedback. Consider asking:

• How would you rate our employee advocacy program?
• Has our employee advocacy program helped you expand your personal brand on social?
• What do you need help with to maximize your use of our advocacy solution?

Try our free checklist, where we’ve boiled it down to 6 easy steps for launching an employee advocacy program.

5. Engage your executives

Engage your executive team to attract more attention to your content and boost engagement. Executives sharing their insights, successes and personal stories can humanize leadership, making the brand more relatable and authentic. And this can inspire confidence and pride among employees, for a culture of transparency and trust. Plus, when executives actively participate, it shows how important the initiative is and encourages employees to join.

However, managing executives and keeping them engaged in curating stories requires a proactive approach. Encourage them to share personal experiences, insights‌ and successes that align with the company’s mission. It’s also important to regularly communicate how valuable their participation is and how their involvement can inspire the broader team and strengthen the company’s brand.

Tools like Sprout can simplify this process by enabling your exec team to easily share content as well as see the impact of their posts. This also ensures they stay actively involved without interruptions to their busy schedules.

Ensure a steady stream of employee advocacy content

Employee advocacy is no longer just “nice to have.” Today’s social teams are up against constant algorithmic shifts and resource deficits that make organic social growth challenging. A sophisticated employee advocacy program is critical to gaining impressions, increasing awareness, securing leads and finding top talent.

To make the most of your advocacy program, collaborate with other departments to help you source and curate content. When you consistently supply your team with new content, the results on your business goals will speak for themselves.

Want to determine the impact of employee advocacy on your company’s bottom line? Try Sprout’s employee advocacy ROI calculator tool.

The post The complete guide to create your employee advocacy content strategy appeared first on Sprout Social.

We created this collection of customizable staff spotlight templates to guide your approach from start to finish. In this guide, find:

• A process checklist to help you stay organized across teams
• A sample 12-month content calendar for your employee spotlight series
• Employee spotlight questions to guide asset creation
• Briefs that support asset creation across a variety of different formats—including static images, short-form video and long-form video.

These templates are just the starting point. Make a copy of the employee spotlight template and personalize it to your team needs, processes and company goals to start your employee spotlight series on social today.

What is an employee spotlight?

An employee spotlight series is a regular feature that highlights and celebrates individual employees while offering a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to work for the company. These posts are typically shared through social media, company websites and internal newsletters.

How do you write an employee spotlight?

Writing an employee spotlight involves more than just interviewing a colleague and drafting up a quick post. If you want to create a scalable process, you need to create a structured process up front.

One of the team spotlight templates included in this collection will walk you through the process of creating your first feature. You’ll learn how to set goals, source your stories and decide on your first featured team member. We also share how to navigate the internal approval process so you can capture and distribute your content without a hitch.

The post An Employee Spotlight Template for Celebrating Your Team appeared first on Sprout Social.

But empowering other teams to tap into social for business insights and create content—for your channels or theirs—requires the right training. In this article, you’ll learn about the core benefits of social media employee training, and what you need to get started.

The benefits of a social media employee training process

There are likely many employees at your company who want to get involved in social—on behalf of your brand, or to build their personal one. According to Sprout Social research, 56% of employees would share company posts simply because their company encouraged them to.

Whether it’s done during onboarding or throughout the year—in person or via webinars—social media employee training removes many of the common barriers that prevent employees from getting involved, or prevent brands from encouraging them to. Think: posting anxiety or brand risk.

Let’s get into a few ways employee social media training can empower staff and put brands at ease.

Organic brand advocacy

Your employees are some of your best brand advocates. Delivering training that empowers them to share company content on social means your brand and posts get amplified, while your team saves budget on paid advertising.

Brand advocacy leads to some of the most authentic promotion you can ask for. And in the age of authenticity, organic social posts are more important than ever. People trust real people—39% of consumers say real customer testimonials or demos are the content they prefer seeing from brands, according to The 2022 Sprout Social Index™.

If more reach even in a time of tight budgets sounds like a pipe dream, consider Vizient. Their use of employee advocacy led to a 10x audience reach from employee networks on a recent campaign. Vizient’s Social Media Director Elida Solis advises team members to “Share what’s most relevant. Don’t think of it as ‘promoting content.’ Consider what your network wants to learn more about. When you share a post, customize the copy to infuse your experience and make it relevant for your audience.”

Improved lead generation

On a day-to-day basis, this helps your sales team find success with direct social selling. But broadly, educating other teams to use social intentionally can reshape a brand’s entire go-to-market approach. According to The State of Social Media 2023 report, 43% of business leaders say that social data and insights currently inform their lead generation strategy.

You already know that social media is a direct line to your customers. Training your sales team to be more strategic on social can help them harness social as a tool to generate pipeline.

For example, Facebook is the most popular platform for social commerce, which is powerful for making sales via social. And LinkedIn business pages have a lead generation form, plus ad capabilities like sponsored content and Message Ads that make it easier to connect with your ideal audience. Training your sales team to use platform-specific tools like this can give them new avenues to capture prospects, and new ways to learn about the customer.

In the end, this benefits the marketing team, too. Proving ROI is a top challenge for social teams. Teaching other teams to use social for lead generation gives you and your team one more way to ladder social media efforts up to broader business goals.

Regulatory compliance

There’s always some risk when employees post about your company—from simply misrepresenting the brand, to violating confidentiality agreements. And if you work in a regulated industry, these risks may give you pause.

But just because your industry is highly regulated doesn’t mean you need to avoid or give up on social entirely. You need a system in place to mitigate brand risks, and a social media employee training program can safeguard against legal or compliance violations.

Work closely with your legal team as you create your training and employee advocacy programs. And if you have a social media policy, ensure the best practices documented in it are reflected and reinforced during your social media trainings.

For a deeper dive, read our social media compliance guide.

Data-driven decision-making

Social media intelligence is business intelligence. According to The State of Social Media report, 85% of business leaders say that social data and insights currently inform their company’s larger business strategy. Social data can empower every team to make smarter decisions—if they know how to use it.

For example, social listening can help product teams get ahead of market trends. 97% of business leaders agree that the use of social data to understand market trends will increase over the next three years—something clothing brand River Island is already doing. Using Sprout’s Social Listening solution, River Island works with their product team to research trends mentioned on social and to identify which products to promote.

Training other teams on how to interpret social data and use it to inform their strategy is essential to getting the most out of your channels. Using sharable dashboards (like those available in Sprout, or built in BI tools like Tableau) breaks down silos and makes your data accessible across teams.

Alleviated social team workload

It’s no secret that social media teams are stretched thin. Running company-wide social media employee training opens the door for other teams to provide post ideas and even film or stand in as social video talent.

This approach also expands the voices and expertise feeding your channels. According to The State of Social Media Report, marketing, customer care/support, communications, operations and sales and the C-suite are the top six teams who influence companies’ social strategies—these teams can harness their customer learnings and surface fresh ideas that enhance your content calendar.

And this is in addition to posts shared and amplified through employee advocacy. In tandem with advocacy content, employees you train in social can alleviate workload and extend the life of your content.

Get a template to train your social customer service team

6 components of effective social media employee training

The elements of your employee social media training will differ based on your business goals and needs. But here are six core components to get you started.

1. Executive sponsorship

Your executives set the tone for the rest of the business. Encouraging employees to get more involved on social starts with executives establishing that social media matters at your company.

If your executives are not social savvy, your social media employee training starts with them. At the very least, they should understand the business impact of social, and why it’s a cross-team asset.

At most, encourage them to actively post or offer to ghostwrite content for them. If they need convincing, consider this business impact: according to our #BrandsGetReal research, 70% of consumers feel more connected to brands with CEOs who are active on social. Active C-suite executives on social set an internal standard, while improving external brand perception.

Take it a step further: To foster an environment where social media is valued, its importance should be baked into your overall company culture. Establish an employee advocacy program plan to make posting easier for employees, including your executive team members.

2. A clear social media policy

Your social media policy is a guiding light of do’s, don’ts and best practices for social. For your marketing team, this is a great tool for onboarding new staff. But a policy also empowers employees from other departments to post confidently, while protecting them and your brand.

Your social media policy will be unique to your company and industry. Here are just a few items to consider:

• Are there words you must/must not use when referring to your business, brand and products?
• Are there topics you want to avoid mentioned alongside your brand?
• What are the do’s and don’ts of talking about your brand?
• Are disclosures needed around any topics or stories your brand discusses? (E.g., If you’re a news brand and you post a story about an affiliate, or parent brand.)
• Does your company react or comment on breaking news, or political and social issues?
• For curated employee advocacy posts, can employees add their own copy or are there specific captions that must be used?
• When posting about your brand, are there certain images to avoid? (E.g., behind the scenes areas that may be sensitive.)
• For employees creating posts for your brand channels, what is your brand voice? Are there any words or tones you should stay away from?

Take it a step further: Check out our article about brand safety tools to find out how you can further protect your brand’s online reputation, and teach others to do the same

3. Live and on-demand training options

Offering live trainings in tandem with on-demand options ensures everyone can learn based on their availability. But this also allows employees to revisit trainings, request access to specific social media management app—like Sprout—and find documentation that outlines how to post and engage the social team.

For example, at a previous company I worked for, the PR team held quarterly social media trainings for new employees. These sessions covered brand voice and values, the do’s and don’ts of images and brand-friendly language. If you weren’t able to attend one day, there would always be a later date to participate in. Here at Sprout, our social media team delivered a robust training for our content team on social copywriting best practices, enabling our writers to assist with post creation.

Similarly, IT software company Ivanti curates internal social resources for their employees to reference. Through blog posts, videos and how-to guides, employees can learn about how to use their employee advocacy platform—Sprout’s, specifically. They even created a social media-centric culture by baking this training into their onboarding process.

Take it a step further: Identify and lean on a small group of social savvy “internal influencers.” They can lead the employee advocacy charge or support content creation for the social team. Then, as you expand your employee social media training, these influencers can serve as go-to experts. Use this employee advocacy influencer program template to get started.

4. A tailored training “curriculum”

What we mentioned above is a “social media 101” training for all employees. But beyond employee advocacy, different teams will have different needs and uses for social—so a blanket training just won’t do.

Develop tailored employee social media training sessions for specific teams. For example, if your content team wants to support Reels creation, train them on video production and curation in your social media management platform.

If your HR team wants to tap social to build their employer branding strategy, recruiting efforts and employee engagement, train them on employee advocacy and LinkedIn tactics.

And if your product team needs social for market research and customer feedback, get them up to speed on social listening. Using a tool like Sprout, you can always provide different levels of access to specific members of different teams to democratize social insights across your business.

5. Provide tool training

When it comes to getting other teams comfortable with using social, ensuring they can access and use the right tools in your martech stack is half the battle. Incorporate those demos into your tailored team-by-team training sessions.

The tools certain employees need will depend on how they’re going to be using social. For example, staff across departments should know how to use your employee advocacy platform.

If your product or customer care team needs to tap social for customer and market insights, train them how to use social listening, or how to pull analytics reports from your social media management platform.

And if you have employees from other teams who want to contribute social content, teach them how to use design tools, like Canva. If you use Sprout, you can even have them submit drafts of content for approval.

6. A continuous feedback loop

This step is less about training your employees, and more about training yourself and your team to share the impact of a more social savvy employee base.

Sharing the performance of employee-created content shows them that their posts have business impact.

And this goes beyond employee advocacy. For example, you can create reports featuring HR-led employer brand content to highlight the engagement they received, or their impact on inbound applications. On the sales side, Google Analytics can highlight leads that came in through social and converted.

Here at Sprout, our content team contributes a handful of social posts to the social team’s production calendar each month. We regularly create mini-performance reports, sharing how the content team’s posts fed the larger social strategy.

Take it a step further: Separating employee posts and their metrics by hand is extremely tedious. In Sprout, Tagging employee-created content enables you to immediately report success metrics for those posts specifically and their individual—and combined—impact.

Start a social media employee training program that grows your entire business

For companies to flourish today and in the future, investing further in social media is crucial.

Leaning on other teams to create or share content is a win-win-win. It expands your reach, alleviates social team workload and creates new ways for employees to build their personal brands.

And it all starts with reliable employee social media training that provides your colleagues with the right skills.

Use our social media policy template to shape a policy that you can use to guide all of your social media training sessions.

The post Social media employee training: A playbook to get everyone involved in extending your brand appeared first on Sprout Social.

Edgio provides powerful solutions across web apps, content delivery and video streaming—servicing approximately 4% of global internet traffic and clients in 38 countries worldwide. While the company isn’t new, its brand name is. Previously known as Limelight Networks, Inc., the business rebranded in June 2022 following its acquisitions of Layer0 and of Yahoo’s Edgecast. What followed was a year of significant change for the company as they pivoted from a CDN vendor to an edge company providing applications and solutions that take advantage of their global edge network.

When Lindsay Moran, Senior Manager, Content and Brand Strategy, joined Edgio in the summer of 2022, her challenge was to amplify the company’s new brand on social media with a strategy that could deliver results quickly and cost-effectively. Moran led the charge to implement Sprout Social’s Employee Advocacy platform, a decision that not only drove employee engagement, but helped the company generate $126,000+ in earned media value (EMV) in just three months after launching its advocacy program company-wide.

The extra reach from our employees—not paid advertising—is helping us grow our audiences on social. Our earned media value was over $126,000 in the first three months of our program

Lindsay Moran
Senior Manager, Content and Brand Strategy

Reinvigorating employee advocacy during a time of significant transformation

Before its rebranding, Edgio had tried to launch an employee advocacy program, but it did not gain much traction internally. Moran said she recognized that the time was right to try again after helping Edgio develop a host of new assets, from blogs to web content, to help the business “rebuild” its position as an industry thought leader. Delivering consistent messaging about the company’s products, solutions and brand across social media channels was also a priority.

“Social media is a no-brainer for sharing this quality content,” said Moran. “We have small audiences on our key corporate social media channels, like LinkedIn, X and Facebook. But we knew we could amplify our reach by inspiring employees to use their personal networks to help promote our brand.”

Helping employees feel connected to our brand and aware of our news was also a top factor in the decision to reinvigorate employee advocacy at Edgio. “When merging companies and pivoting to new value-added capabilities for our customers, there’s a lot to share,” she said. “Employee advocacy is helping us stay abreast of all the good news and stay focused on the future by inspiring our employees to play a front-line role in telling our brand story.”

Employee advocacy needs to feel natural and authentic. What’s great about Sprout is that we can equip our employees with the content we want them to share, but they still have the opportunity to put their individual spin on it and make it their own.

Lindsay Moran
Senior Manager, Content and Brand Strategy

Impressive post-launch results that inspired a “happy dance”

To get the new employee advocacy program off to a successful start, Moran said she leaned on the team from Sprout to provide training to a select group of handpicked brand enthusiasts at Edgio who took part in a 30-day pilot program in February 2023. “It was a great experience,” Moran said. “Sprout let us record the pilot training session, and we’ve since turned it into an internal training tool for our new hires.”

She added, “The pilot program helped us to ensure we had plenty of content prepared going into our company-wide rollout of Sprout’s Employee Advocacy platform. And through a post-pilot survey, we gathered more valuable insights on how to make our program successful from the outset.”

Edgio officially introduced the new employee advocacy program to its workforce through a monthly sales awareness call and a companywide “EdgeTalks” presentation (Edgio’s version of a TED Talk). Moran said these forums were a vital way to communicate the “why” for the program clearly, and to offer a solid overview of program basics plus “tips and tricks” for users to make the most of employee advocacy.

Moran also emphasized that the “tremendous support” of Edgio’s Chief Marketing Officer, Nancy Maluso, who played no small part in helping to build momentum around the employee advocacy effort. “She continues to promote and encourage the program among our leadership teams,” Moran said.

With Sprout’s Reports, Moran tracks the impact of Edgio’s employee advocacy program and shares the results with employees to help them stay motivated “cheerleaders” for the brand.

There’s been new business activity percolating at Edgio, too, which can be attributed to the company’s use of Employee Advocacy by Sprout. “During a recent team meeting, our sales leader in EMEA told us she’d received a lead from content shared through Advocacy,” said Moran. “I did a happy dance! It’s so exciting that we’re already starting to see fruit from our labor. It validates what we’re trying to do as a company, and why we’re working so hard to promote this program.”

Sprout makes it easy to jumpstart and grow employee advocacy

Moran said the employee advocacy program at Edgio is blooming, and the sales, marketing and customer success teams are particularly active in sharing content. But several product specialists and other subject matter experts have also become frequent users, and Moran said their outreach is particularly valuable for helping Edgio grow its reputation as an innovator.

“The ease of adopting a tool like Sprout helped our team embrace the new employee advocacy program quickly. After just the first month, the adoption rate was 34%,” Moran said. “Today, 20% of employees are active users, sharing content with their audiences more than three times per month, on average. Over time, I’d love to see our adoption rate hit 50%. That’s my aim.”

To learn more about how Employee Advocacy by Sprout can help amplify your brand’s social presence and engage your team—without spending more on paid promotion—request a demo today.

The post Edgio sees $126,000+ in earned media value with Employee Advocacy in just 3 months appeared first on Sprout Social.

One of the best ways to jumpstart an effective advocacy program is to identify internal “influencers” to champion your brand on social. We created this employee advocacy influencer plan to empower you to build an influencer program from the ground up, earn buy-in from across your team and maintain long-term success.

This comprehensive template will help you:

• Identify a group of internal influencers
• Fuel a sustainable content pipeline
• Craft dedicated influencer communications at a regular cadence
• Measure your business-wide impact

Download this program plan template to maximize the success of your employee advocacy initiative.

The post How to Create an Effective Employee Advocacy Influencer Program Plan appeared first on Sprout Social.

This post serves as a comprehensive guide on using LinkedIn for business marketing. We show you all the essential steps starting from how to build your business page. Let’s dive in.

Table of contents:

• How to create a LinkedIn business page
• How to use LinkedIn for business
• Benefits of using LinkedIn for business

How to create a LinkedIn business page

If you’re going to build a strategic presence on LinkedIn, the first thing you need is a business page. This page will serve as the go-to source of information on anything related to your business. Prospective clients will check out your content to gauge your expertise. Meanwhile, job applicants will use it to understand your company culture.

Follow the steps below to create a LinkedIn company page for your business.

Step 1: Start by creating a company page

Go to your LinkedIn homepage and click on the “For Business” drop-down menu at the top right-hand corner of the screen. Then select “Create a Company Page.”

Step 2: Select your page type

Select the type of page that represents your business–a company page, a showcase page or an educational institution page. If this is going to be the main company page, select the “Company” option. Showcase pages are sub-pages that you can later create to link to your main page.

Step 3: Fill out your company profile

You’ll need to provide your business name, industry, organization size and organization type. Optionally, you can include a website URL, add a tagline and upload your company logo. On the right-hand panel, you can see a preview of your page to see what it’ll look like to others.

Step 4: Create the page

Click on “Create Page” to finish creating your LinkedIn business page. Now your page is all set up.

From here, you’ll have the option to follow additional steps to improve your chances of success. This includes adding a description, including a location, following relevant pages and more.

Beyond these essential steps, check out our guide on how to build the perfect LinkedIn page for more help. This will provide you with additional best practices and tips to set your page up for success.

How to use LinkedIn for business

Now that you have a proper LinkedIn business page set up, it’s time to focus on how to use it. Check out the video below for a crash course on using LinkedIn for business, including content types and employee advocacy.

Decide on goals

To build a more effective LinkedIn presence, you’ll need to create specific goals for the platform. Take time to meet with representatives from your sales, product, customer service and human resources teams. That way, you’ll be able to identify the top priorities across different departments.

For example, sales team members might be more interested in how LinkedIn can increase web traffic and drive sales. Meanwhile, the human resources department might want to attract more quality hires from the platform.

These conversations will likely result in a lot of ideas. If you’re not sure what to prioritize, here are some questions to guide the process:

• Which audience are you trying to reach?
• What are they interested in?
• What is the action you want them to take after seeing your content?

Engage with your target audience

Just like on other social media platforms, engagement matters on LinkedIn.

Engage with your target audience by participating in relevant conversations. Comment on their posts to add valuable insights or answer important questions. So when their connections see your comments, they might want to learn more about your business.

Moreover, when you engage with others, they might want to reciprocate and engage with your content. This means you get to drive more engagement on your posts, which could boost visibility and get your content in front of the right people.

When people engage with content on LinkedIn, their activity sometimes shows up in the feeds of their connections. That means when someone comments on your post, there’s a chance that their connections will take notice of the post. That way, you could grow your reach and attract a relevant audience.

Check out specialized LinkedIn automation tools to enhance your engagement efforts at a greater scale.

Maximize reach and visibility

Using LinkedIn for business is all about amplifying your reach so that more people can discover your brand. It is helpful to understand how the LinkedIn algorithm works to maximize your brand visibility through LinkedIn SEO. Another effective approach is to get your employees involved.

Chances are your employees already have a solid professional network on LinkedIn, and you want to tap into it to maximize your reach. One employee advocacy study found that branded messages had a much higher reach when employees share them. In fact, branded messages shared by employees had a 561% higher reach than when shared through branded channels.

Have your employees reshare your company’s LinkedIn posts and latest articles. And make sure they’re regularly providing their connections with the latest company updates. As representatives of your brand, they serve as a reliable source when it comes to information about your company. At the same time, they add a more personal touch to the message since it’s coming from real people.

At Sprout Social, team members regularly share product update info and branded content on LinkedIn. This puts a human face to the brand and helps us to build a more personal connection with our audience.

Showcase your expertise

People aren’t going to follow your company page just because it exists. They have to be able to derive some value out of it. That means you need to showcase your expertise and give them a reason to tune into your brand’s updates.

You can share thought leadership pieces that address relevant and trending topics in your industry. Follow LinkedIn best practices and make sure to add original thoughts and ideas to give these pieces a unique touch. This is a great way to show your audience that you know what you’re talking about.

Additionally, you could use native documents such as how-to guides, reports and case studies. These types of content are a great way to address the needs of people who are looking for helpful information. How-to guides will show that your team has expertise in the field. Surveys and reports show your in-depth knowledge of the industry. Meanwhile, case studies serve as proof of your team’s capability.

For example, Semrush regularly shares how-to guides and practical tips related to SEO. It provides informative answers to pressing questions and guides the audience on how to do certain things. This has helped to establish the brand as an authority figure in all things related to SEO.

Track ROI with LinkedIn analytics

To maximize the potential of LinkedIn for your business, it’s important to make data-driven decisions. Best practices and assumptions can only get you so far. Instead, you need to look at what your LinkedIn data is telling you to fine-tune your strategy and get more out of the platform.

The native LinkedIn Analytics tool can provide you with valuable data about your page performance. You’ll be able to learn about how many people visited your page, how many followers you gained and more. You can even look at the performance of your content in terms of impressions and engagement.

Use these insights to understand how certain strategies impacted your performance. For example, did you see a spike in visitors after sharing your latest report? Or perhaps you might notice that certain types of posts are getting significantly more engagement than others. This should be able to inform how to improve your strategy and get more out of LinkedIn for your business. If your company requires more detailed data, a third-party LinkedIn analytics tool may be a better solution.

Benefits of using LinkedIn for business

So if you follow the tips above, what do you have to gain? How can you benefit from using LinkedIn for business marketing? Let’s take a look.

Builds influence and credibility

An active presence on LinkedIn helps you demonstrate your credibility. People can go to your LinkedIn page to find all the information they need about your business.

LinkedIn lets you update your page with all the essential details such as your company size and location. Plus, you can include additional details about your social impact, work-life balance and so on. By providing easy access to this information, you can showcase your credibility and earn the trust of your audience.

Moreover, you have the opportunity to use your LinkedIn business page to build your influence. This may involve consistently showcasing your expertise through valuable content. You could share thought leadership pieces and practical information related to your industry. Eventually, this will help you establish your authority in the field and build your influence.

Grows your audience

LinkedIn gives you access to a massive network of job seekers and B2B consumers. According to the latest LinkedIn stats, the platform has over 900 million members worldwide. While they may not all be relevant to your business, you still have millions of people you could potentially reach. With the right tactics, LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to exponentially grow your audience.

Develops relationships with your community

LinkedIn is the hub of conversations in the professional community. You’ll find people discussing everything from job opportunities to the impact of ChatGPT. These conversations serve as an effective tool to build relationships within your community.

You could join relevant LinkedIn Groups and participate in trending conversations. You could even start the conversation yourself and encourage people to share their thoughts. All this engagement eventually helps you build a relationship with the right people.

Ready to use LinkedIn for your business?

As the largest online professional network, LinkedIn is a goldmine for businesses that want to reach B2B consumers. Make the most of the steps provided above to get started with the platform.

Already have a LinkedIn strategy but not sure if you’re doing it right? Use our LinkedIn for Business worksheet to see where you currently stand.

The post The complete guide to using LinkedIn for business appeared first on Sprout Social.

Brand advocacy is when individuals who love your brand share their positive sentiment about your product or service to their followers and audience. These are loyal brand followers who can sing your praises.

Harnessing and amplifying this advocacy should be an integral part of your social media marketing strategy. And, with the right brand advocacy strategy, you can realize a stunning ROI.

In this article, we define what brand advocacy is, examine different types of brand advocates, and highlight the many benefits of brand advocacy. We also show you how to measure the effectiveness of your program.

Table of Contents

• What is a brand advocate?
• Is brand advocacy right for you?
• Who is a brand advocate?
• What does brand advocacy look like?
• Why brand advocacy matters for your company
• How to determine if brand advocacy is effective

What is a brand advocate?

Brand advocacy occurs when people become excited about your product or service and they share that excitement with others. This could be through word-of-mouth, or by posting to their social media networks, in blog posts, on review sites and other corners of the internet.

But did you know customer service is a huge part of brand advocacy? When you please your customers and clients, they will be more likely to share their experience with you with others.

But brand advocates aren’t limited to customers. In fact, there are several groups of individuals who can be advocates for your brand, including employees and partners.

The best thing about brand advocacy is that it costs little to nothing to obtain. Even if you have yet to launch a brand advocacy program, you likely already have advocates working on your behalf. They post positive content about your brand simply because they love what you offer.

Is brand advocacy right for you?

Brand advocacy can be one of the most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal. With it you can extend your reach, find new audiences, generate leads and find top talent all while amplifying brand awareness. Enthusiastic brand advocates can help new brands get before larger and more engaged audiences. With the boost by advocacy, brands can magnify their market share much more easily, faster and farther.

For customers it’s about products, services and customer service. It’s about the relationships brands develop with their customers through engaging with them on social media or other customer care channels.

For employees it’s about loving their work, the company culture and, of course, the product.

Advocates can create enough buzz on social media to reinvigorate a brand’s position in the market. Of course, you still need a great product or service for people to get excited about.

More and more people are turning to social media to research products and services. Studies show that the vast majority of people will trust recommendations from people they know. So think word-of-mouth, and reviews and ratings as well.

And, considering most of this type of organic marketing is free, or of little cost to you, brand advocacy has a lot to offer any brand.

Who is a brand advocate?

Clients and customers

These are some of your best brand advocates. Their user generated content (UGC) is considered to be much more authentic than brand messaging. Their contacts, family and friends trust this content. In fact, recommendations of this type, earned media, are trusted by 92% of consumers around the world beyond all other types of advertising. And 70% of consumers will trust other consumers’ opinions posted online.

This type of advocate works for you right now because they love your product or service. They do this without any thought of reward. Imagine what they could do for you with a little incentive.

Employees

Employees know all about your company, your product or service and your culture. This makes them powerful brand advocates, and perfect to represent you to consumers and potential hires. Not only does this increase brand awareness, but it helps bring in top talent. And, research by LinkedIn has shown that employees have an average of 10 times the connections as their company’s Page followers. This means that what your employees post about the company reaches 10 times more people, and their message can continue beyond that. By encouraging your employees to share news, updates and successes, your brand’s reach can extend to audiences you might not have been able to reach before.

Industry partners

Any other organization or company affiliated with your brand can also be a brand advocate. What they say or post about you can improve brand awareness and influence buying decisions. Think: comarketing or cobranding campaigns with your industry partners as an opportunity to also increase your reach.

Influencers

Influencers make great brand advocates because of their large audiences. Harnessing them as part of your marketing and advocacy strategy allows you to target audiences who are interested in your brand’s offerings. Influencers as brand advocates can help you raise brand awareness in specific markets and help you capture a new cohort of consumers.

What does brand advocacy look like?

Some ways clients and customers advocate are by talking up your product or service in person and online and by posting positive reviews. They act as your customer service representatives by answering questions for other customers. Whether on your website or elsewhere, this is powerful PR for you. But how can you harness this advocacy and amplify it?

First, you need to find out who you already have as advocates. Look for those who are leaving positive reviews. Who is liking and sharing your content? Who is producing content about your brand? One excellent way to identify brand advocates is through social listening. Sprout Social’s Social Listening tools let you search for specific terms and hashtags related to your company. You will then be able to tap into conversations online.

Once you have an idea who your advocates and audience are, offer incentives for further engagement. Some incentives could include running social media contests, sending company swag, or shout-outs on the company website or social media.

To maintain relationships with current or prospective advocates, respond to reviews, comments and posts quickly. Provide excellent customer service. Conduct surveys and ask for reviews in newsletters, chats, receipts and phone call confirmations. Google provides an easy way for you to get Google reviews through a direct link.

Remember, with brand advocates, it’s all about the relationships you forge.

When we talk about employee advocacy, it’s a bit different. What is employee advocacy? As mentioned earlier, your employees are some of your best advocates because they know about your brand inside out. Some will already be posting about you, but you could harness their networks to increase brand awareness, create a wider personal network for sales team members, and showcase subject-matter expertise for industry leaders. Having employees in an employee advocacy program will be to your benefit.

Data from Sprout’s Employee Advocacy Report reveal that 72% of all employees would post company content on their personal pages if their company wrote it for them. And engaged users (spending 60 minutes or more daily on social media) are 11% more likely to post this content than casual users.

In their role to increase brand awareness, 73% of employees (engaged users) believed that posting company content helped. And 72% believed that it helped them in their social selling. It’s clear from these employee advocacy stats how valuable an employee advocacy program is.

The easiest way to institute such an advocacy program is to use Sprout’s Employee Advocacy. With Advocacy platform, you can provide curated, branded content to your team that they can share with a click or two. You can even create approved message ideas for your employees so they can post with confidence that they are staying on-brand.

With Advocacy by Sprout Social, it’s easy to upload photos, videos and links for your employees to share to their networks. And, you can use the “Send to Advocacy” feature from within Sprout to duplicate social posts you’re already sharing to your brand’s social networks.

Why brand advocacy matters for your company

1. Improved brand perception

Brand advocacy improves how people view your company. It increases trust. Instead of your company, a “real person” – a customer, employee or influencer – is extolling the virtues of your company, product or services.

2. Reflection of brand authenticity

For the same reason, people see the information provided by the advocate as more authentic. This reflects well on your company, conferring authenticity to your brand by virtue of this perception.

3. More organic brand awareness

Advocates provide an organic way to grow brand awareness. Brand advocacy creates positive, enthusiastic conversation around your products and services. This is invaluable to increasing your visibility, which can lead to more leads, sales, hiring prospects and growth for your company.

4. Higher likelihood of media attention

The more conversation your advocates generated about you, the more likely the media will notice you. News outlets and publications may start writing about you because of all the talk. Not only does this attention open the potential for new and broader audiences, but it also helps boost your brand’s trust levels in the community.

5. Wider audience reach

Your reach becomes more extensive with brand advocacy. Brand advocates post excited, positive content about your product or services to their own social networks. This gives you access to their friends, family and followers, and to untapped markets.

6. Saves you money

With all this free or low investment marketing, brand advocacy saves you money. Imagine what it would cost you to produce all that organic marketing yourself. This is money you can allocate elsewhere, if needed. Despite what advocacy programs might cost initially to implement, the ROI would be more than worth it.

In fact, read how we use Sprout’s Advocacy to overcome social media challenges and its payoff.

How to determine if brand advocacy is effective

It’s important to have clear goals for your advocacy program. Once those are set, you can better determine which metrics you need to track. Some common metrics that help determine generally if your advocacy program is effective are

• Number of likes, shares, impressions, hashtags and mentions, as a measure of brand awareness
• Number of likes, shares, clicks and comments, as a measure of social engagement
• Conversion rates based on completed CTAs
• Number of posts and actions of your advocates, which relates to your overall reach. It gives you a sense of an advocate’s number of connections
• Online reviews and ratings, as they affect buying decisions
• Where your advocates are posting, as this helps understand which channels work best
• Net Promoter Score (NPS), at minimum a measurement of customer loyalty, helps to predict the number of brand advocates you have
• Earned media, which is publicity or media generated by organic means aside from your marketing efforts
• Employee conversion rate, as the percentage of employees actually participating in your employee advocacy program

Sprout’s Employee Advocacy measures shares, engagements, potential reach and earned media value automatically. With this dynamic tool you can monitor effectiveness in real-time.

And with Sprout’s Advocacy ROI Calculator Tool you can clearly see the benefits of your program.

Amplify brand advocacy on social media to launch your brand to the next level

Brand advocates work for you enthusiastically with or without incentives. Why not take this enthusiasm and ensure that it not only continues, but intensifies? Getting your social advocates to continue and even increase their efforts on your behalf can be as easy as posting their UGC on your company’s social accounts. How far will your social advocacy strategy take you?

With the might of your employee advocates behind you, you can use advocacy to overcome social media challenges. Your social strategy ROI and organic reach can be dramatically improved with brand advocacy. Don’t you think it’s time you upped your advocacy game? Try with a free trial of Sprout Social today.

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