Employee advocacy can take many forms, but Linkedin is one of the go-to channels for many companies who want to uplevel their brand and marketing efforts. But like most social media platforms, LinkedIn can also suck up an endless amount of your time and resources, with no guarantee of results.
This article is here to help! Learn the basics of employee advocacy, an overview of employee advocacy tools and platforms, and how to build a successful strategy for employee advocacy on LinkedIn.
What is employee advocacy?
Employee advocacy means the promotion of a company, brand, or marketing initiative by the company’s employees. Employee advocacy can take many forms, from structured employee advocacy programs to impromptu posts from an employee who is genuinely excited about their job.
Since most of us are more likely to trust a person we know instead of a faceless company, employee advocacy can dramatically enhance brand visibility, increase trust, and result in a more engaged workforce. You can learn more about employee advocacy and see 3 examples of great employee advocacy in this article. One key component of effective employee advocacy is personal branding; you can review personal brand examples.
Why LinkedIn is an awesome platform for employee advocacy
LinkedIn is an ideal platform for the employee advocacy efforts of many companies. Since it’s a space where professionals already connect, offer insights, and build personal brands, it’s a natural fit for employees to share about their employer and company initiatives. One other benefit is that LinkedIn has avoided much of the infighting and conflict of other social media platforms, making it safer for corporate marketing efforts.
That being said, it’s always important to think strategically about the channels you’re using for marketing efforts. Depending on your company’s ICP (ideal customer persona), there’s a chance that LinkedIn might not be the best for your organization. Is the industry you’re trying to reach already active on LinkedIn? What about the decision-makers specifically? These questions should be explored before spending time and resources on LinkedIn.
Three tentpoles of effective LinkedIn employee advocacy
Once you’re certain that LinkedIn is the right channel for your marketing efforts, it’s time to build the skeleton of an effective LinkedIn employee advocacy program. We recommend focusing your efforts three components:
- LinkedIn profile optimization
- Consistent content and engagement
- Enablement for company milestones
LinkedIn profile optimization
There are endless resources available that explain what a good LinkedIn profile looks like, so we won’t go into all the nuances in this post. But seen through the lens of employee advocacy, it’s not about perfecting your LinkedIn profile, it’s about helping as many people in your company as possible have an on-brand, active presence on LinkedIn. A few high level recommendations include:
- Profile photo and background photo
- Headline
- Current position and connection to company
Encourage your teammates to optimize the three components above by sharing a collection of on-brand background photos for them to use, messaging examples that they can incorporate into their headline, and incentivizing them to update their profile with their position and initiatives that they’re working on. You can even offer an in-office photo shoot, so everyone has access to an up-to-date headshot that isn’t just a cropped photo from their cousin’s wedding.
One thing that’s important to note when encouraging employees to optimize their profiles: provide options and leave the ultimate decision up to each individual. Employees should never feel like they are compelled to share specific messaging or include a company background photo—it is their profile after all. But if you provide multiple options, offer an incentive or two, and then leave the final decision up to each employee, you’ll likely get a solid participation.
Consistent content and engagement
Once your teammate’s profiles are optimized and on-brand, the next step is to offer them a steady stream of new content to share on their own profiles. The same principle applies here as in the previous point: provide options and incentives, then leave everything else up to each employee.
We recommend setting a goal around the amount of new content you’re going to offer employees each week. (Two options per week is a good place to start.) Once you determine the content cadence, the next step is to figure out a distribution plan. Traditional methods include email, Slack or other messaging apps, or dedicated employee advocacy platforms.
You can compare the benefits and trade-offs between different options in this article.
Once employees begin to share the content that you’re providing to them, make sure that you engage with every single post and comment that you see. Even a short comment and a reaction provides reinforcement for them to continue sharing, and will likely lead other employees to join in.
Enablement for company milestones
Certain company milestones extend beyond day-to-day employee advocacy efforts. These can include product launches, funding announcements, or company events. As you’re developing a strategy for these events, one of the main differences is that you’re trying to maximize engagement over the course of a day or two vs. an extended period of time. Another difference is that these milestones often require unique reporting requirements, like being able to share with leadership if a campaign was effective a few days after the launch. This is one reason why establishing a milestone-specific hashtag can be effective, because it makes reporting easier.
These milestones reinforce the importance of building a culture that embraces employee advocacy. If such a culture already exists in your organization, then these milestones are simply an extension of them.
One unique challenge that you’ll need to solve is organizing a collection of approved messaging and visual assets like images and videos for employees to use for your launch, while making sure that they aren’t “leaked” ahead of time. Employee advocacy tools like Sharekitt can help with this, since they include scheduling functionality, the ability to pause specific assets, and other controls that extend beyond what’s possible via email or Google Docs.
One final tip when building your employee engagement strategy around milestones: let your employees do the talking. Seek to amplify the words of leadership and other team members, vs. having all the primary messaging come from company accounts.
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We hope this article has been helpful in helping you learn a little bit more about LinkedIn employee advocacy. With a little bit of work, and a generous helping of consistency, LinkedIn can be a powerful channel to generate leads, increase employee engagement, and reinforce your company’s brand.
