One of the best ways to get the essential employee advocacy tips is to source people and companies who are running programs, and successful ones at that.
At EveryoneSocial, we have our own unique tips and practices that can ensure your company, no matter the use case, will have long-term success.
Yet, it’s our clients that also have some amazing tips for others looking to get started with employee advocacy.
Employee Advocacy Tips
Below, we talked to five program leaders at some of our clients to learn what their employee advocacy tips and insights are.
These examples can help you understand how a social program can benefit your organization, but also how to approach your strategy effectively. Let’s dive in.
Related: Looking for additional material for why an employee advocacy program can benefit your company? Check out these eye-popping statistics.
Align Employee Advocacy to Your Social Selling Program
A big piece to being successful with your employee advocacy initiatives, is getting your sales teams involved.
Most likely, they are already (or should be) quite active on social media. Aligning employee advocacy with sales’ social selling program can be a game changer for pipeline, deal size, win rates, and revenue.
“Employee advocacy works best when your sales team gets in the act, since they are the ones most likely to be connected with key customers and prospects. Pair your employee advocacy efforts with your company’s existing social selling program as part of the sales enablement process, giving your sales team content they can share to their connections.”
– Bo Gowan, Director of Social Media at Ciena
Make It Clear the Value of Social Media and What It Means To the Company
When it comes to social media, not every employee has time for it, knows how to write or share properly, or even what is okay to post.
Adoption and use of your employee advocacy program needs to be presented in a unique way, so employees see the value and realize it’s not an additional job task that is being forced.
“Getting the employee masses onboard with EveryoneSocial was, at first, difficult; I mean, who wants MORE work added to an already stacked plate? Also, we were juggling with outdated ideas of what social is and/or misunderstandings of social requirements and engagement from those whom aren’t often on social.
Here’s what we found out: Most corporate persons, although they might not THINK themselves social, are already on LinkedIn. For an enterprise business, this is exactly the platform on which you want them to share.
We’ve learned that by changing our speech to ‘you need to be social’ to something more along the lines of, ‘people would love to hear about the product you support/work on’ changes the idea quickly and effectively. EVERYONE wants to share about their passions!
In order to make this happen, my team and I conducted bi-weekly introductions with different groups within Micro Focus. Rather than listing the ‘DON’Ts‘ of social, we concentrate heavily on the ‘DO’s.”
We came to understand that most employees weren’t using social for two reasons:
- It was too time-consuming
- They didn’t know what to write
EveryoneSocial totally eliminates those issues. By utilizing EveryoneSocial, we are giving employees time BACK (through the scheduling tool), and giving them the verbiage they need to effectively share relevant information within their industry-specific spaces.”
– Stephanie Wisdom, Director, Social Marketing at Micro Focus
Leverage Your Program As the Universal Content Hub
Content is essential for an employee advocacy program, as this technology should be the hub for all the go-to material. This means company content, industry news, marketing content, product info, employer branding content, etc.
This allows departments to have the most interesting content to them, but also informs all employees of what’s going on, in an engaging way.
Side note: We created a platform that allows personal streams of content, which gives individuals the ability to add and share what interests them outside of their company/industry content. This is big for program adoption, engagement, and lets the audience know what your employees interests and experiences are.
“EveryoneSocial has had a number of unintended consequences. Our sales and marketing teams use EveryoneSocial to learn more about the industry, our marketing activities and even our competitors.
It’s a shared library of the latest and greatest knowledge that’s been compiled and easily accessible on one pane of glass. It also increased our organic search across certain key terms because there were so many new external links headed back to our website. “
– Dan Lamorena – CMO at FireMon
Do Not Underestimate the Value of Consistent Employee Training
Many times, companies assume that they can put an employee advocacy program in place and employees will flock to use it. However, that will not work well.
Employee advocacy delivers great results, but only when employees understand the value and are trained properly. Most times programs fail because employee adoption never takes off, which hinders any results.
“Our team has found great success in earning employee buy-in by taking the time to demonstrate the tool on team calls and explaining the value of social selling before creating user accounts. That way, employees set up their accounts already knowing how to use the tool, and they are motivated to get up and running.
Furthermore, our most enthusiastic group of users is our executives. The leaderboard has generated quite a frenzy of friendly competition. “
– Kaitlyn Elizabeth Riddle, Digital Marketing & Customer Marketing Manager at Infoblox
Effectively Sell Your Employee Advocacy Program Internally
Launching an employee advocacy program is something that might be on your plate currently and gets you excited. However, the challenge can be selling internally to your executives and other employees of the company.
Here’s how Dell approached their program with these three essential employee advocacy tips:
“Selling an employee advocacy program internally at a very large company can have its challenges. At Dell, we have focused on three areas.
First, we enlisted the help of employees who are our biggest brand cheerleaders. Those people who are already active in social media, who want to share their enthusiasm about the work they are doing and the company in general. We began our program by enlisting these people as our first users. They tend to be highly connected and people notice what they do and want to emulate it.
Secondly, we strive for buy-in from executives. We have a wonderful white glove training program to help executives become comfortable with using social media. We weave the use of EveryoneSocial right into this training experience. When executives are active on the platform, people notice and want to be in that club.
Thirdly, as our program matures, we have moved from simply offering EveryoneSocial as a platform for socially savvy employees, to embedding strategy around employee advocacy into plans for large events and product rollouts.
As we beat the drum about the importance and power of the voices of our employees, more people have become aware of EveryoneSocial, and more people want in on the excitement.”
– Jill Bell, Social Media Program Advisor at Dell
Related: Want to learn more about Dell’s employee advocacy program that started back in 2015 and is thriving today? Download our case study here.
Why EveryoneSocial?
We’ve built our platform for the large to enterprise companies looking to engage with their employees, audiences, customers, prospects, and future hires all through social media.
Here’s why our clients have chosen to use and work with EveryoneSocial:
“Our team primarily leverages EveryoneSocial to drive social selling by enabling sales and other customer-facing employees to engage with customers and prospects across social media channels in order to ultimately build trust and enhance relationships with customers and to win larger and better deals as a result.” – Kaitlyn Elizabeth Riddle, Digital Marketing & Customer Marketing Manager at Infoblox
“I have used EveryoneSocial at my last three companies. The impact it has had on our share of voice and social media outreach has been huge. Since we recently deployed it across a small part of our sales and marketing teams, we’ve seen a jump in overall social media activity and have increased our share of voice relative to our competitors.” – Dan Lamorena, CMO at FireMon
“Through EveryoneSocial we have not only seen our engagement numbers skyrocket for social, but we have also built a stronger company culture because we can visibly see, through social media platforms, that we are all sharing the same information.” – Stephanie Wisdom, Director Social Marketing at Micro Focus
“EveryoneSocial has hastened our ability to elevate high performing marketing content and get it into the hands of our sellers to connect with customers in a relevant, timely, and engaging way. The platform is the catalyst in this virtuous cycle, helping convert our marketers’ top-of-funnel, 1:many, brand awareness efforts into our sellers’ undeniable, 1:1, dream come true. Talk about the ultimate Marketing & Sales interlock!” – Bing Han, Global Head of Social Selling at Adobe
Whether you are looking to roll out company-wide or focus on specific departments, our solution is tailored for your specific company needs.
We have clients in various industries utilizing our program for marketing, sales, employer branding, social recruiting, internal comms, and employee engagement.
