Leveraging your employees as brand ambassadors online or utilizing “employee advocacy” as it’s known in social media circles, is one of the hottest topics in marketing these days.

A quick search on Google revealed there were more than 57 million results for this marketing term.

Employee advocacy is simply taking the concept of word of mouth marketing and applying it online through social media. The benefits of employee advocacy are many, especially these days when personal recommendations are more trusted than expert opinions*.  For employers, it helps increase the company’s brand awareness. It also makes recruiting easier and boosts sales. For employees, it helps build their social network, sphere of influence and their personal brand.

Power in Numbers

Employee advocacy has many benefits, but the driving force behind this emerging mega marketing trend is in the numbers.  Let’s take Good Morning SLO as an example. Every fourth Thursday at 7:30 a.m., 300 community leaders, business owners, nonprofit executives, and staffers come to share and network with each other. The average person has 250 fans and followers on their social networks. If a single Good Morning SLO attendee shared on social media that they were at the SLO Chamber event representing their employer or organization they could potentially reach 250 people. If all 300 attendees also mention #goodmorningslo in their social media posts, the potential reach for #goodmorningslo is 75,000 (300 people x 250 fans and followers). Not bad for a simple social media post, especially when you consider the average reach of a Tribune print ad is 38,000. And that’s the ultimate allure of employee advocacy.

Employee Advocacy Checklist

So how do you get your employee advocacy program started? Here is a quick checklist to see if you’re ready for employees to create conversations about your company on social media.

  1. Is your company social?
    This question seems obvious. But to reap the benefits of employee advocacy, your company needs to have a solid social media plan and presence in place.
  1. Do you have someone who can implement and monitor an employee advocacy program?
    It’s not enough to have a social media presence. You need someone in your organization that can create a program that feeds employees the content to get the conversations going and to monitor the results.
  1. Do you have a culture where you empower your employees?
    Having a positive, trusting culture is the most important box that needs to be checked. If you have internal issues, unleashing your employees on social media is not the most prudent move.

Planning Your Program

If you have checked off all the boxes, the next step is to plan your program. As with all marketing plans, it starts with an understanding of what your goals are, the strategies to achieve them and what success look like. You also need to understand the restraints of your industry. Medical, financial and legal professions have specific limitations as they pertain to social media, and regardless of industry, the FCC regulates all social media activity. Your employee must disclose they work for your company if they are promoting your product or service.  A simple hashtag at the end of a social media post such as #calpolycorpemployee (I work for the Cal Poly Corporation) will keep your employee compliant.

Guidelines and Training

Once you have your plan, you need to provide your employees some guidelines. If you are going to empower your employees, you need to give them the rules of engagement. These are guidelines up and beyond your social media policy. (If you don’t have a social media policy, you should craft one. Just ask Human Resources.) In addition to guidelines, your employee advocacy program should include social media training. Lunch and learns and webinars are an easy way to raise your employees social IQ. Start with one of the four big social channels: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, whichever one you think your customers are on.  Another important training topic is personal branding. If employees learn how advocating for your company can benefit them, they are more likely to do it.

Make it Easy and Fun

Empowering your employees and giving them the tools and knowledge will go a long way to launching a successful program. Making your program easy and fun will ensure it’s happily adopted. For example, give your employees prewritten content to post like a blurb about your company to add to their LinkedIn bio, providing them the flexibility to customize it.  Another tactic is to embed “tweet this” links into a newsletter about important company announcements for employees to easily share. Another great idea is to start your program with an internal social media contest to get employees comfortable sharing on social media and giving them an incentive.

Start Small and Savvy

The final key to successfully launching an employee advocacy program is to start small and with your most socially savvy employees. At the Cal Poly Corporation, we employ students in our Marketing and Communication Department as part of the university’s “learn by doing” mission. We train them and give them the tools to be successful as managers of our social communities. Rather than hide behind our corporate brand, we have our student employees introduce themselves to our fans and followers. Just as employees like to hear from other employees, students like to hear from other students. This peer-to-peer communication strategy builds trust and has been responsible for our growing engagement levels on social media. Want to find out more about employee advocacy or social media in general, please follow me on Twitter @ellenkcurtis.

*Based on Edelman Trust Barometer report, which showed that while trust in CEOs has been declining, trust in company employees has grown.


Ellen Curtis is the director of marketing and communication for the Cal Poly Corporation