LinkedIn Employee Advocacy: How to Turn Teams into Brand Amplifiers

​​In the innovative B2B world of today, businesses are not growing through their company pages any longer. Growth happens primarily through human beings – specifically employees who share information, build rapport with others, and connect to individuals in their networks. All of which makes LinkedIn employee advocacy a very strong resource for many businesses; however, it may be one of the most under-utilized resources.

Instead of relying solely on the communication created by a company’s brand or marketing department, companies can get exponential amounts of visibility by empowering employees to be contributors instead. This LinkedIn Employee Advocacy Guide outlines how to create, scale, and maintain an employee advocacy program that turns employees into true brand ambassadors for a company.

What is Employee Advocacy and Why It Matters

Prior to executing on it, it is necessary to know practically what employee advocacy means.

The most basic idea of ’employee advocacy’ is for an employee of an organisation to be actively out there sharing and talking about their organisation’s brand, expertise, and/or content via their respective individual LinkedIn accounts. This includes anything from sharing a company’s LinkedIn post to creating your own original piece of content or engaging with content that has been created by others about your employer or company.

The transition from:

• Brand-to-company-led messaging.
• People-to-people-led stories
• Is a very easy yet powerful change.

The increase in value of LinkedIn employee advocacy is a result of the fact that people are far more likely to trust individuals versus corporations, thus creating an enormous level of engagement for the content that has been created as a result of employees sharing on behalf of their companies.

The Real Advantage of LinkedIn Employee Advocacy

LinkedIn’s employee advocacy is valuable because of the number of people who will have greater reach in an authentic way.

Each employee has:

• Their own network of connections.
• Their own audience to resonate with.
• Their own style of communicating.

Together, these result in a multiplicative impact that cannot be achieved through the corporate page alone.

Various employee advocacy LinkedIn stats have shown that content shared by employees gets far more engagement than when posted to the corporate page. This further exemplifies a fundamental factor to consider, that people drive visibility on LinkedIn, not the logo of a company.

Building a Strong Foundation for Employee Advocacy

Prior to launching a program, businesses must first establish the proper foundation. The first step for any LinkedIn official guide to employee advocacy is to have clarity and preparation.

Define your objectives

Determine what you want to accomplish:

• Brand awareness

• Lead generation

• Employer branding

Having clear goals will help to keep your LinkedIn employee advocacy program on track and measurable.

Align your content and messaging in a way that supports:

• Relevant to your target audience

• Shareable

• Value (not promotional).

This is where an effective employee content strategy is vital to success. If there is no value-added, ongoing employee-generated content, employees will have difficulty being active participants.

Optimize profiles

Encourage employees to refine their profiles to accurately reflect their personal expertise and their company’s position.

This would include:

• Clear, concise headlines

• Professional summaries

• Consistent branding

Having well-developed employee profiles not only serves to build an employee’s personal brand on LinkedIn but also serves to support the overall advocacy efforts.

Activating Your Team: Turning Employees into Advocates

After establishing your foundation, the next step is to activate your employee advocacy program.

Keep Participation Easy

Keep the process as straightforward and simple as possible. Ensure employees know:

• What to share
• When to participate
• How to contribute

Providing employees with guidance is one of the main reasons to have a LinkedIn official guide to employee advocacy.

Encourage Genuine Contributions

One of the biggest mistakes made by most companies is expecting employees to copy and paste their content, rather than encouraging employees to share their own unique perspective, voice, and insight.

Consumers prefer to engage with authentic contributors and authentic contributors build trust.

Build a Feedback Loop

Ongoing feedback is crucial to improving participation by recognizing employees for:

• The highest performing post
• Most creative contributions
• Successful engagement experiences

Continuously providing employees with ongoing feedback keeps them engaged and in alignment with the overall strategy.

Content That Powers Employee Advocacy

Content is the driving force for every advocacy programme; without it, no matter how passionate a team may be, they will struggle.

What Type of Content Works on LinkedIn for Employee Advocacy?

The following are content types to focus on for LinkedIn employee advocacy:

• Industry Insight
• Behind-the-Scenes
• Client Success
• Personal Experience

All of these types of content come across as more authentic to a viewer when shared from an individual versus from a corporation (i.e., company). Therefore, they have a greater likelihood of influencing other people.

Balancing Your Brand and Personal Voice

While consistency should still be maintained across all employee accounts, they should not sound like an employee account of the brand.

Rule of Thumb:

• Brand = Guidance
• Employee = Interpretation

This balance will mutually benefit the use of personal branding on LinkedIn and enhance the overall visibility of the company on LinkedIn.

Leveraging the LinkedIn Algorithm

The success rate of delivering content on LinkedIn increases dramatically when we understand how the LinkedIn distribution model works.

Importance of immediate engagement

The first hour of a post is extremely important for receiving likes, comments, and shares from employees. This initial engagement reinforces to the network that the content is relevant for LinkedIn’s algorithms.

Be consistent and do not chase virality

Over time, the regular participation of employees in liking, commenting, and sharing will establish momentum and visibility for the company. There is also some evidence that the frequency of authentic engagement is more valuable than the less frequent but high effort of large-scale employee engagement efforts.

Measuring Success: What to Track

Measurable employees’ advocacy program on LinkedIn proves beneficial.

The following are metric examples to measure and track, such as:

• Reach/impressions
• Engagement Rate
• Visit Profile
• Inbound Inquiries

In addition to reaching more potential customers, companies typically experience higher-quality leads, due at least partly to employee advocacy statistics on LinkedIn.

Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Challenges can still occur even when there is a solid LinkedIn employee advocacy guide.

Low Participation

Solution:

Set realistic expectations

Provide basic guidelines

Acknowledge their input on content. 

Inconsistent Content

Solution:

Create an employee content plan that is consistent

Provide employees with regular amounts of content to share

Fear of Posting

Solution:

Provide employees with training and samples

Encourage small actions (e.g., like, comment, and post) to build confidence regarding the posting process and your content strategy.

Real-World Application for B2B Businesses

Marketing initiatives by B2B organizations can be enhanced with LinkedIn employee advocacy. This is accomplished largely through a variety of methods, including: 

Sourcing and distributing leadership thought-leadership content

Engaging with potential customers via the sales team

Sourcing and distributing key organizational updates to employees

An example of how employee advocacy can be utilized in this manner is that many digital marketing experts in Dubai have used their employees’ advocacy to help differentiate themselves in a highly competitive marketplace by providing their employees both an opportunity to share their personal experiences and professional knowledge when reaching out to potential customers.

Integrating Advocacy into Your Wider Strategy

Employee Advocacy shouldn’t happen by itself; instead, employee advocacy works together with: 

• Marketing content 
• Generating leads 
• Creating an employer brand 

When integrated, LinkedIn employee advocacy will help achieve larger corporate goals instead of just being an isolated program.

Final Thoughts

While brands often come first, it’s people who will determine how effective your LinkedIn marketing will be in building customer loyalty. A successful LinkedIn Employee Advocacy Initiative allows employees to act as trusted representatives for your brand; thereby expanding the reach of your organization, enhancing brand credibility, and increasing employee Engagement.

Using a systematic approach to launching an employee-driven initiative such as this gives businesses the ability to build an infrastructure that amplifies content created by employees and helps to develop a healthy company culture internally and positively impacts the external reputation of the company as well.

On a social network where connection and authenticity are critical, your employees are your strongest assets, not just the content you create on the site.