Love that you’re about to implement a new employee advocacy program, @clayton_norman. There’s a bunch of folks here at the Arb that have shared amazing tips on Advocacy, tagging them in here so they can chime in! @Joe Ray @lisa.rodrigo @victoriawalenga @Elida S. @brina.moore @marisa - curious to hear your thoughts here!

The advice I’ll give to structuring your program is setting it up so you can meet your team members where they are.

(full context, my company’s only 16 people with 10 active social sharers, so personalizing the program is a little easier)

Here’s what that has looked like for me:

• On the starter tier, some team members just click a few buttons and share the recommended company posts. And that’s totally fine. You’ll probably have a lot of these people.
• The middle tier is where I have some team members who are willing to customize the recommended posts, adding 1-2 sentences from their own perspective. 2-3 times a month those people will have some nice content ideas of their own, and I’ll take a few minutes to help them craft those ad-hoc posts.
• And then at the top tier, I have other team members who are ready and capable to run their own content. For them I have a worksheet to help guide the topics they discuss and their voice & tone, and a content matrix to help them generate new ideas. And (soon) we’ll have more templates where they can create content and I can quickly populate a template and send them back some really polished content...they write a post and I convert it to a carousel of photos, or they record a talking-head video and I pop it into a social video template and add captions, etc. These people are posting 2-3 times a week with minimal support from me.

We haven’t really set up an incentive program for social sharing, but that’s a good idea I’m going to look into.

We find that when employees invite their network to our website, those users are more valuable toward driving leads and revenue. It’s 3x-5x above what the brand drives, in terms of pages per session, average session duration, marketing goal completions, etc. So your mix of branded vs. unbranded content will be a consideration. We aim for 20%-30% branded and the rest is general industry articles where we can layer in our thought leadership. 

Incentives are motivating. From the gamification of a leaderboard to swag. I’m trying to set up a reward program but being creative with prizes… a LinkedIn recommendation from a director-or-above, lunch with the CEO… something beyond another water bottle or t-shirt. 

I’ve also learned the value of ongoing training. Especially as new features arise, or just to send a nudge to use the tried and true ones. I use a weekly newsletters to share those tips as well as highlight articles in the tool that deserve the added recognition. 

Best of luck to you!