How to Launch and Scale an Employee Advocacy Program

We’ve all seen the LinkedIn posts of employees sharing their daily activities, the Claude workflows, and the tips and tricks of their trade. Those posts aren’t always born out of their individual will to post. In most cases, they are part of an employee advocacy program. 

These programs have the purpose of expanding a brand’s reach through thought leadership. A LinkedIn user is most likely to be interested in a person than a brand when it comes to building community. And when done well,  an employee advocacy program can turn employees into brand ambassadors. 

This guide covers how to launch an employee advocacy program, how to grow it, and what separates programs that stick from ones that quietly die after a few months.

What is an employee advocacy program?

An employee advocacy program is like a corporate influencer program that encourages employees to share content on their personal social media accounts. The content employees post should be personal, and not dictated by the employer. It should come out naturally and feel organic for the audience. This helps support the employer’s brand goals, as the more the posts spread, the more exposure the organization gets.

The difference between casual sharing and an employee advocacy program is structure. There’s a goal, a process for finding content, a way to measure reach, and usually some form of prize for participants.

👉🏼 Related: How to Use Social Walls to Power Recruitment Marketing

Why companies run employee advocacy programs

Let’s start with the facts backing up why an organization should incentivize employees posting more online, and specifically, LinkedIn:

• Employee voices are three times more credible than the CEO’s when it comes to talking about working conditions in that company
• 60% of prospective employees research a potential employer on LinkedIn before applying  
• 92% of people would consider changing jobs if offered a role at a company with an excellent corporate reputation (Employer Branding Sta

Personal accounts provide social proof that a brand account cannot manufacture. When a software engineer shares a photo from a company meeting, or an account manager posts about closing a deal, it seems real because it is.

This is especially important for employer branding. Candidates do their own research on companies by looking at content created by current employees long before a recruiter contacts them, making it easier to attract talent into your applicant tracking software.

 📊 Sources: Employer branding statistics

How to build an employee brand ambassador program: step by step

1. Define what success looks like before you start

If an employee advocacy program doesn’t have clear goals, it becomes a newsletter that nobody opens. Before you choose a single participant, decide what you want to achieve.

• The total number of people who have seen the company’s social media content
• The number of job applications that come from people sharing the company’s content on social media
• The number of people who interact with the company’s content
• The percentage of the company’s content that is shared compared to the content of its competitors on LinkedIn
• The number of times a specific hashtag is used in a campaign

Choose two or three metrics that are important to you. If you do too much, the program will lose focus.

2. Identify your early advocates (they already exist)

Some employees of every company are already posting about their work. They share event photos without being asked, write LinkedIn posts about what they’re learning, or tag the company in industry conversations. These people are the foundation of your program.

Start there. Invite them personally, explain what you’re building, and ask for their input before you present it to a wider audience. The people who helped create the program and supported it in the beginning are the ones who are most likely to continue to support it as it grows.

3. Write an employee advocacy policy

As mentioned above, employees should be posting their own ideas and inspiration. The content should flow naturally, yet it’s important to make it clear from the start which topics your brand doesn’t want to be associated with. That’s why implementing a policy for the program might be a good idea. The policy could include the following topics:

• The topics to avoid while talking about the brand. This doesn’t mean you’re regulating what they say; they should only talk about certain topics without mentioning your organization at the same time. 
• Sensitive topics that should not be public (unannounced products, financial information, legal matters)
• A guide to handle questions or criticism in comments

Keep it short and share it with everyone joining the program to avoid any friction.

👉🏼 Related: Culture Wall, Display Company Values Internally

4. Build a content library employees actually want to share

Content that employees will share is content that makes them look good to their own network. That usually means:

• Industry insights related to their field of expertise
• Behind-the-scenes content that showcases the company’s work environment
• Company milestones they contributed to
• Event recaps with content from the event itself
• Job openings that they would genuinely recommend to their network

A content library doesn’t have to be elaborate. A shared folder with weekly suggestions, a Slack channel with shareable posts, or a dedicated platform all work. The goal is to make it easier to go from thinking, “I should post something,” to actually posting.

👉🏼 Related: 10 Corporate Event Ideas for Your Brand

5. Make it easy to contribute content, not just share it

The most authentic employee advocacy content comes from employees themselves, but many people don’t know where their content would go or whether it would even be seen.

A tool like Walls.io’s Direct Posts lets people submit content directly to a shared wall without needing social media accounts, through a QR code or link. Employees who don’t usually post publicly can still contribute photos, quotes, and experiences to a central content hub. Marketing can then share this content more widely.

This is especially useful for companies with a lot of employees who don’t use social media for personal use. This is common in manufacturing, healthcare, and industrial sectors.

⭐ Related: How Sandvik Coromant runs employee engagement across 150 countries

6. Train employees on the basics of social sharing

If there are any employee advocacy enthusiasts that want to join the program but aren’t social media savvy, you can create a guide or training for them explaining the basics. This will help them loose the fear of posting, and encourage them to do it constantly. You could create a pre-recorded video, or even create a “buddy program” in which social media experts teach them. Anyhow, such training should cover:

• How to write a personal post versus a shared post for a brand.
• The effective LinkedIn post structure
• Leaving and receiving all types of comments
• To describe when to tag the company account and when not to.

⭐ Related: 10 Employee Engagement Ideas Using Social Media

7. Recognize and reward participation (the right way)

Recognition works. But the type of recognition matters. Employees who post about company culture to try to get a higher rank on a leaderboard tend to produce content that reads exactly like that — it’s fake, not in line with the brand, and not very useful.

Instead, you should try to feature some employee posts in the company newsletter. Or put together a social wall in the office or on the intranet to display the content created by employees. You can even offer small prizes for quality and creativity, not for how much content an employee puts out. The goal is to show that real contribution is valued, not to make content output into a game.

Brands running employee advocacy programs

It’s always helpful to see first how others do it. These brands are working in partnership with LinkedIn Elevate, an invitation-only program from 2015, which provided marketers with demographic information about who has engaged with content. It doesn’t seem to be working anymore, but it laid the groundwork for employee advocacy programs. 

VISA

Visa’s employee advocacy program was created to showcase the company’s new ideas in its different markets around the world. The program also aims to make Visa and its employees well-known as leaders in their field. Since the launch, the number of employees sharing content has increased 6x, and the number of followers of the company’s page has increased 4x.

DLA Piper

DLA Piper started an employee advocacy program to help its lawyers, partners, and professionals build their personal brands and raise the firm’s profile. Since it was launched, the number of staff members sharing it has increased 6x, resulting in 3x as many LinkedIn Page followers.

Unilever

Unilever saw its employees as its most powerful brand ambassadors and wanted to give them a platform to share the company’s mission more widely. The company used an employee advocacy program to support its content strategy. As a result, there was a 16x increase in employee sharing and a 5x increase in job views.

How to scale an employee advocacy program

Once your early group is active and you have shown that your idea works, you can make it easier for the next group of participants.

Segment your advocates by channel

A 24-year-old account executive and a 50-year-old VP of Engineering are not going to post the same content to the same platforms. If you divide your advocate program into different groups based on department or platform, you can create content that is more relevant to each group. Human Resources might use Instagram and TikTok to improve the company’s reputation. Salespeople may focus entirely on LinkedIn. Engineering might prefer internal channels where they can share information publicly.

Feed the content loop with social aggregation

To keep an employee advocacy program alive, you need to keepl employees engaged and posting. Social Media Aggregation lets you create a live content hub that pulls together employee posts from LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and other platforms into one feed. You can put that feed on your company’s website, show it at the main office, or use it to fill a page about jobs. You end up with a content cycle that starts when employees see their posts featured in the feed, which inspires them to post more. 

Measure the right things at scale

As the program grows, the metrics and prizes need to grow too. Early-stage programs can track the number of posts and how people are engaging with them manually. To do this, you need a clearer view of:

• The content that gets more shares
• The most active departments
• The percentage of employee content shared by the brand
• And if, after a while, employee content reduces the cost per hire, or slows turnover

Embed advocacy into company culture

The programs that work well are the ones where participating feels natural and not forced, and this can take many forms. The leaders who behave in a certain way in public (for example, a VP who posts thoughtfully on LinkedIn shows that it’s expected and safe). The moments of internal culture that generate content naturally (events, milestones, launches, and team wins). The most relevant to this article, a social wall that makes employee-created content visible internally.

⭐ Related: Employer branding tips from industry experts

FAQ

What’s the best way to get employees to take part in an advocacy program?

Start with volunteers who already post about their work. Give them interesting content to share, not just corporate propaganda. Make it easy for people by creating a content library, a shared Slack channel, or a submission tool. This will make it so that most of the problems go away. Say “thank you” to the people who contribute to the project by sharing their work on the public website. Don’t force it.

What’s the difference between an employee advocacy program and an employee brand ambassador program?

People often use these terms to mean the same thing. In practice, “brand ambassador” usually refers to a more formal, ongoing role. In this role, selected employees actively represent the company at events, in content, and in recruiting contexts. An advocacy program is broader. It includes any effort to get employees to share company content on social media. A program that encourages employees to represent the company’s brand is often part of a larger effort to get people to speak up about the company.

Do employees need to say that they work for the company when they post content that uses the company’s name or logo?

Yes. The FTC in the US and similar regulators in other countries require companies to disclose material connections when employees post content that could be seen as a testimonial or endorsement. In practice, this is as simple as including “employee” in their bio or adding a clear disclosure to any post that promotes a company product. It also builds more trust than trying to make content look organic.

How many employees do I need for an employee advocacy program to be worth running?

There is no floor. Even five people who actively post on LinkedIn can help a small company reach a lot of people. For a 500-person company, it’s realistic to expect that 10–15% of people will participate in an active program and see real results. It’s more important to be consistent and have high-quality content than to have a large number of followers.

Which social media platforms should staff focus on?

LinkedIn is the best choice for B2B companies because organic content still reaches a lot of people. Instagram and TikTok are good for reaching younger job candidates. For internal communications, an intranet with a social wall gets employees who don’t use public platforms to participate. Match the platform to the people who are interested in your company — the candidates, customers, or other businesses in the industry.

Start your employee advocacy program the right way

The most common reason employee advocacy programs are put on hold is the belief that you need a perfect system before you can start. You don’t.

Start with the employees who are already posting. Give them better content to work with. Measure the land. Then build from there.