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5 Steps To An Effective LinkedIn Employee Advocacy Program
Why do you need a LinkedIn Employee Advocacy Program? Well, it’s all about levelling up and engaging. Not just with your employees but also the wider LinkedIn network and potential customers.
Here are a few other reasons
Those three statistics alone should have you eager to go to the next level.
If you have followed, and implemented the tips in, our earlier article Maximizing Company LinkedIn Pages, you will already have your Business Profile up to date and optimized.
What is a LinkedIn Employee Advocacy Program?
Employee Advocacy is the promotion of a company/brand by employees who share information from and about their company’s services, brand or products across their social media networks.
LinkedIn’s Employee Advocacy Program is your next step to maximizing your presence on the platform. But before you start sending out emails asking employees to get sharing, you need some firm foundations in place first.
Step 1: Set your LinkedIn Employee Advocacy Program Goals
Your ultimate Goals must form the foundation block to your program. And, to know your program is working, any results need to be measurable. So be clear about what you want to achieve.
Example 1: A tech company has a schedule of new projects coming online over the next 1-4 years. They’re looking for a fresh injection of top programmers to join the company.
The goal is to encourage more job post views and applications from high caliber candidates. The ways to reach that goal are:-
- Raise the company profile on LinkedIn,
- Build more followers
- See more engagement
The steps to reach the goal are measurable.
Example 2. The Goal Company A wants to increase sales of their products.
The ways to reach that goal are:-
- increase followers from their target customer demographic,
- increase engagement with their target customers,
- increase brand awareness
- drive leads for sales.
All of these steps are measurable.
Step 2: Identify Key Players for your LinkedIn Employee Advocacy Program
Once you have your goals and steps in place, you need to identify which departments, and the teams under them, can best assist you to reach your goals.
Any LinkedIn Employee Advocacy Program works best when everyone in the company is actively taking part. But if you are a large company you may want to start out with a team of key players first.
Identify which employees are more active on LinkedIn, or who are more Social Media savvy in general first. It is important that those employees have also taken the time to optimize their LinkedIn Profiles. For tips see our earlier article: How To Create The Best LinkedIn Profile Page
Their role is not just to share your company posts on their walls, they need to actively engage with anyone who likes, shares or comments on their own profile post, as well as their colleagues. This includes liking and commenting on the same post, on their colleagues profiles. As well as sharing it to any groups they are members of.
Ensure that any employee group identified to take part include Managers and Supervisors, to emphasize the importance of the program.
Step 3: Have a Content Strategy in place.
A clear content strategy is vital for employee buy-in. It should cover the What, Why, When, Where and How factors. Whatever content you share needs to be of interest to more than just your customer audience.
It needs to be of interest to your employees so that they want to share it. After all, they work for you and your content reflects on them as a professional too!
The majority of your content should be relevant to your business and the industry, with some general posts as well.
This approach will be beneficial for the business in terms of visibility and brand awareness. It will also help your employees improve their own visibility and business-relevant connections on LinkedIn, whilst building on their professional reputation.
Where possible have a set schedule for your posts, so employees are aware when to be ready to share, like and comment. Whilst also understanding that Industry content is not within your control.
You can also alert employees to a new post; an automated box appears above any newly shared post, offering the option to alert employees.
Step 4: Communicate your Goals & Content Strategy to your employees.
Explaining the whys and wherefores of your goals and content approach, as well as the personal benefit of active engagement to employees, should foster buy-in, which is vital to the success of the program.
Organize a specific meeting to consult and share your plans, and be flexible to adapt your Goals and Strategy.
Especially if some of your employees are already very active on LinkedIn; they may have some great suggestions such as groups or LinkedIn profiles to follow, for interesting industry-related or general posts and news.
Step 5: Maintaining the momentum
Companies with socially engaged employees are 58% more likely to attract top talent and 20% more likely to retain them.
Keeping your employees engaged and active is quite simple. Just share the results of the program with them regularly. Show them how the company goals are being reached, what the engagement or click-thru rates have been on shared content. Report on the number of new followers or changes to customer demographics (where the goal was to reach a new customer base or market).
Use your profile and website analytics to track site traffic, page views, and length of stay. Monitor the number of Registration or Subscription requests for company e-newsletters, or product/service catalogues. And of course monitor areas such as increased Sales or job applications.
You can run a reward scheme each week or month for the employee with the most (external) engagement on their shared company posts.
If you are all ready to elevate your existing Employee Advocacy Program check out LinkedIn Elevate
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