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Is your employee advocacy program boring your employees and your audience? Read on for the top LinkedIn employee advocacy best practices!
Employee advocacy is the bee’s knees: your messages have 551% greater reach when shared by employees, and the leads you attract through employee advocacy have 700% greater conversion frequency.
Now, considering the sheer size of LinkedIn, it’s easy to see why many brands are using employee advocacy on the platform as part of their social media strategies. However, it’s crucial that you do it right. So, let’s look at expert-backed best practices for LinkedIn employee advocacy!
Let’s face it, LinkedIn is the largest professional social networking site. Among its users are influencers, industry experts, and high-level decision-makers. It makes sense to use it to promote your business. And, as a bonus, most of your employees are on the platform already.
What do you want to achieve? Would you like to…
You can’t do everything at once, so it’s vital that you define clear goals from the outset. Understanding your goals will ultimately shape your employee advocacy strategy. And when it comes to your employees, knowing what they’re measured against will help them track progress and increase their motivation.
Most companies create employee advocacy policies so restricted that employees are left wondering if they should sanitize their memes.
You definitely don’t want to discourage your talent from showing their personality. That personality is the critical reason personal LinkedIn profiles perform better than company pages.
When creating your policy, keep an open mind:
For example, you may state that your crucial value is transparency - but if your policy forbids employees from posting about their work failures or hard days, it won’t be genuine.
Your employee advocacy strategy isn’t about you but your employees. As Brian Madden of VMWare says:
“Create content that you’d want to consume. If you’re publishing content that you find boring?”
First, talk to your employees to create a framework:
Be open and transparent in the roundtable discussion. It may take time to break the ice, but it’ll be worth it.
Secondly, motivate your employees to participate and post consistently. The key to doing this is helping them set their own goals for engagement and how many times they’d like to post rather than forcing them to do so.
You can also use incentives to increase motivation, especially for those employees who are hesitant to post. For example, you can offer gift cards.
Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all approach, and how you motivate your team will vary from employee to employee.
Some will naturally be more private and hesitant to post but don’t single them out. Instead, discuss other options for participating in the program - perhaps they’d prefer to be behind the scenes or help you co-create the strategy.
Finally, you should also measure your progress to get insights into your strategy's performance. While you can measure some impact through your company page, your employees will also need to analyze their LinkedIn personal profile performance.
For example, they may realize that inspirational content performs better than daily events. Perhaps they get more clicks when posting about your company’s team retreats than values.
Unfortunately, standard LinkedIn analytics won’t give them strategic insights. To understand which content performs best, they’ll need Inlytics.
It’s the only LinkedIn analytics tool you need to understand how every employee’s post drives results for your company.
With detailed personal profile analytics, profile scoring, and AI profile recommendations, Inlytics will show you everything you need to grow and scale a successful LinkedIn employee advocacy program.
Ready to spread the word through your employees? Get the data framework in place - try Inlytics!
