5 Steps to Launching an Employee Advocacy Program

No matter how expert your marketing and PR team, there are physical limits as to how much time they can spend on social media engagement. Over a billion people are on Facebook alone, and even if your target audience is only a microscopic fraction of that number, it’s still too large to engage with individual conversations. The conventional wisdom of the new marketing era states that individual contact and personal comments are the most important aspects of the medium, so what’s a business owner to do?

An employee advocacy program is one highly functional answer to this marketing dilemma. Enlisting your own people – the ones who earn a living engaging with your brand every day, all day – to represent your company on social media is a great way to expand your footprint in the digital marketplace. For many companies, establishing an employee advocacy program entails a profound change in workplace culture because traditionally there has been a strong separation between personal and professional life.

To effectively navigate this new social landscape, managers must be aware of pitfalls and take the appropriate steps to create a program that adds a positive new thread to workers’ lives. The following five steps will explore the elements of employee advocacy that successful programs share.