Finding Success with Social Advocacy Programs

By Scott Rogerson · 5 minute read

UpContent CEO Scott Rogerson was fortunate enough to be able to sit down with social media marketing leader, Hootsuite customer success manager Lexi Kuna and Gerry Avalos, the brand lead for leading commercial, rural and personal lines insurer, CGU for a webinar on employee advocacy programs.

Gerry was there to discuss how his company was able to utilize Hootsuite Amplify and UpContent to drive brand engagement with their newly created employee advocacy program.

Employee advocacy is one of the fastest-growing business trends precisely because of the type of impressive results that were discussed during the webinar.

In this post, we'll discuss some of the key takeaways from that meeting to help put you on track to creating your own advocacy program.

The benefits of a social advocacy program

During the webinar, Gerry gave us a great rundown of the benefits that he saw for CGU, and the reasons his company wanted to test the waters of employee advocacy.

  • Stay in the loop: Even the most engaged employees don't always stay up-to-date on the state of the industry. Some employees put in very little effort at all on that front. Part of creating a successful advocacy program is building a pool of content for your employees to draw from. A side effect of this is that any employee who chooses to participate in the program immediately becomes more informed about the latest developments at your company and news surrounding the industry as a whole.
  • Authentic reach: There are several ways you can grow your audience. In addition to their employee advocacy program, CGU also utilizes promoted content from LinkedIn. Paid views may bring in viewers, but that traffic is less engaged than when visitors come from the existing, real-people networks of your employees. As we'll see later, this more authentic form of reach is a more effective way of growing an audience.
  • Personal brand building: Several years ago, CGU had a social media policy that was the polar opposite of employee advocacy; employees were prohibited from talking about company business on social media. This limits the ability of those employees to build their own personal brands. An employee advocacy program, and all the tools it provides for employees, reversed that trend. Not only are employees now allowed to build their own brand, but as they do, it gets tied back to CGU.
  • Brand consistency: One of the reasons companies like CGU were initially hesitant to allow employees to discuss the company on social media is the lack of brand control. That problem went away with the adoption of the employee advocacy program. The content strategy and resources provide the company with tools to allow employees freedom while still having some measure of brand control.
  • Culture building: Building a positive company culture is an important part of keeping everyone on the same page and having a business that operates as efficiently as possible. Employee advocacy programs help with this in two regards. First, by allowing employees to post about the company on their social media accounts, you're helping to foster a sense of pride in the company within them. Second, the community aspect of content pooling and program-related meetings helps to create a stronger feeling of community within the staff that's participating in the program.
  • Result tracking: The Hootsuite Amplify platform provides a wide range of metrics that companies can track to measure their progress and see how the program is performing. Information about who is sharing, what they are sharing, and who the top sharers are serves as motivation for employees in the program.

How Hootsuite Amplify helped CGU

CGU didn't jump right into its employee advocacy program. Instead, to test the waters, the company created a pilot program.

The numbers below show just how much more successful the pilot program on Amplify was compared to the LinkedIn-owned page.

  • 160% more shares
  • 140% more likes
  • 80% increase in potential reach
  • 23% more clicks

The four pillars of a successful advocacy program

As one of Amplify's customer success managers, Lexi is uniquely positioned to discuss what does and doesn’t work when forming a new employee advocacy program. Early in the webinar, she broke down what Hootsuite sees as the four pillars of creating a successful program.

  1. Program ownership and executive buy-in: Running an advocacy program, especially in the early stages, requires significant time and effort.
  2. Employee participation: You can't have employee advocacy without employees to advocate.
  3. A strong content pipeline: The optimum amount of content shared should be between 8-13 new pieces per week.
  4. Ongoing communication: Getting people on board initially may be a challenge, but isn't nearly as challenging as keeping them engaged on a regular basis.

Finding the right mix of original vs curated content

The key, he says, is thinking the two types of content in terms of assets and operating expenses:

"The original content is assets, things you are focusing a lot of time and energy and resources on. You want to get the most value from this as possible."

Scott expanded further on how the breakdown usually works.

Lifestyle content is content that isn't necessarily within the wheelhouse of your company. Topics like 'Anxiety in the Workplace' or 'Returning to Work After the Pandemic' may be of interest to your audience, but don't really fit your brand - often making them poor candidates for original pieces.

Launch your advocacy program with UpContent

Hootsuite Amplify and UpContent make a perfect pairing for creating a content pool that your employees can use in their advocacy efforts.