How to Start an Employee Advocacy Program

Employee advocacy works because people trust people.

Buyers, candidates, partners, and peers are often more likely to trust the people behind the company than the company page itself.

That is why employee advocacy matters: It gives more credible reach, while helping employees build visibility and authority in their own networks.

But the program only works when both sides benefit.

If you are still working through the first question — why employees would want to advocate for the company in the first place — start with our guide to LinkedIn employee advocacy. This article covers the next step: how to build an employee advocacy program around that motivation.

What is an Employee Advocacy Program?

An employee advocacy program is a structured system for helping employees share relevant content connected to the company’s work, culture, expertise, and market point of view.

That can include sharing company content, but it should not stop there.

Well-designed programs help employees talk about what they know within their professional reality. This category might include:

• Customer questions
• Product lessons
• Behind-the-scenes work
• Hiring needs
• Event takeaways
• Company culture
• Industry shifts
• Practical realities of doing the work

Think of it as the overlap between brand reach, employee expertise, and referral-style trust.

The company becomes easier to discover and believe in, and employees get something in return (which, btw, can be a monetary incentive as well).

In a way, employee advocacy does the same thing as a customer referral, but from an internal perspective: It signals that the people who work here are invested in the company and will vouch for it.

What to Consider Before You Start Your Employee Advocacy Program

Before you start an employee advocacy program, it’s important to put a plan in place that will align with your existing social media strategy. Consider your short- and long-term goals, as well as how you’ll get buy-in from employees, stakeholders, and decision-makers.

The most important planning question is “What would make participation worth their time, name, and credibility?”

That answer shapes the program before you choose tools, templates, or rollout plans.

Like most things in social media, how you start your employee advocacy program depends largely on your brand’s current capabilities. If you’re just getting started, the first thing you’ll want to do is assess the current level of your program.

You might be thinking, “We don’t have an employee advocacy program yet, that’s why I’m reading this post!”

And while it’s true that you might not have launched a specific, strategic initiative to expand you brand’s reach by tapping into your employees’ networks yet… well, that doesn’t mean that you’re not engaging in employee advocacy.

Unless your employees aren’t on social media at all, you’re not starting from scratch.

That’s why it’s important to take stock and level set before moving forward. This is an ideal time to employ a social media maturity map to help assess and plan.

5 Levels of an Employee Advocacy Program

Once you’ve determined which level your brand is at, you can use this guide as a roadmap to building towards the next level.

The goal is not simply to move from “employees do not post” to “employees share company content.”

A mature program helps employees become credible voices around the company’s work, category, customers, and culture.

So, let’s see which of the following sounds most like your brand.

Level 0 of Employee Advocacy

The majority of your employees aren’t actively on social media. If they have accounts on relevant platforms, they post rarely, or not at all.

Start by understanding why employees are not showing up yet, then make participation feel useful, safe, and realistic.

The key to earning employee buy-in at this early stage is to make it both compelling and easy for your employees to participate.

Here’s how:

1) Make it compelling.

Frame your goals and expectations in a way that makes it clear how this will also benefit the employees, not just the company.

Employee advocacy elevates the brand, but as a consequence of helping employees build credibility around the work they already do.

2) Make it easy.

You should develop a process for helping employees get started.

Bear in mind that for some of these employees, social media might be a very new medium. Providing patient guidance while they create their profiles and explore new platforms will help grease those wheels.

Level 1 of Employee Advocacy

At this level, most of your employees should be on social media and aligned with your brand.

There are a few things to start doing at this stage to make sure that happens:

1) Make sure everyone has an updated profile.

It should be clear where employees work and what they do, but the goal is not to make every profile look identical.

Set employees up with simple guidance for improving their profiles, such as:

• Clear role descriptions
• Relevant expertise areas
• Useful featured links/posts
• Professional visuals

You can provide sample profile language, but treat it as a starting point. Employees should still sound like themselves.

And speaking of templates…

2) Develop templates for your employees to use.

Like most marketing tactics, this is all about reducing as many friction points as possible.

While employees might not yet be actively sharing brand content on their channels at this stage, now is the time to lay the groundwork for a smooth transition.

Developing templates for their profiles and bios is a good starting point.

We also recommend creating prompts or post structures that employees can use when in need!

3) Train employees on how to talk about the company.

Since you’re just starting your employee advocacy program, likely, you don’t have any guidelines in place for how employees should represent themselves as ambassadors of your brand.

Get out ahead of this before asking them to start sharing company content on their different profiles.

Do you have a distinct brand voice or message?

Communicate the company’s voice, values, and boundaries, but do not ask employees to become miniature brand channels. Train them on what is safe, useful, and credible to say in their own voice.

The templates will help with this, but it’s best to also have explicit rules and guidelines so that everyone is on the same page from the beginning.

Level 2 of Employee Advocacy

If you’re starting at this point, many of your employees are already actively re-sharing company posts from their personal profiles.

To ‘level up’ and generate further employee engagement, we suggest an incentive system.

Keep in mind that this is extra on top of your employees’ existing responsibilities and workload, so while intrinsic motivation is nice, it’s neither guaranteed nor fair to expect.

In other words, a shout-out in closed internal channels might feel good, but it’s not proportional to the extra work being done.

That extra effort and investment in the company should be rewarded with tangible ‘extras’ that your employees will actually be interested in, like gift cards, team lunches, and even bonuses.

Be clear about what and how you reward.

Another way to motivate employee advocacy is by gamifying the process. Create a leaderboard and show key metrics so the team can keep track of who’s gaining the most impressions, engagement, or leads.

Friendly competition is a great way to drive participation.

Level 3 of Employee Advocacy

At this level, the company’s role is to help employees find usable raw material.

At this level, the company’s role is to help employees find usable raw material. Most employees are not short on expertise. They are short on structure, confidence, and time.

There are myriad ways to do this, like:

• Showcase employee work, projects, and achievements through the company blog or social channels.
• Share case studies that highlight the team’s role in solving customer problems.
• Invite employees to contribute short quotes, lessons, or perspectives to roundup posts.
• Ask for employee perspectives on relevant industry news, customer questions, or category shifts.
• Provide approved topic lanes that employees can adapt for LinkedIn posts, articles, short videos, or comments.
• Give employees editorial support so they are not expected to become content creators from scratch.

You must let your employees decide for themselves how much they’re comfortable contributing. You don’t have to throw them into the deep end right away by asking them to write a full exposé — they can work up to that.

Shopify has historically been a useful example of this broader model: Employee stories, expert content, company channels, and executive visibility working together rather than relying only on brand posts.

This type of content is perfect for employees who want to boost their own personal brand and authority while gaining perks from being an employee advocate.

Bonus: When employees create useful content, the brand often earns stronger material to reshare, curate, and build from.

Level 4 of Employee Advocacy

This is where things really start to take off.

At this level, some employees are gaining traction, with active networks and clear areas of expertise.

If your employees are already thought leaders and influencers in the space, make the most of it by cross-promoting and amplifying each other’s content.

The company should not only ask employees to share brand content.

It should also amplify employees’ best thinking through the brand account, executive accounts, newsletters, blogs, events, and sales enablement.

Some of the best examples of this actually come from media businesses.

Take, for instance, the business newsletter MorningBrew. Their team members post viral Twitter threads that build their own brands, but they’re also constantly plugging their employer’s content, too.

Executive Social Media as Part of Your Employee Advocacy Program

At this stage, you’ll also want to seriously consider how executive social media activation can work for your brand and augment your employee advocacy program. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Which executives are best positioned to be influencers in your industry?
2. Are they already active, or will they need strategic, editorial, and operational support?

Executive advocacy can strengthen an employee advocacy program, but it should not replace it.

Executives are often best positioned to carry the company’s market point of view:

• Where the category is going
• What the company believes
• What tradeoffs buyers should understand
• Why certain strategic decisions matter

Employees are often better positioned to make that point of view tangible through customer conversations, implementation lessons, product work, hiring stories, and practical examples.

The strongest programs use both. Executives give the company a clear point of view. Employees make that point of view more specific, credible, and human.

That all sounds great, of course, but getting executive buy-in might be difficult for a few reasons. Here are the most common concerns and how to address them:

1. They lack experience with social media and don’t feel comfortable with it. Provide training specifically for the execs. As the faces of the company, it’s super important that they feel comfortable representing the brand online, and the high-level nature of their positions means that the standard employee training probably won’t be as relevant to their needs.
2. They feel like they don't have ideas or a system for turning their thinking into posts. Yes, they’re busy, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have something valuable to add to the conversation. Make it easier for them by sharing specific opportunities, so they don’t have to spend time seeking them out.
3. They’re not convinced of the ROI of an employee advocacy program. Show them the real-time value. It also helps to share what the competition is doing and how their programs are driving engagement and growth (or not driving it — that’s an opportunity to step in and fill that vacuum).

How to Roll Out an Employee Advocacy Program

So, now that we’ve identified a basic roadmap on how to start your employee advocacy program, let’s work on how to roll it out.

Before rollout, ask a few questions:

1) Who is Running the Show?

Identify which internal department(s) will start the employee advocacy program and run it moving forward. Perhaps it could be your marketing, PR, or communications team? Or perhaps recruiting and sales will drive the process? Or even the HR department?

For many B2B companies, this will be a shared effort between marketing, communications, sales, recruiting, and leadership.

The owner should be clear, but the inputs should come from across the business.

2) Why are Employees Involved?

It’s important to articulate the plan to employees and show them how their efforts will be rewarded.

Explain the importance of starting an employee advocacy program.

For the company, that may mean:

• Building brand awareness
• Reaching more relevant audiences
• Supporting recruiting
• Creating warmer sales conversations
• Strengthening category authority
• Making the company feel more human and credible

For employees, that may mean:

• Building professional visibility
• Growing their network
• Becoming known for their expertise
• Getting access to conversations
• Turning their work into career capital

3) How Will Onboarding Work?

Whether you’re a team of 10 or 10,000, you’re not trying to roll out a program that needs to be adopted by every single member of your team. Instead, develop a plan that selects pilot employees and teams that will have the biggest impact:

• Select coaches with lots of social media experience and knowledge in place who can provide support to other employees in the program.
• Select early advocates carefully. Look for employees who are close to useful stories, have something to gain professionally, and can post with good judgment. Enthusiasm helps, but credibility matters more.
• Distribute materials that lay out the process for your employees so that the how and why of everything is clear.

Start with a pilot group before expanding company-wide. A pilot lets you test content lanes, approval workflows, training, incentives, and measurement before asking the broader team to participate.

How to Measure an Employee Advocacy Program

Most employee advocacy programs measure the company side first: Reach, impressions, clicks, engagement, shares, and referral traffic.

Those metrics matter, but do not tell the whole story.

A stronger measurement model looks at three things:

• Company outcomes
• Employee outcomes
• Program health

For company outcomes, track metrics like brand reach, engagement, website traffic, inbound interest, assisted pipeline, recruiting page visits, event interest, share of voice, and content performance.

For employee outcomes, look at profile views, network growth, inbound messages, connection requests, buyer or candidate conversations, confidence posting, and growth in professional visibility.

For program health, track participation rate, repeat participation, active advocates, post quality, approval speed, content adoption, employee feedback, and advocate retention.

This matters because advocacy only lasts when both sides benefit.

A program with 15 active employees creating useful, credible content is healthier than a company-wide rollout where 200 people were invited, and five people post once.

Are You Ready to Start Your Employee Advocacy Program?

You should now be able to level set your program, identify where your company is starting, and decide what needs to happen next.

The important thing is to build from the right foundation (employees understanding what's in it for them, and contributing with content that fits a strategy).

That kind of program takes time, so start with the employees most likely to benefit.

Give them content lanes, guardrails, and support. Measure whether the company is gaining visibility and whether employees are gaining value.

If both sides keep benefiting, the program has room to grow.

We know that starting an employee advocacy program can feel intimidating. We’ve got you covered.

Book a meeting to chat with us about how we can help your team build and execute an employee advocacy program that is strategic, credible, and actually useful for your team.

We know that it can sometimes be intimidating to start an employee advocacy program. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

Book a meeting to chat with us about how we can help your team build and execute an employee advocacy program that is efficient, effective, and even fun for your team.