What is employee advocacy?
Employee advocacy is the practice of internal employees genuinely and organically endorsing their employer’s products, services, or brand.
Here are three employee advocacy examples to illustrate what we mean:
- An Apple employee raves to their friends about the latest iOS accessibility features.
- A Starbucks barista posts funny TikToks every few days about his love for their lattes.
- A Morgan Stanley banker tells her LinkedIn network about how the bank accelerated her career for the better.
Anything kind that employees publicly say about their employers is considered employee advocacy. Social media is a hotbed for advocacy — and savvy businesses are catching on to that.
Today, buyers almost always do their own research via online channels before they ever chat with a salesperson. They look at what current customers and employees are saying about the vendors and brands they’re considering. They look at how active everyone is in their industry’s community. They watch for authentic, trustworthy behavior, specifically on social media.
Which begs this question: How can small businesses and global enterprises alike show up excellently on social media for their buyers?
The answer is simple: an employee advocacy program.
What is an employee advocacy program?
An employee advocacy program is simply the formalization of the ad-hoc, organic endorsement employees make about their employers’ products, services, or brands.
While employees can, of course, be solo advocates for their organization, forward-thinking organizations are creating more formal employee advocacy programs because there’s strength (and sales) in numbers.
To be clear, ad-hoc advocacy is still fair game and welcomed by most brands — but sanctioned employee advocacy programs put the tools, resources, prompts, and enablement right into the hands of employees who may need a bit more assistance to pull together a strong social media advocacy post.
Here’s one important caveat before we go any further: advocacy programs should never feel like another form of advertising. Buyers can sniff out sneaky self- or business-promotion from a mile away. Instead, great employee advocacy programs exist to align employees and give them tons of fodder and support in building authentic and trusted relationships with their networks at scale.
