On one hand, social media has been a great boon for marketers. It’s never been easier to reach out and have a conversation with our target audience. We can know what’s on their minds, what they want from our brand, and can glean ways to help they haven’t thought of yet.
The flipside, though, is that social media is built primarily for people, not brands. To really reach people and have productive engagement, brands need to be more human.
Your employees can speak with a more authentic voice than your corporate account. What’s more, they’re likely to have a far larger extended network than your brand does. The challenge is to create a strategic, sustainable program that encourages employees to advocate on your brand’s behalf.
That’s where LinkedIn Elevate can help. LinkedIn Elevate is an employee advocacy platform. It uses the power of LinkedIn’s network of members to make employee advocacy easy.
Read on for step-by-step guidance to creating and executing your own program – and how LinkedIn Elevate can help you excel every step of the way.
Step 1: Finding Champions
The best way to rally employees is to let them be the ones to champion your cause. So start by figuring out which of your employees are already socially active.
LinkedIn Elevate makes it easy for you to identify your most influential social stars. The platform provides a list of socially active employees, and tools to activate them and track their progress.
Step 2: Curating Relevant Content
Keeping the content pipeline flowing is essential to equipping your employees to succeed. The goal is to find and deliver an ongoing stream of relevant content. While content curation can be time-consuming, it’s a must to fuel your employee advocacy program.
Elevate streamlines curation, providing daily suggestions of content that is resonating with your target audience. Plus, as it learns your employees’ content preferences and sharing behaviors, it prioritizes recommendations accordingly.
Step 3: Keeping Enthusiasm Up
Even the most carefully launched and well-managed program can lose steam without cultivation. To keep up the momentum, remind employees of all the goodness that comes from their participation. This includes the benefits to your company and to employees’ personal brands. In other words, underscore how advocacy boosts their own professional reputations.
LinkedIn Elevate includes several features that can help, including notifications to keep sharing top-of-mind and metrics to measure impact. Employees can clearly see how their sharing turns into profile views and engagements.
And remember that content is the fuel for your employees’ sharing activities. Increase the chances that your employees stay passionate about sharing by regularly reviewing how your content is performing. Elevate makes it easy to monitor performance and make changes as needed.
Step 4: Measuring and Analyzing Results
Once you launch, you will want to track and analyze your program’s impact. Within Elevate, you can see how employee advocacy is boosting traffic to your website, event registrations, the number of people following your Company Page, and subscribers.
Elevate also captures the ROI for your sales department in the form of new opportunities, new connections, and even contribution to closed deals. You’ll even be able to see which new hires were influenced by your employees as advocates.
Don’t forget to keep tabs on interest levels in your program. Are employees regularly signing up for the program and sharing content? Understanding engagement levels will help you keep these numbers high.
Step 5: Sharing (and Proving) the ROI
It’s important to build your program with measurable goals in mind, so you can track progress and prove ROI to the C-Suite. Make sure you can properly attribute leads and conversions to your program.
With Elevate, it’s easy to monitor the metrics that matter, and create visuals you can share with key stakeholders.
We know it can be daunting to launch a far-reaching, high-profile company program. But we also know that many companies have seen amazing results with employee advocacy done right. By following the five steps laid out here – and calling upon Elevate to help along the way – you can more confidently move forward with your program.
LinkedIn Elevate is the smarter employee advocacy solution that leverages LinkedIn data to maximize program success. Learn more about LinkedIn Elevate.
