How to Simplify Implementing Employee Advocacy Campaigns

Simplify how you implement your employee advocacy campaigns to increase chances of success.

Employee advocacy can do wonders for your social media and online marketing efforts, from raising brand awareness to boosting conversions. 

The catch is that it involves many moving parts, and dealing with all the tasks on top of your other workload can be overwhelming. 

The solution? Simplify your employee advocacy campaign implementation. 

This guide covers tips, tricks, and tools for streamlining and speeding up the deployment of your employee advocacy campaigns. 

What you will learn

• What are employee advocacy campaigns?
• 6 Tips to streamline implementing employee advocacy campaigns 
• How to use Vista Social for easy implementation of employee advocacy campaigns
• What are the top challenges of implementing employee advocacy campaigns?
• Ready to streamline your employee advocacy campaigns?

What are employee advocacy campaigns?

Employee advocacy campaigns are marketing and promotional initiatives in which employees share company values, messaging, and content on their social media pages. 

It involves leveraging your employees as brand ambassadors through a more natural and organic approach. 

Most employee advocacy campaigns aim to amplify a brand’s reach and strengthen its credibility through the employees’ authentic voices. 

The campaigns can include strategies to empower employees, helping them connect deeper with your brand and making them more enthusiastic advocates. 

Must read: Key Employee Advocacy Strategy That Boosts Brand Visibility

6 Tips to streamline implementing employee advocacy campaigns 

Deploying your employee advocacy campaigns doesn’t have to be complicated to work.

Below are the best practices to help implement your campaigns smoothly. 

1. Use the right tools

Leverage the best tools to simplify key, time-consuming tasks such as content creation and publishing. 

Social media management platforms like Vista Social provide features to simplify and streamline your workflows. 

The platform lets you connect all your social media profiles, create and schedule content for auto-posting, and track and optimize content performance all from one platform.

Your advocates can share the posts directly to their social media pages from the platform. 

This allows for more efficient campaign workflows, saving you and your advocates a lot of time and energy. 

2. Pre create advocacy posts and curate content

Participating in your employee advocacy program and campaigns are additional tasks on top of your advocates’ workloads. 

If they’re overloaded with work, like creating content on top of their daily tasks, they’ll likely be discouraged from participating in your campaigns. 

So lighten the burden and don’t leave the entire content creation process up to your employees. 

Instead, establish an asset and content library where your advocates can easily get images, videos, and posts to create and share your brand’s content. 

For instance, you can upload, store, and organize your media and documents within Vista Social’s Media Library for your social media team and advocates to access and use for your advocacy posts. 

Pre-curating content like this helps your advocates create and share a steady flow of on-brand advocacy posts. 

Plus, they won’t need to spend too much time and effort thinking about or creating visuals and other content for your campaigns. 

3. Automate where you can

One of the best ways to simplify employee advocacy campaign implementation is to automate where possible. 

Use employee advocacy tools with robust automation features to streamline your campaign’s critical tasks, such as automating content scheduling and publishing. 

Must read: Top Employee Advocacy Tools to Improve Brand Reach this 2024

With Vista Social, you can set up automatic alerts to notify advocates when a post is available for them to repost or share. 

The platform also offers an automated post-approval workflow. 

The feature allows you to create an advocacy post and set up a workflow, automatically sending it to your social media and campaign managers for review and approval. 

It reduces the time-consuming back-and-forth when reviewing advocacy posts before they go live. 

Automation can save your team a lot of time and energy. It helps reduce micro-management and keep your employee advocacy campaigns on point and on track.   

4. Keep your guidelines simple

Ensure that your employee advocacy program and campaign guidelines are easy to understand. 

It’s important to be as thorough as possible to ensure alignment and consistency across your campaigns and content. 

However, lengthy, overly complex guidelines can be overwhelming and confusing, leading to delays in deploying your advocacy campaigns.

Instead, consider keeping your advocacy rule book simple and concise. 

For example, you can have comprehensive employee advocacy guidelines AND a cheat sheet outlining your critical standards and do’s and don’ts. 

Must read: Employee Advocacy Guidelines Worth Following This 2024

Include easy-to-digest tips on the hashtags, tone, and content to use. 

Vista Social’s social media publishing feature includes an option to save hashtags, making it even easier for your advocates to add the right hashtags to their posts. 

Remember, simplifying your rules can empower your employees to share content confidently while keeping everything aligned with your brand’s integrity and voice.

5. Gather feedback and do regular check ins

Know where to improve your workflows, remove bottlenecks, and simplify tasks by asking your advocates and social media team members. 

Your employees know the potential gaps that cause delays in implementing your employee advocacy campaign. 

So schedule brief, regular check-ins with your advocates or team to:

• Stay on top of your employee advocacy campaign’s progress
• Gather feedback on what’s working, needs improvement, and requires adjustments
• Uncover unique insights to optimize your campaigns

A feedback loop and regular check-ins can help you spot and address issues promptly.

These can also make your team and advocates feel heard and their opinions valued, boosting their commitment to your advocacy campaigns. 

6. Celebrate and acknowledge wins

A huge part of your campaign’s success depends on how active and committed your team and advocates are. 

Recognizing your team’s efforts and successes with your employee advocacy campaigns helps motivate them.

It can boost their engagement with your employee advocacy program and campaigns, reducing the need to send constant reminders to get things moving forward.

Must read: 3 Employee Advocacy Program Examples Worth Following

Positive reinforcement can also encourage employees to commit and participate more actively. It can motivate them to work more efficiently, resulting in your campaign’s success. 

How to use Vista Social for easy implementation of employee advocacy campaigns

Implementing your campaigns can be as smooth as a fresh jar of Skippy with Vista Social. 

The platform is a powerhouse solution that combines advanced social media management features and essential employee advocacy tools. 

Vista Social’s employee advocacy feature has everything you need to run, manage, and track your programs and campaigns efficiently. 

After connecting your social media profiles, you can create your advocacy program.

Provide the necessary details and set up your preferences, such as the schedule to send email digests.

After creating your advocacy program, you can invite advocates and your Social Media Management (SMM) team. 

Must read: Best Platform For Social Media Management [2024]

Important note: Users who are part of your SMM team can’t use the same email addresses to join your Advocacy Programs. 

You can upload a CSV file containing your advocates’ names and email addresses or enter the details manually.

You’ll see all your Employee Advocacy programs on your dashboard like this:

Click on an advocacy program to access its specific dashboard. 

You’ll see the program’s stats, published advocacy content, activities, and advocate list (including each advocate’s reach and status).

The Leaderboard shows your top-performing advocates and their rankings based on metrics such as shares, earned media value, reposts, and engagement.

Creating advocacy content for your campaigns is quick and easy. 

Select the type of advocacy post: New social post, existing social post, or advocacy-only post.

You’ll be directed to the Advocacy content publisher, where you can upload your image or video and customize your post. 

Use the AI Assistant to generate engaging captions and taglines or help refine your written description based on your preferred tone and brand voice. 

You can schedule your post to automatically be available on a specific time and date for your advocates to share and repost.

The platform also lets you create a post for another social media campaign and turn it into an advocacy post.

Create and customize your post in the Publisher and switch on the Add to advocacy toggle. 

You can set the post to be available for reposting and sharing by advocates immediately after it’s published or on a specific schedule.

Vista Social’s employee advocacy feature is unique because it allows your advocates to customize the post before reposting. It can make your advocacy posts more authentic and relatable to audiences.  

Don’t miss out on Vista Social’s other SMM features, including the following:

• A social media engagement feature with a Social Inbox that centralizes all your interactions, such as messages, comments, mentions, and reviews
• A content calendar to simplify your content development, planning, scheduling, and management
• Social media analytics and reporting tools with customizable and automated report generation and sharing
• A username generator to make creating brand-relevant social media handles quick and easy
• A social media listening tool to track your brand mentions and conversations around your business-relevant keywords and topics

Vista Social has the essential and advanced features to simplify and supercharge your employee advocacy planning, management, and implementation. 

Must read: How to Build an Employee Advocacy Plan: Step-by-Step Guide

The platform helps bring order to the chaos, allowing your SMM and employee advocacy teams to work more efficiently.

What are the top challenges of implementing employee advocacy campaigns?

Carrying out your employee advocacy campaign can have several challenges, including the following. 

Getting employee buy in

It’s challenging to convince your employees to participate in your advocacy program or even run or contribute to your campaigns.

An effective approach is to help your employees understand how their participation benefits them. 

Will joining your employee advocacy program grow their personal brands or contribute to their career development?

Answering these questions helps your employees determine the value of joining your advocacy program and contributing to your campaigns. 

Another tactic to increase employee buy-in is to align your advocacy campaigns’ values or relevance to your advocate’s roles. 

Without these factors, contributing to your campaign can feel like an additional task rather than a rewarding or meaningful endeavor. 

Content fatigue

Repetitive content can kill employee or advocate engagement. 

If your advocacy campaigns focus too much on sharing company-centered, monotonous content, your advocates will likely stop sharing your posts. 

Mix up content formats and types, such as community event videos and industry news, to ensure you supply fresh and engaging interaction posts.

Must read: Social Media Interaction Post Ideas This 2022

Create content that reflects your brand while still being interesting enough for your advocates to share. 

Also, allow employees to add their fun twist to your advocacy posts to give them that unique, authentic spin. 

Sustaining engagement

Initial enthusiasm for your employee advocacy campaign will likely fade without proper motivation and recognition. 

If you don’t acknowledge or reward your employees’ efforts, they can disengage, potentially tanking the results of your advocacy campaigns. 

Ensure you provide relevant and fresh content while keeping your advocates engaged. 

Add fun elements to your employee advocacy program to encourage advocates to keep implementing your campaigns. 

For example, weave in regular shout-outs, gamification, and other incentives to keep the ball rolling. 

Measuring success accurately

Proving your employee advocacy campaigns’ returns isn’t always easy since it goes beyond monitoring your advocacy posts’ shares and likes. 

You must determine how your entire campaign impacts your business goals, such as driving traffic, leads, and conversions.

Ensure you accurately track and measure your campaigns’ results with the right tools. 

Analytics tools can help you determine tangible results that link your efforts to business outcomes.

Balancing brand requirements and authenticity 

Employee advocacy doesn’t mean your advocates simply post content your social media team tells them to share. 

Your advocates need to feel that they’re sharing your advocacy posts in their voice while still representing your brand. It can make them feel more involved, not just puppets for your brand. 

So, strike a good balance between authentic and personalized posts with branded content. 

Must read: How to Use Instagram Branded Content

Provide guidelines to ensure your advocacy campaigns align with your brands but allow some wiggle room for creativity. 

This can make your campaigns and posts feel more genuine while still being consistent with your messaging and brand voice. 

Must read: Top Employee Advocacy Guide: w/ Tips, Tools, & Programs

Time constraints

Your employees have daily tasks, so they can’t pour all their time and energy into your employee advocacy campaigns. 

It is crucial to simplify and streamline your processes and workflows to help your advocates work more efficiently and excellently. 

Leverage automation features and tools and have a library or at least a week’s worth of advocacy content to make things easier for your advocates.

The more seamless your employees’ workflows are, the more likely they will share your advocacy posts and implement your campaigns. 

What are the FAQs on employee advocacy campaigns?

Below are the top questions that people ask about employee advocacy campaigns.

What kind of advocacy content should your employees share?

It depends on your campaign goals. 

Employee advocacy campaigns should include relevant, engaging, and relatable content that speaks to your target audiences. 

Consider sharing industry insights and news, event highlights, behind-the-scenes posts, and your employees’ personal experiences with your company.  

How often should your employees share advocacy content?

The frequency of sharing content depends on your advocacy campaigns. 

A good start is usually once or thrice a week. This way, you can keep your brands active without overwhelming your employees and their connections. 

Determine your brand’s optimal posting frequency and schedule to get maximum engagement from your employee advocacy campaigns. 

Can you use employee advocacy campaigns for recruitment?

Absolutely. 

Employees who share content about your company’s work culture or initiatives and their personal stories help build your brand’s reputation. 

A good reputation can attract potential talent to your company, encouraging them to apply. 

What is the difference between influencer marketing and employee advocacy?

Influencer marketing is about paying or incentivizing external individuals with a huge following to promote your brand. 

Must read: Importance of Influencer Marketing on Instagram

Employee advocacy is when you leverage your employees to share your brand’s content. 

Advocacy is a more organic approach since it involves leveraging your employees’ voices to advocate for your brand. 

On the other hand, influencer marketing is more transactional and involves working with external parties to promote your brand for a fee. 

Influencer marketing involves outsiders promoting your brand, while employee advocacy involves people who live and breathe your company culture advocating for your brand. 

Ready to streamline your employee advocacy campaigns?

Implementing your employee advocacy campaigns can take time and effort, but it doesn’t have to be complicated to get you the best results.

Learn tips and tricks for simplifying your campaign implementation, from scheduling your advocacy posts to automating performance tracking. 

Choose the best tools like Vista Social to make your critical social media management and employee advocacy tasks more efficient.

Create your Vista Social account now.