3 Employee Advocacy Program Examples worth Following

You and I both know the importance of employee advocacy programs…

First, it helps make your relationships with your employees ‘stickier’ and more meaningful. You make them feel valued and that you got their backs.

Second, it’s good for your business since your employees tend to become brand ambassadors and champion your cause. They’ll refer you to their network, share your content, improve brand visibility, etc.

Third, your employee churn reduces since your employees love working with you.

We’re just scratching the surface, of course.

TL;DR: You can’t undervalue employee advocacy; it does w-o-n-d-e-r-s for your employees, business, and even your customers.

To help you develop a successful employee advocacy program, we’ll check out 3 employee advocacy examples that you can learn from and build upon.

Let’s hop right in.

1. Starbucks

Here are a few things we know about Starbucks: they serve exceptional coffee, are a multi-billion dollar company, and offer excellent service.

To reach such a level of success, you need reliable systems, top-notch products, and remarkable customer support (among other essentials)—whether you attain these depends on the quality and commitment of your employees.

What Starbucks did

So what makes the coffee chain giant’s employee advocacy effective?

Simple: Starbucks prioritizes employee engagement and empowerment to foster a culture of advocacy. 

The company understands that employees who are satisfied with their workplace are likely inclined to share their positive experiences with their networks. 

The result is a domino effect that helps raise brand reach and awareness while increasing employee retention. 

What you can learn from Starbucks:

Company size isn’t a hindrance

“Our company is massive, it’s hard, borderline impossible to execute a successful employee advocacy program.” This train of thought doesn’t fly. Starbucks has 400,000+ employees globally as of this time of writing.

If Starbucks can do it despite its massive size, so can you.

The secret is clear social media guidelines for all participating employees across the world to ensure consistency and safeguard the brand’s reputation. 

The guidelines include content standards, best practices, and legal considerations that help advocates know their roles while maintaining confidentiality and privacy. 

Foster a sense of belongingness

Starbucks calls their social media contributors or employee ambassadors Partners.

It creates a sense of camaraderie and belongingness while giving Partners a sense of responsibility and control. 

The strategy encourages contributors to exercise and grow their social media game while fostering a positive employee attitude toward the company, resulting in lower employee turnover.

[Must read: Key Employee Advocacy Strategy That Boosts Brand Visibility]

2. Dell

Tech company Dell has found massive success with its employee advocacy program, which has led to thousands of traffic and click-throughs to its website. 

The trick to the company’s wildly successful employee advocate program is that it empowers employees to share content beyond news about the brand. 

According to Global Manager for Dell’s Social Media Training and Employee Activation program Amy Heiss…

“One of the big tenets of our social media and community training is that we want people to post 80% about topics that are informative, helpful and relevant to our customers or are personally interesting to our employees, stuff that reflects their own interests. Only 20% of the content they share should actually be about Dell.”

What Dell did

Dell’s approach to its employee advocacy program goes beyond giving employees pre-created and approved content to share. 

The company empowered employees to become champions of its brand by providing training, content, and tools. 

The “social media university” helps advocates learn through collaboration and idea generation among employees within the company’s social networks. 

The approach resulted in 1,200 current empowered and satisfied Champions (advocates) across 84 countries, which led to higher customer engagement and better sales performance. 

What you can learn from Dell

Dell nails its employed advocacy program by focusing more on empowering and encouraging advocates to share genuine experiences and insights, which resonate better with audiences than corporate messaging.

It’s a good example of an employee advocacy plan and program that connects people with people, which fosters a deeper connection among the company, its employees, and customers. 

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

3. Reebok

Reebok’s employee advocacy program encourages social media-savvy advocates to develop ideas to better showcase the brand and reach wider audiences instead of imposing a content plan. 

The approach fostered a greater sense of ownership, creativity, and collaboration. 

What Reebok did

The company’s employee advocacy content features employees sharing their personal fitness activities and adventures dressed in Reebok gear. 

The advocacy posts include the brand’s #FitAssCompany hashtag for easy tracking while widening the posts’ discoverability.

The company found that employee-generated social media posts produce authentic material that resonated well with audiences and encouraged other employees to create and share their own. 

What you can learn from Reebok

Leveraging employee-generated content makes for genuine, personal, and relatable content that drives engagement and sales. 

Essentially, you can turn employees into influencers for your brand. 

Reebok nails this tactic since most of the company’s workers fall into its target demographic.

Here’s what you can take away from Reebok’s successful employee advocacy program:

• Encourage authenticity 
• Make your program fun and valuable for your employees (#FitAssCompany encourages funny and witty content and captions)
• Turn authentic employee experiences into relatable content that humanizes your brand

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

Social media management (SMM) tool to help with your employee advocacy program

When it comes down to it, there are four crucial features you need to consider when choosing a social media management platform for running your employee advocacy programs:

• Advocate/employee onboarding
• Posting
• Audience engagement
• Analytics

These features in your SMM tool give you a strategic advantage in executing a streamlined employee advocacy campaign.

Enter Vista Social, a sophisticated social media management platform. 

The platform has essential and advanced features that make profile, content, and engagement management a breeze. 

Its latest employee advocacy feature comes with program tools for creating and managing programs, content, and advocates.

Other employee advocacy tools include advocacy post engagement and performance tracking and leaderboards. 

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

Run your employee advocacy program with ease

Instead of conceptualizing your employee advocacy program from scratch, learn from the examples of employee advocacy in this guide.

By analyzing the strategies of the companies we included in this guide, you can piece together strategies and elements that make for a successful employee advocacy program.

Also, remember to strengthen your employee advocacy initiatives with a reliable and feature-packed social media management platform like Vista Social.

Vista Social offers robust functionalities for publishing, analytics, audience engagement, content creation, and employee advocacy features. With these features, you can effectively execute a streamlined employee advocacy campaign.

Create a free FREE Vista Social account now.