The Definitive Employee Advocacy Checklist

Interested in starting an employee advocacy program? You’re on the right track! 

This checklist can be used as a helpful guideline to see if you’re ready to take on an employee advocacy program. But remember, it’s just a guideline. If you don’t check all the boxes, you can still move forward with a successful program. Our team can help you with the areas you need to improve and make the most of your efforts. 

Know Your Goals and How You Measure Success. 

What do you want to accomplish with employee advocacy? 

If you have to know what you’re striving towards. You have to know your goals. You should also consider why these are your goals. Are you trying to increase your brand awareness? Increase social media engagement and traffic to your website? Are you trying to drive more leads? 

Boosting your social media KPIs makes perfect sense. You can boost engagement, increase brand recognition, and drive business. If your goal is to increase your followers? Why is that? Is that really what you want to do or is engagement more important to you? 

We can help you figure out which metrics best illustrate your program’s performance. Knowing what you’re after will make it much easier to strategize how we want to build out your program. 

Update and Revisit Your Social Media Policy

Has it been a while since your last social media policy update? 

Before you launch your employee advocacy program, make sure that your social media policy reflects that it’s okay for employees to share on social media. If you don’t have a social media policy, consider our social media policy template.

The reason for this is that many companies frown on employees being active on social media. This stance might not come from your marketing department. It might come from up top in the executive office. 

Many of your employees don’t talk about work on social media because they are scared they’ll say something that’ll get them in trouble. You need to make it clear to them that it’s OK for them to represent your brand on social media. You hired them for a reason, so trust them, and encourage them to do so.

A List of Employees in Mind to Join Your Program. 

Not all employees need to be part of your program, and many of them will choose not to be, but it’s good to have your starting group in mind. 

Do you have a group of social media savvy employees who already promote your brand? What about a group that is on social media but does not post about your organization? If you identify these employees, it’s a huge help. 

The people who agree to be part of your program early and are enthusiastic about it will be your program champions. They will be the ones you can point to as examples of employees who like being part of your program when you recruit other employees to join. 

We can help you identify these people, have success with them, show your success with them, and expand your program to your larger employee population.

A Social Media Presence.

It might sound pretty basic, but to have an employee advocacy program, you need to have social media accounts.

This goes for both your brand and your employees. Once those are in place, you can use your program to expand your social media reach. But if you try to start an employee advocacy program without employees on social media or any brand handles up and running, that won’t make much sense.  

A Stream of Consistent Content. 

An important piece of employee advocacy is supplying your employees with quality content.

Again, content is just one piece of the pie, but it’s still important. Do you have a blog, podcast, or informative videos you’d like to get in front of your audience? Do you have quality third-party content your audience would be interested in? Your program will help your employees promote it. 

Having your employees share this content will present them as thought leaders. This will make them look knowledgeable and credible in your field, and help both them and your brand draw in your target audience.

Someone to Manage your Employee Advocacy Program. 

A mistake some organizations make is they don’t think about who will manage their employee advocacy program until late in the process. 

Some organizations even depend on an intern to run their program. That is not the way to go. Make sure you have a dedicated person to manage your program who is passionate about your success, works full-time, and has the future of your program and your brand in mind.

Remind Your Employees to Share. 

This might sound basic, but new processes often need reminders to be effective. 

When leveraging an employee advocacy platform like GaggleAMP, reminders of new content appear via email, Slack, Google Chrome, and other integrations. You’ll need to set up a process early on to remind employees that content will meet them where they are and how often to check for new content to share

Consider Incentives for the Team.

Everyone likes to be at the top of the leaderboard. 

Consider how you can make your employees feel excited about participating in an employee advocacy program with incentives tied to gamification. You can run different contests rewarding the most active members of your program, or even the campaigns with the best reach. 

With GaggleAMP, you can assign points to each activity you request of your employees. When they complete an activity, they will earn those points. The activities could be as simple as liking a tweet, or something more lengthy, such as writing a review on Glassdoor. Your Gaggle’s scoreboard will keep track of how many points each person in your program has in the order of most to least. 

The sky's the limit and not all incentives need to be rewards - a simply public “way to go” goes a long way, too.

Revisit and Optimize.

As you’re preparing to launch your program, you’ll also want to set regular checkpoints to ensure you revisit and optimize. 

It’s a good practice to establish regular check-in meetings with your Customer Success representative early on to ensure you are always learning from what you’ve already done. You can use your Gaggle’s analytics dashboard to watch your progress and your Customer Success Manager will help you every step of the way to customize and adjust your strategy so you’ll hit your specific goals. 

We hope this checklist helps, but remember, it’s not a list of requirements – they’re just guidelines. If you know the answers to these questions, that’s great! Your GaggleAMP representative will go over these with you and make sure you’re on the right track.