This article will give you an overview of the essential elements you need for a game-changing employee advocacy program. It includes tips and possible measures to help you get started with your platform and improve your platform's performance.

We have gathered experiences and best practices from our customers and added a couple of recommendations from our customer success team. 

Content strategy & creation

Make sure you have enough relevant content - if users find nothing new/interesting to share, they might lose interest. Keep an eye on what content works best and continue creating engaging content, possibly by encouraging users to propose content on their own.

Sharing the content creation responsibility between different content contributors, adding third-party content, or setting up a content plan with key themes can help you achieve a continuous flow of new content. Learn more

Community recruitment

Create a community to re-engage, educate, and motivate. Determine which employees to target to join the community in the launch phase and beyond by identifying the best teams or individuals with a vested interest in sharing content on social media.

Keep recruiting new ambassadors/cohorts by re-evaluating user personas and their social media savviness. Furthermore, continue conducting periodic clean-ups and user re-engagement efforts quarterly and explore ways to automate these processes. Remove inactive users to maintain platform engagement. Learn more

User engagement & enablement

Empowering your employees to become brand ambassadors is a powerful way to increase product adoption and user engagement. To build and maintain a strong employee advocacy program, it is essential to prioritize the following aspects that encourage community participation and involvement. Remember to keep these in mind and motivate your team to become passionate advocates for your brand.

• Set up continuous training and interactive sessions in Haiilo and in other presentations. You want to keep the momentum of new joiners to get them excited about the platform. Personalize the onboarding experience and add as many visible touchpoints as possible. New users need to know what's in it for them - including active brand ambassadors can help you encourage them to connect their social media accounts and share content. Learn more
• Send re-engagement emails after a person has become inactive on the platform and remind them of the benefits of using Haiilo Advocacy or update them on what they have missed, triggering the fear of missing out. Additionally, you could include a trending post to encourage them to make their first share, add a survey to identify reasons for inactivity, add links to video tutorials reminding them how to connect their social media profiles to the platform, or even offer social media training to create a sense of urgency. Learn more
• Creating buzz around the platform and its success metrics is essential not only for the launch of your platform but also for maintaining the success of your employee advocacy program. Ensure to regularly remind users about Haiilo in team meetings, via activation emails or even through an ambassador page on your intranet announcing news and results, highlighting the success of individuals or teams, or celebrating the competition winners. Learn more
• Incentivize participation to help boost engagement - Set up monthly or quarterly competitions to encourage users to post from Haiilo and reward your employees with different prizes. Include the rewards on your platform so users constantly have a visible reminder and motivator to keep sharing content. Add a leaderboard to the home screen to help users monitor their progress. Learn more

Leadership involvement

Your management team is one of your most significant assets, as they are the most recognized brand personas. Identifying a leader who is passionate about social media and who can represent the program not only during the launch to advocate participation internally - and ideally to encourage other executives to get involved - is crucial to employee buy-in and adoption and will inspire your users to follow the lead.

If necessary, offer leaders social media training or set up a private channel just for the executive(s) where you curate content for them to share. As your C-level or other leaders probably do not have the time to create or share content on their own, you could also use the Post on Behalf feature, which enables a trusted person, an assistant, for example, to create/share content on their behalf. Learn more

Analytics

The Haiilo platform offers a wide range of analytics and allows you to continuously measure and improve the success of your employee advocacy program: Whether you are focused on identifying top-performing content and user engagement via the Posts & Users dashboard or delivering against your overarching KPI's, such as total reach, clicks, reactions or estimated earned media value (EEMV) via Workforce Insights. Learn more

If you want to analyze your ROI on services such as Google Analytics, HubSpot, Salesforce, etc., start adding UTM Tags/codes to the original source URL.