You, as an admin and manager of your employee advocacy program, are in charge of identifying and recruiting the best possible teams or individuals as brand ambassadors to join the community in the launch phase and beyond.
In the following chapters, we want to enable you to not only know who to identify as the right people for your employee advocacy program but also provide you with a few tips on how to recruit new brand ambassadors to your platform.
Who (else) could you include in your program?
If you want to ensure the success of your platform, continue to add users to fill out seats as the platform grows. If there are any empty seats due to inactive users, remove them and replace them with new ones.
Inviting new users, whether individuals or entire cohorts, with the aim of serving multiple use cases in your organization can help strengthen the position of your platform and showcase its business value.
To identify the right people, consider (re-) evaluating all possible user personas and internal stakeholders for your employee advocacy program:
- Marketing
- Internal Communications Team
- Content Creators & Designers
- HR / People & Culture / Talent Acquisition / Employer Branding
- Exec & leadership team
- Sales teams
- Social media stars (Millenials + Gen Z)
- Industry experts
Learn more about why they would be a great addition to your employee advocacy program by watching our video deep-dive into the different use cases or downloading our overview of user personas at the bottom of this article.
When identifying further employees or teams to invite, it also helps to consider the following aspects:
- Would they best classify as…?
- Content creator / curator or approver
- Data Analyst
- Sharer
- Posting on behalf of
- Read-only
- What do you need to provide them with when inviting them to join?
- Benefits to them and the business
- Sharing successes: showing them the positive impact they have on their organization
- Social Media Style guide
- Content strategy
- Expected content input frequency
- Expected weekly workload
Why new hires could bring great potential to the table
To optimize seat utilization on your platform, you can start by integrating your advocacy program into the company onboarding process for new hires before reassessing user personas. This ensures a more consistent and effective approach. New employees are typically eager and excited about their roles, leading to a higher likelihood of sharing their positive experiences, including news about the company, team, or their new role, on various social media platforms.
Keep the momentum of their excitement up by introducing your advocacy program and its benefits during their company onboarding, perhaps through a video, personal presentation, or an onsite session. To make your offer to join the community even more appealing, you could also include a reward specifically aimed at new joiners.
Inviting new employees can also help you identify opportunities to involve other departments in your advocacy program. If you notice that new employees from a particular department are highly engaged, you can reach out to that department to see if they might be interested in joining the program as well. It's recommended to follow up with new employees after a certain period of time to gauge their interest and identify potential opportunities for expanding the program.
How to get the right people on board?
Once you have identified possible new brand ambassadors, it is time to motivate them to join the community. How do you best approach them?
- ensure executive buy-in to evangelize the program and aid in the recruitment
- Recruit through on-site team leads and managers
- Take advantage of internal/external events or campaigns that are an easy way to grab the attention of employees and encourage adoption
After you have started the conversation about your advocacy program, invite them to a meeting. By utilizing this approach, you can inspire and persuade other departments and stakeholders to join the program on a personal level.
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- Intro & objectives: what is employee advocacy? What are the company objectives? How does the employee advocacy platform support the company in achieving its goals? Tip: add in a couple of numbers/stats that demonstrate the significance of employee advocacy.
- Best practice for shareability: share insights into the types of content that can help reach and motivate your users - this will show potential new brand ambassadors how their participation can benefit not only the company’s goal but also their respective departments.
- Showcase session: demonstrate your global advocacy tool and explain the next steps for becoming a new community member. Be sure to address the responsibilities of their possible new roles within the advocacy program. Highlighting the reward program you have in place is an excellent way to increase their interest further.
- Q&A
Follow up: make sure to follow up on the meeting by inviting all interested in becoming a community member. Once invited to the platform, provide them with all necessary material and ensure they get trained on the platform.
Further tips & tricks
To successfully run an advocacy program, it is important to take the following steps regarding community management into consideration as well:
- Make sure that all new members are onboarded and trained properly with regard to their role in the program. If you have an ongoing flow of new joiners on your platform, setting up a continuous training process is key. And remember: most likely, not all of your employees are social media experts. It is, therefore, worth considering offering additional social media training for those who would like to learn more about professional social networking and best practices. Learn more
- Apart from inviting new employees or teams to the platform, it is also crucial to keep (re-) engaging users, conducting clean-ups continuously and removing inactive users after periodic re-engagement efforts to maintain platform engagement. Learn more
- Ensure that enough resources are available for program maintenance and growth. Admins or channel managers are the backbone of the program and should have enough time to create content, gather feedback, communicate results, educate users, and evolve the platform. Proposing a user engagement schedule for admins can help create more structure and consistency in running the advocacy program by defining how often users should be reminded and what the most effective reminder method is.
Check out our blog article to learn more about how brand ambassadors can help you boost your company's success.