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Employee Advocacy - How to find the best employees
What is employee advocacy?
Before we start looking at how you find and train your ambassadors to be used for employee advocacy, let's look at the definition:
"Employee advocacy is when the employees of a company (on behalf of the company) promote their employer via their own social media platforms such as: Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter"
The huge advantage of employee advocacy is that products and companies find it difficult to create relationships, people on the other hand, do not. This means that your staff can much more easily create a valuecreating relationship with potential new employees.
Which employees should I use as ambassadors?
Since we are talking about digital ambassadors, it is central that the employees you would like to have to market your company, graduate or student program etc, have a mindset that suits the task.
Typically, you will find many candidates who are extroverts. It can be salespeople, influencers or generation Z, who belong to the digital natives.
But it is not enough that the ambassadors are extroverted and understand how the metrics work on social media. They must also have something at heart, that is to say, they must be passionate.
Not everyone in the ambassador corps needs to have the same profile, so diversity in the way you communicate can also be an interesting focus area for you.
Depending on how used the employees are to promote themselves on social media, you must be prepared that there can be a big difference between the slightly experienced (who might be a rising star) and the experienced profile. Some employees will be 100% selfdriven after a short introduction and others need both solid guidance and perhaps a nudge every now and then.
You can also choose to present a professional angle when you find ambassadors. This may be if you are looking for employees for knowledgeintensive jobs, or job categories with many technical terms. Examples of this could be: Engineers, lawyers or economists.
When looking for the right profiles, you can choose to create a scale from 1-5, where 5 equals the perfect profile. The factors you can emphasise are:
- Is it a dynamic type of person?
- Is the person used to promoting themselves on social media?
- To what extent does the employee's social profile suit the company?
How do I find the right employees?
Once you have found the candidates, it is time to find out if the candidates are interested in coming to an interview.
At the meeting you will be able to ask questions such as:
- What motivates you at work?
- What do you find interesting in your workplace?
- What do you value most when you tell others about your everyday life at work?
- What will you need from me so that you can make x number of social media posts (possibly in a given period of time)?
- Which social media are you particularly active on and why?
In this context, you can expect questions from the candidates about what they get out of participating in an ambassador corps.
When the meeting is over, the next step is for you to think about: How much time will it take to get the employee onboarded or running on a monthly basis? Get feedback from the employee about whether they is interested in participating or not.
In this context, it is important to set the stage that a refusal to participate in the ambassador corps will not have a negative impact on the employee's status in the company.
Who does what?
There are two roles and one community.
Your role:
Running employer branding as a communication strategy requires that there is a rope holder and that is you. At a minimum, you can count on having to set aside time for:
- Comply with applicable regulations due to the Consumer Ombudsman's referrals
- Choose a tool in which to report and measure
- Create a guide for what the employees may and may not say
- Train the participants in being able to handle critical comments
- Ensure that the right #hashtags are used
- Hold status meetings where you facilitate the participants learning from each other. The meetings can also help to ensure that the participants do not continue off on a tangent that is not appropriate
- Provide ideas for posts if necessary or desired
- Help the participants find a personal angle on employee advocacy
- Make guidelines so that the participants can answer relevant questions about your company
Your tasks may also depend on how experienced the participating employees are.
Should you:
- Interview the participants, or other employees, to create good content?
- Read or proofread everything before it is published?
- Just ensure that the overall framework is present, since the participants are otherwise selfdriving?
The employee's role:
- Follow the rope holder's instructions
- Be honest about the efforts and consequences of the job as an ambassador
- Point out if agreements about posts cannot be met
Community:
- Encourage participants to create a Facebook group, a Discord channel, or meet during lunch breaks to motivate each
The next thing is that you make some guidelines for the participants in the ambassador corps. You can read more about that here: