As a social media manager, you spend endless hours building engagement across your brand’s platforms. But some of your strongest potential advocates are much closer than you perhaps realise. Some may even be sitting right next to you as you read this.

Employee advocacy. Ogilvy went as far as to call it one of the most influential trends of 2024: “A huge untapped marketing resource”, with 89% of C-suite marketers now recognising employees as influencers who could deliver “immense value for their business”.

Tapping into that value isn’t just about encouraging colleagues to engage with your social content, but also motivating them to create their own. Here’s how it’s done.

Make your employees want to advocate for your brand.

Create a personality that employees identify with. They’ll find it hard to promote something that feels false and inauthentic. For example, if you’re jumping on the bandwagon of sharing trending memes, your employees may not consider that to be an honest reflection of your company culture, and disengage. Or perhaps you’re sharing talking points popularised by social-media users who are significantly younger than your workforce.

Instead, keep an ear out for what interests your colleagues, so they feel a stronger affinity with your content and presence. If you hear them debating the merits of AI, for example, that suggests it’s a subject they’re likely to get behind in your social content.

Speaking of your people, you can generate employee advocacy by celebrating them and the culture behind your brand. Social activities and events aren’t the only opportunity to do that. Social media managers can also publicly salute team members who’ve contributed to the success of a project, or post testimonial quotes of their proud reactions.

Rather than seeking carbon-copy engagement across the whole business, encourage each team to engage with the posts that are most relevant to them. Product teams, for example, might get behind the launch of a new update, service or feature they’ve developed; sales, marketing and customer service might celebrate positive reviews and quarterly look-backs of your company’s achievements; C-suite might amplify a new client win, award or growth stat.

Make it easier for employees to engage with your brand.

Be consistent with social posting. Even if you can’t lock in the exact days you post, a regular weekly cadence won’t just help your followers, but will ensure your employees get into a regular rhythm of engaging. It can help to give them a nudge when posts go out on your company’s internal messaging platform – Slack even has plug-ins that will automate that for you.

Not all employee advocacy is equal, of course. A like is all well and good, but the gold lies in an employee sharing your post with a from-scratch original comment. You can take some of the work out for them with social media sharing guidelines. Providing ready-to-go angles and themes can steer employees who feel less confident writing posts from scratch, though you should caveat that any boilerplate copy should be used sparingly and embedded within their own original content.

You can also set up employee groups dedicated to being a company influencer. Set aside time for them to create their own content about where they work – day-in-the life videos that run through their work station, lunch, events, new products, service highlights, achievements and milestones – to advocate for the brand independently.

Give employees a brief on what was significant about the work or update – reaching a business milestone, for example – so they’re galvanised and can champion the right objective. And be clear on how you want to position your brand and your vision upfront, so they’re singing in tune with each other and your business’s narrative.

We write, design and manage social media for household names, niche tech brands and just about every B2B business in between. Get in touch if social media sounds like something we can help with.