Your people are your most valuable asset – not only in providing your products and services, but also through the potential for them to become employee advocates. After you’ve launched an employee advocacy program and training, here’s how to measure its impact to inform your strategy and maximise your results.
Your aligned and engaged people are perfectly positioned to become your strongest brand advocates. Sprinklr shares important statistics why an employee advocacy program is such a great talent attraction strategy: “According to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, 52% of consumers would trust information from a regular employee (a jump from 32% in 2009), and 67% would trust information from a technical expert within the company. The report also found that, in 4 out of 5 company-related topic categories (engagement, integrity, products & services, and operations), employees are the most-trusted influencers.
“By setting up an employee advocacy program, you can ensure your employees are enabled with the training, guidelines, and messaging they need to effectively engage new and loyal consumers. As Social Media Today found, “nearly 64% of advocates in a formal program credited employee advocacy with attracting and developing new business, and nearly 45% attribute new revenue streams to employee advocacy.”
These facts and figures are all well and good, but it’s important to have a framework for measuring the success of your employee advocacy program.
Percentage of employees sharing content
Measure this data point to understand how many employees are participating in your advocacy program. Using this knowledge, you can better understand where your share numbers, traffic, and engagement come from.
If this number is low, find ways to reinvigorate and optimise your program for better results. If it’s high, use this information to motivate other employees to join.
Percentage of employees who have participated in past 90 days
“Three months (or 90 days) is an appropriate trial period to see how your advocacy program is performing. If you’re just launching your program, or if you’re thinking of making some big adjustments, it’s helpful to gauge the participation and performance from the past 90 days. This way, you can arm yourself with a benchmark with which to compare future success.
“For instance, by keeping track of these metrics, BMC was able to see how its own BeSocial program significantly impacted the company’s social engagement. In just three months, 850 members had participated and over 30,500 messages were shared, resulting in 12.9 million impressions and over 3,100 website clicks.”
What content is being shared most?
Find out what resonates with your people. Determine which pieces of content do employees feel most comfortable sharing and what they think is most appropriate for their audiences.
If the majority of your engagement came from a few pieces of choice content, you can use that to inform your content-creation strategy going forward, by either creating more of the same, or axing things that aren’t working.
Engagement rates of content being shared by employees
Of the content being shared by your people, what are your clients and customers responding to? What information are they interested in from your employee advocates.”
“Perhaps blog posts are being shared more than ebooks. Maybe tweets with questions are being shared more than tweets with just headlines and links. It’s crucial to understand how content is performing in these communities because it can tell you if the content is high-value, and which content you should be creating and sharing more. It can also shine a light on the employees who have the most engaged social followings.”
How many people complete your employee advocacy training program?
By offering your people training and implementation guidance, you can increase the chance of your organisation’s success. Measuring the percentage of people who have undertaken this training will give you a better idea of where your reach is coming from (i.e. mostly from people who have been trained?)
Compare content-sharing between those employees who have undertaken training, and those who are sharing content on their own. Then use this data to incentivise more people to participate in your training.
How many people remain and advance in your program
“How effective is your advocacy program at retaining participants? Is there a natural progression between each stage? Perhaps you might need to optimise certain stages of the program. One easy way to do this is to establish check-in points where employees can provide feedback to the social team, and vice versa. The only way employees will be able to successfully complete [or remain in] the program is if they understand each stage and have the tools they need to advance to the next one.”
Total number of participants
Of course, measuring the total number of people participating in your employee advocacy program is key. It indicates how many people are actually adopting your program. If there’s a gap, address the cause and ensure you have adequate communication strategies in place to promote your program.
Employees aligned with your mission, vision, and values are a powerful force to promote your organisation as a great place to work, attract future talent, and personalise your brand. Don’t put a great program in place without measuring its effectiveness. Use data to gain knowledge, promote your program further to your executive team and other employees, and informed make adjustments to maximise the potential of this strategy.
Source
The 7 metrics you need to measure your employee advocacy program
Scott Amerman
Sprinklr