LinkedIn My Company and Employee Advocacy
Employee advocacy is the name of the game here, but what is it? “At its core, *”Employee advocacy” is the promotion of an organization by its staff members. An employee advocate is someone who:
– Generates positive exposure and raises awareness for a brand through digital media or offline channels
– Recommends a company’s products or services to a friend or family member
– Represents the best interests of the company both internally and externally
– Can help build employee ownership of the organization
– Is an expert on your product or service and can be a credible spokesperson for your company
*Definition: Sprout Social
LinkedIn Elevate is DEAD
LinkedIn My Company tab is the replacement for LinkedIn Elevate. The former tool could have cost several 1000 euros. Now there is a lot of interest for companies in using the “LinkedIn My Company tab” because it is FREE. Not many applications go from a paid service to a free one. Normally it is the other way around.
So let’s look at the 6 steps to get going with the new application.
Step 1 – Find an executive sponsor
All social media breakthrough projects need a solid enthusiastic executive sponsor. They provide essential drive and leadership and they might also be the financial sponsor of employee /HR activities. They will love that the LinkedIn My company tab is FREE.
Step 2 – Appoint an administrator
Appoint an administrator to get things going. Ideally that person should be a social media marketer so that they are fully aware of what the ultimate goal is. Most likely to be the existing content admin or super admin of your existing LinkedIn company page. NOTE: That LinkedIn My Company tab is not available for showcase pages or company pages with less than 200 employees. The administrators can appoint your first curators!
Step 3 – Find content curators
Carefully select curators to provide the content to be recommended to employees. The most efficient is to select the very same people who create the content normally day to day. make sure that they populate the application with lots of content so that when the first employees sign up there are many interesting articles to choose from.
Step 4 – Appoint ambassadors
Employee advocacy ambassadors has a nice sound to it. I have sat through many event presentations where companies have given their employee advocacy ambassadors special names like “Blue Angels” etc. This makes them very recognizable in the company. They will be the first to use the LinkedIn My Company tab and will iron out any early issues. Their activity will also populate the analytics section so the first proof points can be obtained.
"We found that by using an employee advocacy application, employees were sharing 4X more" Share on XStep 5 – Create training materials
The curators and ambassadors must be fully trained on how to use the LinkedIn ‘My Company” tab. They need to be aware of the other content types available that can be shared like “employee milestones” and the ‘company news” etc. It is good practice to develop a ratio of these content types. Each company will have a different view on this. LinkedIn also provide materials so ensure that everyone has had time to fully understand them before they start their role.
Step 6 – Measurement
In the early days of being a part of the first roll out of employee advocacy applications, I found it essential to get a grasp of the analytics. At Philips the early results gave us confidence. We found that by using an employee advocacy application, employees were sharing 4X more. This resulted in increased page followers, company page views and new hires that we could all link back to the application activity. This taught me a valuable lesson. From the outset ensure that measurements are in place to check if the social strategy and executive sponsor objectives have been met.
