Social employee advocacy (also known as 'social selling') is all about making it as easy as possible for your employees to post brand content on their own social pages, usually LinkedIn. I worked with Wiley to grow their organic LinkedIn presence 208% by empowering employees to get more active on platform
Wiley, a global publisher with diverse audiences and services, wanted to increase organic visibility and engagement on LinkedIn.
At the same time Wiley's employees wanted to increase their own LinkedIn activity but were finding it hard to find the time to create content, many felt unsure about what to post and didn't want to do the wrong thing.
In short, perfect conditions for a social employee advocacy programme.
The programme focused on three areas. Set up, employee empowerment and optimisation
Set up: Using Hootsuite Amplify as our employee advocacy tool, pre-made social posts were grouped into topics. Participants could choose to follow the topics of most interest to them to quickly discover and post suitable content for their LinkedIn network. We partnered with teams producing suitable content, trained them up and gave them creator access.
Employee engagement: Internal awareness, buy in and continued usage for the programme from employees was crucial for success. We identified teams and individuals who would drive measurable results and invited them directly, we also promoted the programme heavily on internal networks. The onboarding process was kept simple and smooth to encourage adoption. Regular updates sharing compelling results, wins and top performers drove further interest as people could see the impact and benefit of the programme.
Optimisation: Early results showed the potential of the scheme. The programme later grew to include someone responsible for keeping content flowing smoothly. More available seats were added, enabling social advocacy at scale to be integrated into company-wide brand campaigns
In the quarter following the optimisation period, the Amplify program generated 1 million impressions, 4.5k engagements and 2.2k link clicks. As such Wiley's overall organic visibility on LinkedIn increased 208% and engagements grew 56%