While Paychex already maintained an active social media presence, social media publishing was often an afterthought in campaign planning, and customer care on social platforms involved manual processes that compromised efficiency and speed in responding to customers. The teams recognized an opportunity to evolve. Paychex adopted Sprout Social, transforming its Organic Social and 24/7 Care teams into a strategic, cohesive social powerhouse that exemplifies measurable business impact and operational excellence.

The cost of operating in silos

Before implementing Sprout, the Organic Social team primarily operated in a reactive, publishing-only model, where social posts were treated as merely a “checkbox” function fulfilled at the end of campaign plans. The team had little strategic influence or feedback mechanism to inform future campaigns and operated as a just-in-time service organization to broader marketing efforts.

At the same time, the Care team used a separate platform to manage customer responses on social channels, and relied on complex legacy systems and manual spreadsheets for daily executive reporting and performance tracking. Valuable time was spent forwarding communications and reconciling data instead of maximizing efficiency to respond thoughtfully and quickly to customers’ requests for support.

These challenges highlighted the limitations of the tools themselves. Brittney Luedtke, Lead of Organic Social Media at Paychex, had extensive experience using the organization’s legacy social platforms, finding other social media management platforms so complicated and technically complex that her team relied on near-constant support from the vendor. Her team needed a platform that did more than consolidate social tasks: It had to connect the work, accelerate cross-team visibility and empower teams to take swift action.

Sprout’s intuitive UI was a key factor in their decision to choose Sprout Social, ensuring that the entire team, including Care supervisors who weren’t daily users on the platform, could onboard immediately without leaning on technical support or extensive training. Combined with the social media management suite’s extensive reporting capabilities and support for integrated workflows across functions, the switch to Sprout offered collaborative efficiency and ease unmatched by other vendors.

Social as a business intelligence engine

For Luedtke, with her team’s focus on social publishing and employee advocacy, the goal was simple: Elevate social from a marketing function to the backbone of a data-driven business strategy.

Leveraging Paychex’s guiding principle is that “data is only powerful when it drives decisions.” Luedtke uses Sprout’s Reporting and Analytics tools to empower the Organic Social team to deliver on meaningful business metrics, including engagement rate by reach, social share of voice and lead attributions.

Paychex tracks the impact of their internal brand advocates using the financial metric of Earned Media Value (EMV) in Sprout Employee Advocacy, calculating the value based on Paychex-specific CPMs and reporting it back to executives in dollars—a critical metric they could never have reported on using prior tools. In the first month after onboarding Sprout Employee Advocacy in August 2025, Paychex’s Organic Social team has generated over $300,000 in EMV. The team also leverages Sprout’s Salesforce integration to link social actions directly to leads, another source of attributable financial impact for the social strategy.

Sprout is the backbone of how we manage our social channels, how we’re measuring our social channels and our impact at Paychex.

Brittney Luedtke
Organic Social Lead at Paychex

Beyond performance data, Luedtke’s team now captures qualitative social insights that add value far beyond marketing. For example, Sprout Listening identifies trigger events (such as a CFO or CHRO change in an enterprise account) and provides the sales team with immediate, actionable intelligence. It also tracks real-time small business conversations around regulatory changes, insights the social team shares with the Brand, Creative and Engagement team to inform proactive communications campaigns that cement Paychex’s position as an industry thought leader.

The ability to manage online reputation is critical for Paychex, especially in volatile economic times. Luedtke notes that even informational posts about tax or regulatory updates can quickly draw hundreds of comments, escalating into politically charged, high-brand-risk conversations unrelated to HCM. Instead of intervening, which can exacerbate rising tensions, the team uses Sprout Tagging and Reporting to monitor conversation volatility, identify which content triggers debate and report on emerging risks to executive stakeholders without engaging directly in the conflict.

Care at lightning speed

Michelle Latoy, 24/7 Enterprise Manager, leads the team dedicated to Paychex’s elite customer service standard that maintains non-stop, year-round coverage with a strict 15-minute service level agreement (SLA) for responding to customers on social channels. Their success at meeting this goal was hamstrung by manual administrative processes and tracking when working in prior social media tools.

“One of the biggest pain points was we had to manually track everything. I could show you the ugly spreadsheets! Now we can do it all within Sprout,” adds Latoy.

Bringing the Care team along on the move to Sprout’s centralized social management suite eliminated manual tracking and immediately streamlined workflows for the 13 dedicated social support representatives, allowing them to focus entirely on speedy customer response and resolution.

The Care team quickly adopted Sprout’s dedicated case management capabilities and delivered a monumental efficiency win: Paychex decreased its average SLA response time by 67% within 60 days. Supervisors use Sprout’s Inbox Team Reports to track individual agents’ progress on cases, ensuring the team workload is balanced and they are successfully complying with the 15-minute SLA.

Since care representatives are trained from a traditional phone service approach, they often need help crafting appropriate social-friendly responses that adhere to the brand voice and tone.

The team embraces Sprout AI to move away from scripted templates and deliver a more authentic and personalized response for every social interaction, while striking the right balance between automation efficiency and a high-quality human interaction that Paychex customers expect from the industry-leading brand.

Latoy shares “We’re not trained on social media. Our agents are thinking about it with the service mindset. Using Sprout’s AI functionality to help rewrite responses makes them more personable.”

One source of shared social intelligence

The greatest win for Paychex was the unification of Organic Social and customer care workflows into one integrated platform, breaking down departmental silos and creating a shared view of customer interactions on social media.

Prior to Sprout, I don’t think we had a really good relationship between the two teams, because we worked in two different systems. The easy collaboration we have now is a huge win cross-functionally.

Michelle Latoy
24/7 Enterprise Manager at Paychex

The Smart Inbox is now an operational hub. The ability to instantly tag, assign and track messages—everything from a positive customer comment for Organic Social to a complicated customer relations issue which Care resolves—replaces hours of internal emails and administrative work.

“If you add up all of these tasks, even the three-minute ones, it’s so much time during the week that was being taken away from other important work. Not having to do that manual handoff with Sprout, where we have one voice of truth, is phenomenal,”adds Luedtke.

This single, integrated system ensures that whether a customer is celebrating a win or raising a critical issue, Paychex is ready with a unified, professional and swift response.

The new standard for social enterprises

Paychex’s success proves that in the modern era, all business is social. The right platform is one that empowers their teams to be thoughtfully engaged, efficient and driving strategic impact no matter the economic environment.

It doesn’t matter if you’re B2B or B2C, your business is shaped by online conversation. Those that listen, those that respond and who engage authentically, will lead the future of social media.

Brittney Luedtke
Organic Social Lead at Paychex

Learn how Sprout Social can help your organization transform social insights into business strategy. Request your free demo today.

The post How Paychex unites social media management and customer care for a strategic advantage appeared first on Sprout Social.

Employee advocacy enables employees to share smart, quality content with their social networks. But, getting there takes more than a well-crafted email encouraging your team to share branded content on their social networks. Employee advocacy tools streamline the process of transforming your employees into brand ambassadors.

These tools don’t just make it convenient to organize posts—the best ones elevate your overall employee advocacy strategy so you produce and promote content that your workforce will be proud to share with their connections. And get results that fuel your brand awareness and social strategy.

In this list, we’ll break down the top employee advocacy platforms (including ours, of course) and how they’re different from the standard tools you might come across.

1. Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social

Sprout Social offers one of the best employee advocacy tools (previously called Bambu) that helps you amplify employees’ voices to drive real business results.

From enabling employees to quickly share posts to equipping them with industry-leading content, Sprout helps brands turn employees into thought leaders and expand the reach of your brand story.

With our social media management platform, your team executes seamlessly across tactics to maximize your reach and engagement. Plus, social media integration with Salesforce enables your sales team with the functionality to share content with prospects and build a profile that attracts key customers.

Together these solutions offer three distinct benefits that will help scale your strategy and expand your social presence:

Identify and distribute content that resonates most

Employee advocacy is more than just curation—you need to know what content is resonating with employees and how their connections are engaging with it.

Our analytics capabilities help you uncover which content is driving the most engagement and, in turn, inform future content strategy. For example, Medallia, an enterprise customer experience platform, used Sprout to hone in on relevant metrics that informed them how to use content more effectively to better engage their customers in different industries. Plus our automated content distribution enables their internal team to curate and deliver relevant content to employees across the globe to share within their networks. The result was a 48.6% year-over-year (YoY) increase in engagements with Sprout.

Increase employee participation with curated, personalized content

According to Sprout’s Employee Advocacy Report, 72% of engaged users post about their company if the content is written for them. Sprout’s pre-approved message ideas give your employees a starting point that helps them stay on-brand, while having the freedom to edit their voice and choose their preferred social network.

Employees can also customize their feeds by following topics relevant to their roles and suggest content for others to share. This encourages adoption by creating a tailored experience for employees.

West Monroe, a digital services firm, was able to use these capabilities alongside executive support to scale their employee advocacy program to 400 active users and 10,863 shares in the first six months.

Increase social ROI

Per The 2022 Sprout Social Index™, more than 1,000 marketers revealed employee advocacy helped them drive more qualified leads, establish thought leadership and create new networking opportunities.

Advertising success platform Simpli.fi used Sprout to leverage employee networks for these very reasons. “Our potential reach from the sales department alone is at almost a million unique users because everyone has such large networks online,” noted Spencer Traverm, Director of Content at Simplifi.

With Sprout’s employee advocacy program, the company was able to align its brand transformation with a new social media strategy and overcome resource limitations, earning them almost $90,000 in estimated earned media value.

Sprout is suitable for businesses of all sizes—enterprises and small to medium-sized businesses—that have built a social presence and are continuing to invest in social media marketing. It’s also great for all industries including regulated industries like healthcare.

If you’ve just started building your social presence, alternative all-in-one platforms include:

• Sociabble
• ClearView Social
• Hootsuite Amplify
• PostBeyond
• Oktopost

2. EveryoneSocial

EveryoneSocial is a social media employee advocacy tool that solely focuses on employee advocacy. Its freemium model makes it an employee advocacy platform for businesses looking for a low-cost or even no-cost introduction to employee advocacy.

The freemium model also opens doors for small businesses or startups that want to test advocacy without making a substantial initial investment.

A central feature of EveryoneSocial is its content hub. This digital space aggregates all the content your company wishes to disseminate through its employees. From the latest blog post to an important company announcement, everything is organized and accessible in one place, so it’s easy for employees to find shareable content.

EveryoneSocial also has social selling features. The tool integrates with sales tools like Salesforce and HubSpot to empower sales teams to build their personal brands and track leads at the same time.

3. Haiilo

Haiilo is an employee communications platform that includes advocacy features but primarily focuses on creating an internal community.

The platform offers a centralized space for employees to share experiences and achievements and connect their social media channels, which simplifies content sharing.

What makes Haillo’s features different from other platforms is its comms and advocacy analytics. The tool analyzes comms across any employee segment and notifies you about critical developments.

These insights give you data to calculate your advocacy ROI.

Find your most influential employees with this analysis and push them toward the forefront. Plus, set up automated reports to ensure you’re up-to-date with the latest trends and insights in your internal community.

Haillo’s gamification features help employees see how well they’re driving engagement and traffic compared to their colleagues. Make employee advocacy fun with leaderboards and offer perks to encourage active participation.

4. Firstup

Previously known as Dynamic Signal, Firstup, amplifies your brand’s voice through advocacy and offers internal collaboration and communication with a robust employee experience ecosystem.

Firstup specifically uses the platform to connect with job candidates. Employees can get in touch with candidates, promote relevant listings and maintain brand consistency at the same time.

What really makes Firstup different, though, is how it’s available in 30 different languages. This makes it a perfect fit for global teams that want to position their employees as ambassadors in different regions.

Firstup also lets site administrators draft multiple versions of a social post and randomly distribute them among employees for sharing. You can tailor these posts to globally distribute your brand’s message and make sure it’s locally relevant and sensitive to cultural nuances.

Firstup is a good choice for companies that want to encourage their global teams to promote their brand’s message. This is a great way to get everyone talking about your company’s mission and values, all while connecting with potential customers and candidates on a local level.

5. GaggleAMP

GaggleAMP is an employee advocacy platform designed to engage employees in promoting their company’s content across social media channels. It offers flexibility by allowing administrators to create various “engagements” beyond simple sharing, like liking, commenting or participating in discussions on social media, aiding companies to achieve diverse advocacy goals.

GaggleAMP helps build a structured approach to employee advocacy that encourages active participation and makes it simpler to track effectiveness. With GaggleAMP, administrators can provide employees with a library of pre-approved content and clear prompts on how to engage with it. This makes it easier for employees to support the brand without having to do extra work.

The tool also provides detailed analytics, enabling companies to measure the reach and impact of these engagements and identify which activities resonate most with their audience.

6. Sociabble

Sociabble is a tool that helps employees support and engage with their company’s employee advocacy program. Its content calendar helps organize posts, ensuring that timely and relevant content is available, which encourages consistent participation without overloading employees.

Sociabble is best known for supporting a data-driven approach to understanding the impact of employee advocacy on brand awareness and reach. Detailed analytics provide insights into engagement metrics, showing companies how often content is shared, which platforms drive the most reach, and which employees are the most active advocates.

The platform also integrates well with communication tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack and Yammer, allowing employees to share content without leaving their familiar workflows. Sociabble’s features, such as leaderboards and point systems, help incentivize engagement and make advocacy more engaging.

7. DSMN8

DSMN8 is an employee advocacy tool that focuses on making it easy for employees to share company content to enhance brand visibility and engagement through employees’ networks.

Companies can choose and share a variety of content types, from articles to videos, in a content library format directly to employees. This library simplifies the sharing process, giving employees access to a ready-made collection of relevant, on-brand material. The tool also offers a mobile-friendly interface, which is convenient for employees on the go and encourages broader engagement.

DSMN8’s analytics features enable companies to track the reach and impact of shared content, providing insights into engagement levels and identifying top advocates within the organization.

With gamification elements like leaderboards and recognition, DSMN8 helps foster a culture of advocacy by motivating employees to participate. Also, the tool can be changed to match a company’s brand and communication goals, helping make advocacy efforts more cohesive and measurable.

Amplify your social presence with employee advocacy

People trust other people more than they do companies. It’s a natural tendency for us to trust our peers, friends and people we admire more so than faceless corporate entities.

This makes employees your most valuable brand ambassadors. Employee advocacy platforms empower employees to share your brand’s message in their unique, authentic voice. They make it effortless for employees to share content and extend your brand’s reach far beyond what you could achieve alone.

Amplify your brand presence while staying connected to your overall social strategy with Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social. With its robust analytics, you’re never in the dark about your program’s performance and your team is always equipped with the insights they need to iterate and improve.

Ready to turn your employees into your biggest supporters? Learn more how Sprout’s advocacy features will help you.

The post 7 best employee advocacy platforms and tools to drive growth appeared first on Sprout Social.

Through effective amplification, content gains momentum beyond your immediate network. This can happen via promotion from paid ads, word-of-mouth or a combination of both.

And amplification is the cornerstone of an effective social media marketing strategy.

But effective social amplification isn’t just about paid promotion or boosting content.

In this post, you’ll learn how to consistently amplify your content to reach relevant customers. We’ll also break down actionable tactics and examples of social media amplification done right.

What is social media amplification?

Social media amplification is the process of increasing your content’s reach beyond your immediate followers via organic shares, paid promotion and third-party advocacy.

Amplification extends across channels and social platforms. For example, a brand might amplify an organic post on Facebook and run it as an ad on Instagram Reels or vice versa.

Consider that paid, owned and earned media all play a crucial role in social amplification, often working in tandem:

• Owned media is content that you control and publish yourself. This includes social posts from your company accounts, serving as the foundation of your amplification strategy.
• Paid media includes social ads, sponsored content and boosted posts. Through paid media, you can quickly target new customers beyond your owned audience.
• Earned media includes organic shares, mentions or reposts from channels like employees, customers or press mentions. This is content that you earn and do not pay for.

Ongoing amplification is ultimately what fuels your social media presence. The benefits of amplifying your social content aren’t one-size-fits-all, but include:

• Increased brand awareness as you introduce your brand and products to new customers
• Improved audience engagement by driving discussions and further visibility
• More lead generation by getting relevant content in front of the right potential buyers
• Greater content ROI by maximizing the value and lifecycle of any given post

How to build your social media amplification strategy

First things first: you can’t do any sort of social amplification without high-quality content.

Because social media engagement only happens when your content is actually worth sharing.

So many businesses get trapped on a hamster wheel of creating content with no big-picture plan for amplification or distribution. This results in poor ROI on content that never gets the chance to be seen, regardless of its quality.

That’s why it’s so important to build a repeatable social media amplification strategy that works across multiple channels long-term. Let’s dig into what you need to get started.

Identify your social amplification goal

Before diving into any sort of content promotion, you’ve got to define clear business objectives.

Especially when concerns of content ROI are greater than ever among your stakeholders.

Think hard about what you want to achieve from the time and creative resources you’re putting behind amplification. Lead generation, driving website traffic or simply increasing brand awareness are all fair game.

Just note that different goals will ultimately inspire different types of content and promotional tactics. Clear goals guide your strategy and help you measure success to optimize future amplification.
Create an action plan based on your goals
Once your goal is clear, tailor your tactics for amplification accordingly. Here’s a snapshot of common goals and which tactics and KPIs to couple them with:

• For brand awareness, lean into earned and owned media such as influencer partnerships and employee advocacy. KPIs for this goal include impressions, reach, follower growth, shares, brand mentions and engagement rate.
• For lead generation, prioritize paid social media campaigns (think: Facebook ads, TikTok Spark ads), gated content or digital events such as webinars. KPIs for this goal include new leads, lead volume growth, cost-per-lead and conversion rate.
• For website traffic, focus on promoting posts with specific calls-to-action that lead to relevant landing pages. KPIs for this goal include impressions, traffic, traffic sources and form submissions from social media.

Once your channels, goals and tactics are aligned, you can start experimenting and measuring to fine-tune your social media amplification strategy over time.

Use social listening to identify amplification opportunities

One of the best ways to make sure your message gets heard is by partaking in the right conversations.

That’s where social listening can save the day.

Through social listening, you can dig into conversations among customers and prospects to identify potential brand advocates. Not to mention content formats that resonate most with your target audience. Consistent listening means keeping a constant pulse on what people want.

For example, a brand might seek out unlinked brand mentions or industry keywords to uncover products or posts that people love. These mentions and the data you gather are a goldmine that drives both your content and amplification strategies.

Encourage audience engagement and user-generated content (UGC)

Anything you can do to drive engagement is a plus to gain visibility with social media algorithms.

This means finding organic ways to encourage comments, shares and saves. This can be done through asking questions, running polls or using interactive content.

Launching a dedicated user-generated content campaign can also help. Getting your audience to create and share content on your behalf is one of the most powerful forms of social amplification. This is where branded hashtags, contests and follower challenges can work wonders.

Granted, you give people proper credit when you promote or repurpose their posts!

A key aspect of both driving audience engagement and running UGC campaigns is promptly responding to comments, tags and mentions. This is where a tool like Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox can help to manage notifications so you never miss a mention across your social channels.

Lean into employee advocacy

Employee advocacy is the active promotion of a brand or company on social media by its employees. Through advocacy, employees can leverage their personal networks and online presence to get company content in front of as many people as possible.

Perhaps the best example of employee advocacy is when a company’s employees boost promotions and content on LinkedIn. This is a proven way to get your content in front of exponentially more people.

Think about it. A company LinkedIn page with 2,000 followers will only get a fraction of the reach of 100+ employees posting to each of their 500+ personal followers.

Done right, employee advocacy can be one of the most authentic forms of amplification as it encourages individual employees to put their personal spin on content promotion. Employee advocacy builds brand trust and credibility while also allowing your brand to control its narrative.

Engage with the creator economy of influencers and brand partners

Partnerships with influencers, affiliates and content creators are yet another powerful form of social amplification.

Recent influencer marketing statistics highlight that brands aren’t just working with more influencers but also using them to make the authentic connections that customers crave.

Building relationships with these individuals at scale can yield amazing results when it comes to amplification, particularly with people who don’t currently know about your brand.

3 Social media amplification examples in action

Let’s look at three effective social media amplification examples across industries, all of which work despite using totally different tactics.

Goldcast

Goldcast highlights how to use employee advocacy across roles to amplify content.

To promote their Webinar Benchmark report, the company had team members share unique LinkedIn posts with personalized captions across multiple formats.

This included a promotional photo, video and even a meme from the company’s CEO.

The variation in engagement in these posts proves the value of tapping into your team’s creativity and unique audiences.

When employees and leadership work together for social media amplification, you’re encouraged to experiment. This example highlights how a single piece of high-value content can (and should!) be amplified by multiple voices to maximize its impact.

Cotopaxi

Cotopaxi leverages UGC to fuel its social amplification strategy on Instagram. By encouraging customers to tag their product purchases with #GearForGood, the brand gets a steady stream of organic content to potentially promote.

This hashtag has already generated thousands of posts from customers who voluntarily tag the brand.

To further boost engagement, Cotopaxi curates a #weeklyherd round-up of posts in which the brand is tagged. This celebrates the brand’s community while also encouraging future shout-outs from fans.

This amplification strategy gives Cotopaxi a consistent way to reshare content and build rapport with its followers, all the while building positive customer sentiment. The brand is a clear example of how to strategically amplify and repurpose UGC.

University of Central Florida (UCF)

Social amplification across multiple channels is crucial, especially for large organizations like universities. Distribution can get complicated with high volumes of content, especially as posts’ performance varies so much depending on the platform you’re publishing to.

UCF highlights how effective cross-channel amplification can work. Note this post that they posted across Facebook and Instagram.

While the posts were basically identical and each performed well, the Instagram post got significantly more engagement.

This shows the importance of distributing content strategically and amplifying across channels when possible. Doing so allows each piece of content you produce to work harder.

4 Best social media amplification tools for 2025

Making amplification work means having software to automate and streamline the process. Here are a few of the best social media amplification tools that can help.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social supports amplification through a variety of features and tools, serving as the ultimate all-in-one solution for brands serious about maximizing their reach.

Tools like social listening can uncover key customer conversations and trending topics, while Smart Inbox notifications keep a pulse on UGC and relevant brand mentions. Meanwhile, AI-driven tools such as automated captions and messages can help you amplify and repurpose content faster.

Sprout’s powerhouse publishing features also allow brands to schedule and post their content across multiple channels at peak engagement times.

With add-on solutions such as Employee Advocacy and Influencer Marketing, Sprout enables you to cover all of your bases when it comes to brand amplification on social media.

Best for: Mid-sized to large businesses, agencies and enterprise teams

Start your free Sprout Social trial

Planable

Planable simplifies content planning and approval, allowing teams to collaborate on content for promotion and cross-posting. Like Sprout, the tool has its own optimal timing and collaboration features to help teams cover more ground when promoting content and responding to customers.

Best for: Agencies, content teams and small to mid-sized businesses

Sprinklr

Sprinklr offers enterprise-level social listening, publishing and analytics tools to amplify content at scale. The platform has built-in integrations with OpenAI to assist with content boosting and repurposing across channels.

Best for: Large enterprises and global brands

Iconosquare

Iconosquare provides in-depth analytics for Instagram, Facebook and TikTok to help brands understand what content resonates most. The platform’s scheduling tools and audience engagement trends provide insights into what’s working and what’s not at a glance.

Best for: Small to mid-sized businesses, influencers and social media managers

How to measure your social media amplification efforts

To wrap things up, consider the importance of assessing the success of social amplification.

You need to be able to prove social media ROI as well as understand which types of content perform the best among your target audience.

For starters, you need to make the following metrics and KPIs part of your measurement:

• Reach to determine how many unique people saw your content
• Impressions to measure the total views of any given post
• Engagement rate to evaluate which content people interact with the most, relative to your audience size
• Share of voice to understand how your amplification stacks up against competitors
• Referral traffic from social media to connect social activity to your business initiatives
• Shares that highlight user-driven amplification

This yet again illustrates the value of an analytics solution like Sprout that helps brands report on all of the above and demonstrate content ROI.

Through detailed performance reports and integrations with tools like Google Analytics, Sprout can demonstrate at a glance how amplification drives business outcomes.

Ready to take social media amplification to the next level?

Social amplification is more than just posting and hoping for the best.

Amplification requires brands to be strategic with content and clearly define goals to boost engagement and ultimately drive leads. With the amplification tactics above, your brand can boost the impact of your messages and content to hit your social KPIs.

If you need a tool to help you do that every step of the way across multiple channels, check out a free trial of Sprout Social to amplify your content more efficiently and effectively.

The post Social media amplification: The ultimate guide to expand your reach appeared first on Sprout Social.

“Advocacy is our secret superpower for creating awareness,” says Olivia Jepson, Sprout Social’s Senior Social Media Strategist. “Amplification is the key to breaking through the noise, increasing our reach and standing out on social media.”

In this article, we’ll showcase how employee advocacy turns our greatest challenges into our strongest opportunities. Keep reading for a deep dive into our strategy and actionable steps you can follow to fuel your advocacy program.

Why advocacy matters

Our employees are our greatest asset on social. That’s why we rely on advocacy to solve our hardest problems and bolster our overall strategy. Here are four ways our advocacy program delivers solutions to common social media challenges.

Extends reach and awareness

Social media challenge #1: Achieving organic reach on social media is harder than ever.

If you’re struggling to break through on social, turn to your employees to widen your audience and grow your brand community through advocacy. On average, content shared by people receives more total engagements than content shared by brands. Sprout’s Employee Advocacy solution enables you to curate and share brand content with employees all within a few clicks. You can stay compliant with pre-approved copy for employees to share, and you get automated reports to illustrate your impact through data.

Advocacy is the easiest way to extend our reach. Through Sprout’s Employee Advocacy solution, we drove a reach of 28.9 million in 2024. We also drove an earned media value (EMV) of $898,000.

EMV is a key metric in our strategy that demonstrates the impact of our work with a dollar sign. Overall, EA’s reach and awareness is more than three times what we drove from all our other networks combined. When employees celebrate our company’s culture and accomplishments and share their authentic experiences, interest in Sprout ripples across their social networks.

Attracts the best candidates

Social media challenge #2: Social teams are growing, but it can be hard to find the right candidates in a crowded market. Some 86% of marketing leaders anticipate hiring ‌at least two new team members in 2025.

Allow your current employees to expand your candidate search and generate interest in working for your company. At Sprout, advocacy facilitates more opportunities to attract top talent. Our team members are eager to post about their experience with our brand. Their messages are the most compelling examples of company culture we can offer prospective candidates, and they help us stand out in a crowded playing field.

EA remains one of the best channels we have for amplifying hiring news. On a biweekly basis, our partners on the recruitment team curate priority open positions and rely on it to build a pipeline of highly-qualified candidates.

Many Sprout teams work together to curate posts about open roles, product awards and cultural recognitions. Our advocacy program makes it as easy for our team members to share these announcements with their networks by putting them all in one place.

When Sprout was named #1 product by G2 in 2024, we had our top-performing EA post ever. Our employees shared it over 600 times, their networks engaged with it 10,000 times and it reached almost 1 million people. EA is a great way to not only amplify key brand milestones, but also enrich your employer brand by giving your team a chance to take pride in their accomplishments.

Engages and empowers employees

Social media challenge #3: Organizations struggle to engage employees to post on social media. They must also balance mitigating potential risks from employee-generated content with amplifying the experiences of internal voices.

By allowing your employees to take a shared role in your company’s identity, you give them your trust. Be sure to provide helpful resources and a continuous pipeline of employee advocacy content to make your program successful.

When curating a story for our team to share on our advocacy platform, we provide pre-approved social copy so they feel confident they’re staying on-brand—while we’re reassured they’re representing our brand positively. Employees can personalize the message idea before sharing it, improving the odds that not every post is the same.

Regardless of a team member’s comfort with social media or experience developing their thought leadership, employee brand amplification makes representing Sprout online more accessible.

According to Micaela McGinley, Senior Internal Communications Strategist, “In a digital, remote-first work environment, the days of popping over to the next cubicle are behind us. We have to make sure our content resonates and is easily shareable. Sprout’s Advocacy solution empowers people to stay active on their social networks and spread exciting news.”

Jepson says, “Advocacy enables us to target our entire team to amplify a campaign. Every single member of our company can participate, no matter their department or social media experience—it goes beyond marketing.”

EA can also serve as a lifeline during a crisis—amplifying key messages to our customers and others in the industry. For example, when we shared two posts about the impending TikTok ban, we drove 198 shares, 375 engagements and reached 388,000 people in the first 24 hours. Having prepared and approved copy protected our brand and empowered Sprouters to share relevant messaging to our audience.

Fortifies faith in social

Social media challenge #4: Securing social buy-in

Advocacy pays off and improves your social strategy ROI.

Proving the value of social to stakeholders can be challenging, especially on networks where it’s increasingly difficult to gain traction and expensive to place ads. By measuring employee advocacy efforts and showing the impact of your EA program, you can help secure investment and resources.

Rachael Goulet, Director, Social Media says, “When you consider the size and scope of the audience you’re able to reach with advocacy, you can compare how much you would’ve spent on a media budget to make the same impact. With EA, we’ve been able to reach the right people—something that isn’t always guaranteed with paid media.”

But to reap the benefits EA can bring, you must set your program up for success. See our employee advocacy launch checklist for everything you need to get started or optimize your EA strategy.

How we use Sprout’s Advocacy platform

All the responsibility doesn’t fall on our social team’s shoulders alone. There’s a lot of cross-functional partnership. Here’s a breakdown of how we use our Advocacy platform and other Sprout tools to support our brand amplification function.

How we curate

We have about 20 teammates across Sprout that help us curate new stories in our Advocacy platform on a regular basis. Overall, we usually share four to five stories per week. Our social, public relations and content teams collaborate to decide which content we promote in our Advocacy platform. We include Sprout-specific content (launch materials, blog posts, social content, etc.) and third-party articles.

We prioritize sharing:

• Employer brand content
• Owned and earned thought leadership
• Industry insights and news
• Recruitment content

We recently updated our curation process to introduce a new approval workflow to help ensure EA provides a centralized, simplified view of Sprout’s most critical content—making the platform intuitive and highly valuable. This process essentially sets a north star for company priorities and supports our employer branding strategy.

At Sprout, we have a unique problem of often having too much content in EA, so this approval workflow empowers us to gain cross-department visibility and foster strong collaboration. Whenever teams add content for curation, myself or a member of the social team will review it based on the following criteria:

• Timing: Is this message evergreen? Will it compete with other priority messages if we release it now? Is EA the right channel?
• Best practices: Can we make this more social-first? Is it relevant to our audience or customers?
• Reporting needs: Are the right tags selected? Is this the right campaign? Is the right Topic selected?

Our internal distribution strategy

From there, our team can share the story to their social profiles right from the Current Stories feed in Employee Advocacy.

To encourage sharing among our team, we send weekly digests with our latest high-priority content stories, like company-wide updates. We have biweekly newsletters to reach our internal influencer audience–this includes Team Sprouters who have large followings across social media or have wide impact when they share EA posts.  Links from the newsletter will take team members to our Advocacy platform, where they can share our content. Lastly, we also cross-promote key updates on internal channels to ensure everyone gets the information they need.

We also recently introduced a cross-team calendar that gives visibility into what other teams are planning to add to EA in the coming weeks and months, and we can see how it relates to programming on our organic social channels.

The Sprout features that help integrate advocacy into our larger strategy

According to Goulet, her other favorite advocacy-forward Sprout features are:

Advocacy reporting tools
Within the platform, you can pull data like potential reach, earned media value, shares, engagements and other metrics to help you determine which stories perform best with your team and their audiences.

Tagging
Across all Sprout properties, you can tag your messages based on your workflows, business objectives and marketing strategies—which makes it easy to track how well Advocacy content performs. The platform also offers UTM tagging, a sophisticated tool that can help you demonstrate how curated content impacts your website’s traffic.

Send to Advocacy function
Whether it’s posts you’ve already published or third party content you’re sourcing, you can use the Send to Advocacy capability in Sprout’s Compose tool to seamlessly add new sources to our advocacy platform.

Topics

If you have a lot of content to share like Sprout, you might start to feel the effects of social media saturation. To mediate this challenge, use Topics within the platform so users can customize their Feed based on the content that best aligns with their role and areas of interest. We have product-specific and messaging pillar Topics, as well as a Topic for Company News.

Sprout’s Advocacy platform: The key to amplifying your brand

The challenges social marketers face aren’t going away. Yet, a strong performance on social media is becoming more and more important for brands.

The key to amplifying your brand’s social performance is tapping into your employees and their networks on social media. Employee Advocacy helps you extend your brand’s reach, attract the best candidates, empower your employees and prove the value of social to stakeholders. Experience it for yourself and sign up for a demo.

The post A powerful employee advocacy example in action: How Sprout uses EA to amplify our brand appeared first on Sprout Social.

This begs the question: is DEIA dead?

According to Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab, experts argue that DEI isn’t dead. Instead, it’s experiencing a period within social movements scholars call “closed doors.” Closed doors refers to periods where the path for breaking the status quo requires intentional strategies, such as reframing approaches for survival and supporting the resilience of people willing to continue work to make change.

Cultural heritage months like Black History Month are a cornerstone to many DEI initiatives for brands. But in a landscape where performative activism is breeding skepticism, how can brands celebrate Black History Month authentically? And why should brands prioritize supporting DEIA initiatives year-round?

In this article, we’ll explore why Black History Month is just one piece to a broader investment brands should make toward a diverse, inclusive workforce. We’ll highlight how enterprise companies are using Black History Month as a cornerstone to year-round DEIB strategies. And we’ll share best practices for honoring cultural heritage months from planning Black History Month social media posts to partnering with Black creators year-round.

What is the purpose of Black History Month?

Black History Month reminds us to celebrate and recognize the achievements of Black Americans and others of African descent. As a cultural heritage month, it’s used to reflect and celebrate the contributions of descendants of the African Diaspora. Black History Month occurs in February in the United States and Canada. The month is recognized throughout October in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Black History Month in Australia takes place in July and is known as Blak History Month, honoring the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

Why cultural heritage months on social media matter

Honoring cultural heritage months like Black History Month and Hispanic Heritage Month allows brands to build authentic connections and demonstrate their commitment to DEIA initiatives. By sharing educational content and historical contexts, brands can raise awareness while fostering a deeper understanding among their followers. These observances also provide a platform to amplify the voices of underrepresented communities and organizations, enhancing the brand’s reputation as a responsible corporate citizen.

But there’s another key aspect marketers should keep in mind: cultural competency is a must in today’s social landscape. The Sprout Social Index™ found 93% of consumers agree it’s important for brands to keep up with online culture.

When we reflect on social media over the past few years, it’d be remiss to deny the impact of Black and brown communities on social media and internet culture. For example, Jewel Ham created the concept Spotify’s Wrapped as an intern in 2019. Today, its annual mainstay on social media, with many enterprise companies making their own versions.

DEI as a business best practice

So why should brands embrace celebrating cultural heritage months like Black History Month?  It’s business-critical for organizations.

Cassandra Blackburn, the Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Sprout Social explains there’s a proven business case around concerted DEI efforts and the value add it brings to an organization.

“The most critical strategy or component of any business is its employees. They are your most valuable asset. As an employer, you are bringing in diversity through many layers. The recognition and acknowledgement of diverse communities is so important for employees to feel seen, heard and included in the company culture,” Blackburn says.

The importance of viewing DEI as a best practice is reflected in a McKinsey & Company report, where executive teams with more diversity by gender and ethnic representation were found to be more likely to outperform financially.

Although top companies are scaling back their DEI efforts, others remain steadfast in their commitment. For example, 98% of Costco shareholders rejected a proposal urging the wholesale club to “evaluate any risk posed by its diversity, equity and inclusion practices.” In Costco’s board message to shareholders, they note how diverse employees and suppliers promote creativity and innovation in their merchandise and services, leading to customer satisfaction. Apple also urged shareholders to reject an “anti-DEI,” proposal.

These enterprise examples reflect the findings of a Deloitte 2023 Global Human Capital Trends report, which shows 86% of business leaders see embedding DEI into daily operations and team dynamics as critical to organizational success.

DEI is one of EY’s company values and is Global Equality Standard (GES) certified. The UK-based company is known for its work toward establishing inclusive culture and equitable opportunities to drive decision-making, innovation, agility and resilience. The firm has a variety of workforce initiative programs that support neurodiverse individuals, ethnic minorities in leadership and women in leadership. EY also regularly publishes data on the business impact of DEI, such as DE&I Interventions that Deliver. The 2025 report shares research from 11 UK leading diversity campaign groups and highlights strategies that have had significant impact on improving workplace equity and inclusion. The report highlights strategies across multiple characteristics, including gender, ethnicity, disability, LGBTQ+ identities and socio-economic backgrounds.

“As younger generations continue along their careers and we don’t address the needs they have identified, the pressures that businesses are going to feel will magnify, especially as [new generations] ascend into leadership roles and their voices become bigger. If businesses don’t prepare, they are going to face challenges and potentially fail,” Blackburn says.

5 best practices for celebrating Black History Month

Here are five best practices for brands to follow:

1. Recognize Black history 365 days a year

One of the most important best practices is to not seclude awareness to just once a year, which applies to all cultural heritage months. Brands need to consider how they’re championing Black people, culture and achievements beyond one month.

“I want brands to know and be cognizant that this is an ongoing celebration. Be intentional about finding ways to acknowledge the celebration, otherwise it could be perceived as performative,” Blackburn says.

Recognizing Black History Month means brands need to go beyond marketing messages that preach solidarity but offer little action. If brands are serious about celebrating the Black community, that commitment needs to extend into the business and become part of the brand’s culture.

While it might start with the best of intentions, brands need to consider the impact of their celebrations. Take a moment to recognize your brand’s role in the conversation, question who benefits from your Black History Month ideas and consider how those ideas can become staples in your brand’s culture.

“As brands make plans to celebrate diverse communities through Black History Month and others, it’s important that they approach their campaigns with authenticity, empathy and cultural intelligence,” says Blackburn. “Center your campaign on advancing the mission and purpose of the celebration by seizing the opportunity to honor the accomplishments of the community.”

“Cultural conversations exist beyond the realms of 30 or 31 days so it doesn’t make sense to only create content or launch campaigns around those months when you can talk about these cultures year-round. I think one thing [businesses] need to consider, especially as our society grows, is that a lot more brands are moving toward appealing to the Gen Z audience. And Gen Z is more multicultural than ever,” says Jayde Powell, content creator, marketing strategist and host of #CreatorTeaTalk.

She recommends instead of just partnering with Black creators during Black History Month, brands can start incorporating them into their overall strategy. For example, in a sponsored video with Archive, she mentions that brands looking for Black creators and influencers for Black History Month campaigns should have started 11 months prior.

“It makes it more than just this cultural heritage moment and actually shows you are a brand that cares about the Black community. You care about Black creators. And when you say you want to work with Black creators you mean that and it’s not just during Black History Month,” she says.

2. Use social data to inform intentional campaigns that align with culture

Review your social media analytics and social listening data to identify ways to specialize campaigns and identify unique opportunities. Talissa Beall, Strategic Services Consultant at Sprout, led several DEI efforts throughout her career in social. She’s also a committee member of Black@, a Sprout community resource group.

She recalls a time where she used social data to identify misalignment between a brand’s actual customers and their organic social media content. For example, her team discovered there was an opportunity to incorporate photo representation that was more closely aligned with their demographics.

“By reviewing social listening and replies, we paid attention to how people were talking about [the brand], paying attention to language as well. We learned there was a disconnect in imagery and the type of content being featured. We learned that people didn’t care for headshots, but preferred seeing diverse people in other ways, such as a hand shot, back of the head or from the neck down. We were intentionally queuing more representation in social content,” she says.

Being data-driven is a must, regardless of the marketing efforts you’re planning, especially if you’re trying to gain more buy-in. The Sprout Social Index™ found 65% of marketing leaders say demonstrating how social media campaigns are tied to business goals is crucial for securing social investment.

3. Avoid performative activism through ongoing initiatives

To avoid being labeled disingenuous or opportunistic during Black History Month, brands need to prioritize maintaining their commitment to the Black community throughout the year. There are several ways to show solidarity:

• External partnerships: Work with companies, organizations and institutions such as HBCUs that champion diversity and have broad representation to diversify your talent pool and content. Collaborate with third-party DEI vendors to conduct unconscious bias training.
• Compensation: Compensate your partners, especially when working with content creators. If your company is limited on resources, think outside the box and focus on adding value in another way. For example, you could donate to a nonprofit organization on their behalf or co-market their content across all your social media platforms for an extended period.

4. Be present at relevant industry events

Attend relevant industry conferences and create a social media for events strategy. Consider attending events like CultureCon, AdColor and AfroTech to connect and support Black professionals in tech, marketing and creative industries. Not only will your team gain valuable insights, but you can also reinforce your company values and reputation. For example, when Team Sprout attended #AFROTECH24, we created a content strategy plan, including a social video with LinkedIn for Marketing.

5. Partner with influencer agencies that specialize in diversity

As you start planning for your Black History Month social media campaigns, consider partnering with an influencer agency for Black creators. For example, Kensington Grey is an award-winning influencer agency specializing in casting, talent management, strategy and other services. Their robust talent roster consists of Black and brown influencers and creators with audiences that span a variety of generations, locations and niches.

How to create strategic partnerships with Black creators

Celebrate by amplifying voices within the Black community and collaborating with Black creators. Powell says brands want to work with creators because of what they have to offer whether it’s their personality, interests, unique point of view or how they create content. Just as consumers enjoy purchasing from brands that are authentic and allow them to feel like they can trust them, brands want to work with creators they can trust.

According to The Sprout Social Index™, authenticity is ranked as one of the most important traits of brand content. Powell says authenticity is one of the best ways to achieve that trust consumers are seeking.

“Often, as creators, we’re the face of the brand. We are the people behind the scenes. So why not infuse who we are into the content that we create? One of those ways to do that is by showing up authentically in who you are,” she says.

Rethink collaboration to achieve authenticity

She recommends brands rethink their approach to establishing connections to help maintain the authenticity consumers seek. She points out that often when we think about relationships between brands and creators, it’s rooted in contract, but human connection makes all the difference.

She explains when she works with brands, she enjoys getting on calls to understand what the brand is trying to accomplish, their end goal and the best way to help them. Seeking this alignment is helpful because what a creator envisions for a brand’s channel or platform may look different compared to the brand’s perspective.

“I feel like that face time helps them also understand who I am as a person, so they have the knowledge and pretense that this is also going to show up in the content I create—my personality, how I speak, how I write because it’s coming from my brain. It’s my creativity and my creativity is me,” Powell says.

Powell encourages brands to pass the mic to creators during cultural heritage months or cultural moments to center members of the community because that’s sometimes where brands miss the mark. They want to insert their product and services everywhere, but they aren’t a part of or active within the community.

“When it comes to Black, brown, queer, immigrant and plus-sized creators, if you don’t have an authentic, intentional way to step in those communities, leveraging them is a great way to do that because you’re picking people from those communities who already have a connection with your brand. If they don’t have a connection with your brand, there’s an opportunity to educate and showcase why the brand is valuable to them,” Powell says.

Expand your dollar into the community

Powell explains these creator collaborations don’t have to be limited to creating content either. This ranges from nonprofit contributions to bringing in creators as consultants to get a genuine understanding of what cultural conversations are relevant to them.

“Whether you’re a corporation or a small business, if you know these are moments you want to be a part of, look for opportunities to expand your dollar into that community,” Powell says.

Powell emphasizes paying creators in a timely manner and other efforts toward pay equity because of the disparity within the creator economy. When we look at the creator economy‌, a large percentage is white.

“Because of this disparity, Black creators are often under-valuing themselves because when you’re not getting as much experience or knowledge into how much you should be charging in a space that’s already convoluted. I think brands also don’t always value Black creators as much as they should,” she says, “There’s that wage gap between Black and brown creators and white creators, but it also comes down to the people that are hiring creators.”

She explains when social media and influencer marketers are working in house to build these cultural heritage campaigns, they often don’t come from those communities, so it isn’t always top of mind for them. She points to an example of a time she was working with a brand where a marketer was building an influencer list and it was entirely white, so Powell suggested including more diverse influencers.

“Black people are culture drivers and that’s shown in the creator economy. I’ve seen creators on TikTok who are white predominantly use sounds that were created by Black people and have millions of followers. That’s not to say it’s only Black creators who are creating original content, but that’s something for brands to consider during their research. Who are the true drivers of these trends? Which creators have helped these moments online come to life? You’ll often find that a lot of them are from Black and brown creators,” she says.

She mentions an example that happened on February 1, 2024.  Content creator @cierralikeseggs called out a mega influencer who replicated her joke in a TikTok video word for word. People across social media networks started calling the influencer out for not giving credit to the original creator. The mega influencer deleted the video in response, but didn’t acknowledge the situation.

Between these common scenarios and social media marketing teams often being smaller, Powell explains it’s not just down to one or two people to vet and validate creators—an industry-wide shift is needed. So how can brands be part of the trailblazers making that shift? Pay transparency.

“If you’re working with a creator and you know you have a larger budget and they severely undervalue themselves, tell them. For example, if you’re creating an influencer list of five people and each quote $1000, but one person asks for $300, it would be unethical to give them a lower rate when you know you can do more,” she says.

Pay attention to tone

Remember it’s a celebration. Although it’s important to highlight the history of oppression, racism and institutional struggles, there’s power in amplifying joy in Black History Month and other heritage months such as Latinx Heritage Month and Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.

“I’ve noticed the more I’ve gotten into marketing, the moment we start talking about cultural heritage months, it’s always rooted in oppression. It’s almost as if being Black is synonymous with struggle. But for many of us, being Black is a celebration. It’s not always about our persecution or our ancestors’ dark history. Of course that’s part of it and why we’re able to celebrate, but our experience as people on this planet goes beyond oppression,” she says.

Appeal to the global diaspora

Powell encourages brands to shift their view of Black history and culture to include the global African diaspora. As an American citizen born to Jamaican immigrant parents, Powell says her heritage informs much of her experience. When we talk about the Black community, that includes people from Africa, Europe, Canada, Latin American, the Caribbean—literally everywhere.

“I think that’s a really missed opportunity for a lot of brands, whether they’re based in the United States or not. When we talk about Black History, it’s immediately around Black Americans. It’s important to get out of the US-centric point of view because the Black experience is global,” she says.

Brands that celebrate all year

Now that we’ve covered the importance of Black History Month and best practices while participating, let’s review some of our favorite brands who do a great job celebrating all year.

Topicals

If you’re looking for inspiration for celebrating year-round, look to Black-owned brands like Topicals. The beauty brand is known for influencer brand trips. The first trip in 2023 made waves online as the first fully BIPOC sponsored brand trip. The influencer trip resulted in 3 million impressions and an increase of 5,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram.

In December 2023, #TopicalsGoneToGhana trip highlighted Detty December, a month-long annual celebration featuring music festivals and other events in West Africa. The campaign resulted in their Slick Salve lip balm being sold out, but Topicals used the opportunity to uplift other Black-owned lip balm brands in Sephora. They shared recommendations across their brand accounts. In 2024, the brand returned to Nigeria for their #LagosLovesTopicals campaign.

Topicals’ commitment to donating to mental health organizations and the Spottie Sphere, an interactive ambassador program open to customers, creators and skincare professionals, are also testament to the brand’s dedication.

Ben and Jerry’s

Accountability follows a statement of solidarity, and brands need to be ready to show how they are backing their words up with visible action. Ty Heath, Director of the B2B Institute at LinkedIn, warns consumers are quick to call out brands that talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.

“Saying your brand will do better without action won’t stand up to scrutiny,” said Heath. “While many brands have shown support for social justice issues building trust requires sustained investment—not only during Black History Month.”

She points to Ben & Jerry’s as one brand that’s figured out how to be authentic with their activism. “Ben & Jerry’s has made speaking out against social justice issues part of its DNA. The journey starts with an internal conversation about uncomfortable topics we often avoid. To support your growth, incorporate diverse voices and core values into the fabric of your company’s brand and culture,” she said.

Not only do brands like Ben & Jerry’s follow through on their promises; they also take big, bold stands that strive to move the needle on equality and equity. The actions a brand takes ripples outside of the organization and can even impact society.

John Lewis Partnership

John Lewis and Partners 2024 campaign is a great example of striking an appropriate tone and amplifying voices in Black History Month social media posts. In October 2024, the department store chain featured Black creators and influencers on social media, focusing on celebrating Black beauty. Each person shared their favorite products and shared a personal story about their relationship to beauty.

They published a blog featuring content creator and influencer Marisa Martins and Karen Ward, Partner and Online Trade Manager for Technology and Beauty. Throughout October, John Lewis and Partner locations offer in-store activations including makeup masterclasses, live performances, art exhibitions and children’s activities. The retailer also participated in Black Pound Day.

John Lewis Partnership, the holding company of John Lewis and Partners, aims to be the UK’s most inclusive business, aiming to serve their partners, customers and communities to have equal opportunities to grow and succeed. The Belonging at JLP Report 2024 outlines the organization’s various achievements and initiatives, along with insights into JLP’s pay gaps. To support accessibility, the company released an audio version of the full report.

These brands are excellent examples, but it’s important to note enterprise companies will never be perfect. Although not every company will always have the monetary resources to invest in Black History Month celebrations, Blackburn says the incorporation of DEI into values and practices long-term outweighs any singular campaign or initiative.

“As an organization, your north star is becoming the most inclusive, diverse and equitable company. That will rain through your social media campaigns, customer engagement and building your brand,” she says.

Black history is more than a moment

Black History Month on social media doesn’t have to stop after one month. Supporting the Black community is an ongoing commitment, with the bulk of the work happening offline. Cultural heritage months are just the beginning of embracing and celebrating underrepresented groups as key drivers of culture and impactful members of society.

Ensure your company’s efforts are genuine and sustainable by prioritizing DEI in all parts of your business operations. To learn more best practices for integrating your Black History Month coverage into long-term strategies for success, check out our panel discussion in The Arboretum.

FAQ

The post Celebrating Black History Month: Best practices for social media and beyond appeared first on Sprout Social.

But what about gifts for social media managers? Some would argue social marketers are those in the greatest need of a pick-me-up during the holiday season.

We turned to our internal team and Sprout’s community, The Aborteum, to find out which gifts are at the top of social marketers’ wish lists this year. Here’s what they said, arranged by interests and niches.

Disclaimer: None of the products mentioned in this article are sponsored, endorsed or contain affiliate links. They are only meant to show product examples of highly requested gift categories. Prices listed represent current prices at time of publishing and may vary.

Gifts for the coffee crazed

If the social media marketer you know has a coffee habit that rivals Lorelai Gilmore (don’t most?), there’s only one gift that really matters: coffee.

Local coffee shop gift card: $10+

It’s a cliche at this point: Social media managers love coffee. Not only does caffeine run through their veins, but cafes are also a great work-from-home spot during the winter months. Going out into the world, even for just a few hours, is a great way to keep spirits high during the darkest, coldest time of the year.

A coffee shop gift card of any value would be deeply appreciated—especially if it’s for a local spot.

Monthly coffee subscription: $15/month

If your recipient brews at home, their greatest nightmare is running low on coffee grounds and beans. With a personalized monthly subscription, their favorite coffee will be delivered right to their door. You can gift a subscription for one month or an entire year, depending on your budget.

Smart mug: $150

We’ve already emphatically mentioned how much social marketers love coffee. But, in the flurry of daily tasks, it can be easy to forget to actually drink your cup of joe. That’s where smart mugs come in. They keep coffee warm for hours.

Like this mug, which allows you to set an exact drinking temperature. Social marketers can use this mug to prevent their coffee or favorite warm beverage from getting too cold or too hot (nobody likes burning their mouth mid-meeting).

Coffee and espresso machine: $200

If the social marketer in your life is still using their college coffee machine that takes a half hour to brew or has questionable cleanliness, it’s time for an upgrade. A machine that brews both coffee and espresso is a great choice for those who want to experiment with making cafe-caliber drinks at home. Bring on the caramel lattes.

Gifts for wellness warriors

They drink electrolyte water and green juice during your 9 a.m. meetings. They love protein. Their workout class attendance rate is a KPI. Here’s what we’d gift our favorite social marketer wellness enthusiasts.

House plant: $50

Not only do house plants beautify your remote work background, they have tangible benefits. They’ve been shown to reduce stress, sharpen attention and increase happiness.

This suggestion came from Sprout’s Sr. Social Media Strategist, Olivia Jepson, who mentioned how beneficial it is to have green space indoors when you work in social’s fast-paced environment.

You can find house plants and pots at local home garden stores—they often offer repotting and plant care services, too. Or you can get a plant delivered through a brand like The Sill.

Read how to balance working in social media and maintaining good mental health.

Instant camera: $60

Imagine sparking new content ideas without having to spend hours scrolling. With an instant camera, social marketers can capture content—or just hone their photography skills—the old fashioned way. Without running up against their app or screen time limits.

This fun lavender camera is an example of the newest generation of Polaroids. You could also consider buying new camera lenses, film and photography classes for social content creators who already have a film or digital camera at their disposal, and want to devote more time to their hobbies.

Spa gift card: $100+

While any social marketer would appreciate a spa day, fans of wellness trends would be even more excited to receive this gift. Especially for a spa that offers services like infrared saunas, massages and cold plunges. Bonus if the spa is especially aesthetically pleasing (just in case they want to capture content while they’re there).

$100 is a great starting point, but spa services come with hefty price tags so budget accordingly.

A year-long ClassPass membership: $240

ClassPass, a monthly fitness and wellness membership, is a favorite for those who like to mix up their workouts. Every month, members accrue credits they can use toward different fitness studios, gyms and even beauty venues.

While you can give any amount toward ClassPass credits, $240 covers a year-long basic membership.

Under-desk walking pad and treadmill: $300

As these social marketers will tell you, sitting too long comes with harmful health risks. A walking pad or under-desk treadmill is a great solution to help get those steps in and warm up during chilly winter days.

Some walking pads come with a place to hold your computer—making it easy to walk while you work. Others only have a bar, which means they require a standing desk to use during the workday.

Gifts for on-screen talent

Social marketers who serve as the face of videos, webinar events and other digital content want to put their best foot forward. And they already have a state of the art ring light. Here’s everything else they need to take their at-home recording to the next level.

Read our step-by-step guide to remote video production.

Portable charger: $25

Picture this: You’re about to film a video for social when you get an alert that your phone is going to die. Now you have to try and squeeze in a good take without eating up all of your battery life. Or you have to stop and plug in (and hope you can find an available outlet).

With a portable charger, social marketers can make sure they’re always ready to go. Plus, is it just us, or do chargers actually drain faster during the winter?

A portable charger like this one keeps social marketers’ phones charged on-the-go. We especially like that it charges two devices simultaneously and works with a wide range of devices.

USB microphone: $85

Having a broadcast-quality microphone that blocks out ambient noise is a massive time-saver. With a high-fidelity microphone, social marketers can pull together videos quickly. As one of our Arb members said, “I’d like a podcast-caliber mic. Especially a cool retro one. It would really help with quick voiceovers.”

This one has a bidirectional polar pattern that makes it possible to speak in the front while someone else speaks in the back, helping marketers capture audio from interviews or collaborate on posts.

Read our guide to getting your own podcast up and running.

Ultra HD webcam: $170

A blurry webcam—like the default on most computers—doesn’t meet quality standards for hosting webinars or filming content. Social marketers who frequently serve as on-screen talent need a high definition version. For example, this webcam records in 4K and highlights the subject in all lighting scenarios.

Gifts for home office optimizers

These social marketers have a home office that rivals even the best Pinterest boards. It’s organized and impeccably designed. But they’re still missing tech that will elevate their work-from-home experience.

Note: All of these gifts are on the pricier side.

Google Nest Hub: $100

With a Google Nest Hub, you can view and control all your devices from a single dashboard. You can turn the lights on and off, change the temperature, listen to music, view your calendar and more. As one Arb member put it, the hub provides all the household information you need at your fingertips—without having to leave your home office. The ultimate luxury for optimizers.

Portable Bluetooth speaker: $150

A powerful speaker with crisp sound sets the right tone for a top-tier home office experience. Social marketers can jam to their favorite playlists or “co-work” to the voices of their favorite podcast hosts.

While this speaker is around $150, some of the more high tech versions will set you back much more. Make the right choice for you, with your budget and the recipient’s needs in mind.

Noise-canceling Bluetooth headphones: $350

Members of the Arb expressed their frustration at continually having to re-purchase Bluetooth headphones that break after a few months. Others shared how helpful noise-canceling headphones would be for focus. Bringing both capabilities together is music to their ears.

While noise-canceling headphones help social marketers zero-in on the work in front of them and tune out the rest, powerful and reliable Bluetooth allows them to dive into their own rhythm. Plus, they’re the perfect fit for an open-concept office.

Ergonomic desk chair: $549

We get it. A few years ago, we didn’t know if hybrid or remote work would catch on. So, you still have that uncomfortable chair. Or the chair you bought because it looked beautiful, but doesn’t offer proper support. Your favorite social marketer can relate.

The ultimate gift this holiday season is an ergonomic, comfortable chair that still has stylish, chic flair.

Give the gift of something social marketers actually want

Finding a meaningful, useful gift for a social marketer may seem daunting, but a thoughtful choice can make a big difference in their daily lives. From the coffee fuel they rely on to the tech they use to produce content, these gifts show you see and appreciate the work they do.

Whether it’s a smart mug to keep their coffee warm or a pair of noise-canceling headphones for laser-focused content creation, each of these ideas serves as a reminder that they’re supported. This holiday season, go beyond the basics and give something that truly enhances their work—and their well-being.

Want to win some of the prizes in this article? Join the Sprout Social Arboretum and follow our 2024 Holiday Engagement Giveaway.

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If a C-suite executive says the wrong thing on social, it could snowball into a brand crisis and cost them their job. That’s why many leaders stay away from building a personal brand, whether by choice or corporate mandate. Despite the risk, many grow their followings by regularly sharing brand content, thought leadership and even a peek into their personal lives.

Because when executives approach social in an intentional way, it makes their brand seem more approachable, honest and trustworthy. With a focused executive social strategy, leaders amplify visibility and deepen connections with customers, employees, investors, media and partners.

Let’s dive into our lineup of executives (and the teams who support them) who are the most effective on social, and tips for developing your own successful executive communications program.

Salesforce: There’s a first time for everything

As the company behind a leading CRM software, Salesforce is a B2B marketing icon. With massive events like Dreamforce and millions of followers across platforms, the SaaS company sets the standard. Yet, up until recently, they weren’t able to do something pivotal: Leverage their CEO on social media.

When CEO, Marc Benioff, published his first LinkedIn post on October 30, 2024, it rocked the network’s algorithm. At time of publishing the post has over 18,000 likes, 800 comments and 1,900 reposts. Benioff’s post focused on an AI system update to their platform—a move that comes amid fierce competition in the AI landscape.

The post dramatically boosted the reach of the announcement through organic engagement and paid investment.

The PR lift from Benioff’s post and related commentary contributed to media pickups related to the launch, and reassured customers and investors of the company’s direction.

The play: For social and communications professionals who have struggled to get their executives (especially their CEO) on board with social brand advocacy, you’re not alone. Even some of the world’s biggest brands are figuring out how to overcome this challenge. Let Salesforce give you hope.

Make a case for creating an executive communications strategy by using Benioff’s post as a proof point. Tell a compelling story of what can happen for your brand when you tie a pivotal brand launch to a leader’s debut on social.

Symphonic Capital: Creating a sense of belonging

Symphonic Capital is a venture capital firm that invests in the next generation of institutions through serving overlooked and underserved communities. On LinkedIn, their founding general partner Sydney Paige Thomas has amassed a following by reflecting on what she’s learned investing in infrastructure technology and highlighting the firm’s events.

Thomas is consistent on social, which matters. But more importantly, she’s herself. She talks about her experiences as the daughter of the first Black Chief of Staff of San Diego Mercy Hospital. She shares personal anecdotes from her school years. She even mentions astrology in her posts.

Thomas demonstrates why executives can (and should) bring their full selves to their online personal brand. Humanizing your leaders creates confidence in your mission by allowing your community to see your leaders’ values first-hand. What motivates them, what their purpose is, why they think their work matters.

Thomas’ efforts helped her land on the AFROTECH™ Future 50 list. This accolade is one of a growing list of accomplishments she’s achieved as a trusted voice in the investment space. As she continues ascending in the field, so too does her firm’s profile.

The play: Take a cue from Thomas and Symphonic Capital by giving your leaders space to embody their full identities on social. Give them permission to talk about their upbringings, hobbies and families as well as their passion for their work. People trust people, and want to hear from them.

Raising Cane’s: From CEO to celebrity

In both B2C and B2B, it’s rare to see a CEO as involved in company marketing as Todd Graves. Graves is the founder of Raising Cane’s—the rapidly growing American chain known for their chicken fingers. He has shared the stage with Snoop Dogg, appeared as a guest shark on Shark Tank and gave Travis Kelce free chicken for a year.

The Raising Cane’s team uses Graves’ outgoing personality, likeability and popularity to their advantage, frequently featuring him in the brand’s social media content. Graves also has his own public Instagram channel (another CEO anomaly) where he is tagged as a collaborator on most of Raising Cane’s posts—amplifying their reach to his more than 500,000 followers. He appears in influencer posts, like this one where he shared a meal at Raising Cane’s with an influencer who had never eaten at one of his restaurants.

It’s difficult to articulate just how effective this strategy has been for raising Graves’ profile. His unlikely origin story became the bedrock of the brand’s image, forever intertwining Graves and Canes. Awareness of one inevitability creates success for the other. The company is on track to amass $5 billion this year and Graves was subsequently named to the Fortune 400 list.

The play: The “throw your CEO in the spotlight” strategy will not work at every company. Probably not even most companies. This playbook is only meant for founders who stick around for their entire career, until the next generation inherits their business. Even when brands fit into that bucket, they should only pursue this approach if they have a leader who has clearly defined values, flourishes in the limelight and is discerning about what to share publicly.

For brands with all pieces of that puzzle, your CEO might be the golden ticket to massive growth and outpacing the competition. For others, adapt what makes sense for your company. Maybe it’s encouraging your CEO to create an Instagram account managed by the social team. Or doing more media outreach for your C-suite.

Google: Sharing the spotlight across the C-suite

For a multinational, publicly traded corporation like Google, having executive thought leaders on social can be a significant risk (even more so than for startups or small companies). For this reason, some members of the C-suite might not be present on social at all, while others take a restrained approach.

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, chooses the latter, and shares well-curated content like highlights from earnings calls, clips from conversations with leaders at other companies and reflections about the future of global emerging technology on LinkedIn.

Similarly, Google’s Chief Sustainability Officer Kate Brandt shares how Google technology enables sustainable practices, like finding the perfect location for a solar farm, from her account. She also shares new pathways the company is creating for clean energy and AI-powered sustainability.

Melonie Parker, Chief Diversity Officer at Google, uses her voice on LinkedIn to draw attention to corporate initiatives tied to employee resource groups, partnerships with HBCUs and collaborations with nonprofit organizations.

It’s clear Google executives are in lock-step with their internal communications and content teams, and play an essential role in shaping their public narrative and steering attention toward their company roadmap.

The play: Though building an executive communications program on social can be a risk, the greater risk is zero executive presence on social at all. Even if leaders only repost existing brand content with a thoughtful message, that still helps companies stay ahead of and shape news stories, while multiplying reach and increasing employee engagement.

Take a cue from Google and create a posting calendar for your executives where they reshare existing content tied to their function. Suggest articles they should share and tie their posts to internal milestones.

Hilton: Pulling back the curtain on culture

For a well-established brand in the hospitality industry like Hilton, the need for a strong executive presence on LinkedIn might not be obvious at first. The brand is already widely recognized globally (they even have a celebrity spokesperson in the family). But as recruiting employees in the hospitality sector becomes a larger priority, so too does the need to strengthen their employer brand.

Hilton’s Chief Marketing Officer Mark Weinstein frequently posts content using the brand hashtag #EveryJobMakesTheStay, an ode to the Hilton ethos that every employee plays an important role in providing best-in-class guest experiences.

Weinstein also showcases Hilton’s awards, philanthropic efforts, and accessibility programs on LinkedIn, as well as leadership programs offered at the company.

Having leaders like Weinstein rally around recruitment and retention efforts—even indirectly—reinforces Hilton’s positive culture. His posts build upon stories in the media about Hilton’s partnerships with organizations like the U.S. Committee of Refugees and Immigrants, and underscores the brand’s commitment to investing in people.

The play: Building an indelible employer legacy is one of the most pressing reasons to kickstart or expand your executive communications program. No matter your sector, showing prospective employees what daily life at your company is like is key to hiring and keeping world-class talent.

Global spotlight: Telstra’s CEO is on the frontlines

Telstra is Australia’s largest mobile network, building, operating and fortifying telecommunications connections around the country. The brand’s CEO, Vicki Brady, shares scenes onsite while crews build network infrastructure. Like in this post, where she talks about the sacrifices those on the frontlines make and how their hard work translates to strengthening intercity fiber networks.

Through posts like this, Brady demonstrates her empathy for both the brand’s customers and employees. She proves Telstra’s commitment to providing reliable service as weather patterns become more extreme, and the appreciation she feels for the crew members who spend weeks away from their loved ones on the job.

She also shares reflections from sitting down with customers to learn more about their needs—especially those in remote places.

Telstra’s commitment to providing top-tier service and connectivity reflects in their earnings projections, even as they navigate tricky economic headwinds.

The play: Executives don’t just play a role humanizing your brand, they also humanize your customers and employees. As Brady illustrates, making people feel seen can go a long way. Consumers and team members are more than a number, and executives who reflect that on social earn their trust.

From the board room to the feed

That concludes this month’s installment of the PPR. Stay tuned for next month’s edition, where we’re rounding up brands we haven’t been able to scroll away from in 2024. In the meantime, remember these key takeaways:

Looking for step-by-step guidance on building an executive brand? Download our executive social media strategy cheat sheet.

And if you see a social post or campaign that deserves to be highlighted, tag us @sproutsocial and use #PostPerformanceReport to have your idea included in a future article.

The post Post Performance Report: Masterful examples of executive brand advocacy appeared first on Sprout Social.

With a well-curated strategy, supported by your social team, you can transform your executive brand into a source of influence that resonates with customers, employees and stakeholders alike. We created this concise guide to help you:

• Effectively position yourself as an industry thought leader
• Build a collaborative strategy with your social media team
• Empower the rest of your executive team to use social media to achieve key business goals

In an environment where reputation is everything, your executive online persona is an effective way to shape public perception of your brand. Download our executive social media strategy cheat sheet today, and start building a social presence that truly reflects your leadership.

The post Elevate Your Executive Brand with Proven Social Media Strategies appeared first on Sprout Social.

With the right amount of support, your coworkers can become your most essential brand advocates. Set them up for success with a thorough launch strategy that streamlines your efforts and theirs.

Use this checklist to plan a rollout that encourages maximum participation and supports your long-term business goals. This phased approach will help you:

• Outline how employees can benefit from an advocacy program through professional development, participation incentives and personal brand building.
• Secure the executive sponsorship needed to get people motivated to participate.
• Determine which metrics will be used to measure the internal and external success of your program.

Download this checklist today to jumpstart your employee advocacy program with a high level of engagement from day one.

The post 7 Steps to Launching an Employee Advocacy Program Your Team Wants to Participate In appeared first on Sprout Social.

Case in point, Sprout Social earned more than 28 million impressions from our Employee Advocacy platform last year.

From increasing brand awareness to building an employer brand that attracts top talent, employee advocacy helps brands achieve business goals.

However, many advocacy initiatives are informal side projects. Looking forward, building a sophisticated program requires strategic content planning and cross-functional collaboration.

In this article, we offer prescriptive recommendations for how you can curate a pipeline of content and ensure the long-term success of your advocacy efforts in 2024—and beyond.

Create goals and determine how to measure success

To create a robust content strategy for an employee advocacy platform, you need to first set clear goals for your employee advocacy program and choose the metrics you’ll use to measure success. Here’s a breakdown of how to do this.

Define clear, measurable goals

Understand what you aim to achieve with your employee advocacy program, and then lock it down. For example, is your goal to increase brand awareness and reach? Or do you want to improve employee morale and brand connection by involving employees in advocacy? Your goals could also be tactical, such as generating new leads through employee networks or positioning your company as thought leaders in your industry. Another great goal could also include the use of advocacy to attract star talent by showcasing your company culture.

Now to the brass tacks. Ensure these goals are quantifiable. For example, increasing brand awareness by having 50% of employees share at least one piece of content a week. Or aiming for a 20% increase in website traffic from employee-shared content within six months.

Make sure you can achieve your goals with your current resources and capabilities. Also ensure they’re relevant, by aligning them with broader business objectives, like increasing overall brand visibility or boosting lead generation.

Finally, establish a time-bound framework, like targeting a certain engagement rate within three months, to keep the goals on track and ensure timely progress.

Identify key performance indicators (KPIs)

Once you’ve set your goals, identify the KPIs you’ll use to measure success. These could include social media metrics such as reach, impressions, shares and engagement rates. Or, lead conversion rates to see how many leads are generated from employee shares. KPIs, like traffic sources, to track web traffic from social posts shared by employees, employee participation rate and referral rates are important as well.

Adopt tracking and measuring tools

Use social media monitoring tools to track and measure your program. For instance, tools like Sprout help manage, track and analyze the performance of your EA efforts. These metrics show the ROI of your employee advocacy program, and you can easily share core metrics with your leadership team to attract executive support.

You can also set up custom UTM parameters to track the specific impact of employee-shared content on web traffic and conversions. Plus, regularly collect feedback from employees to understand their experience and identify areas for improvement.

Review and adjust tactics regularly

It’s important to conduct regular, monthly or quarterly reviews of your KPIs. This will help you assess and ensure the ongoing success of your employee advocacy program. This also includes feedback from employees to keep them motivated and engaged because, after all, their collaboration is crucial. You should also aim to recognize and reward employees who actively participate and get great results. This will help foster a culture of involvement and appreciation.

The pillars of a content strategy for employee advocacy platform

According to Sprout’s research, brands report not having enough content as one of their greatest employee advocacy challenges. As one marketer said, “You need a lot of content to support a program. If your company’s not in a good place with content, then you’re going to struggle.”

The key is to curate the right content, not just a lot of content, that aligns with your brand’s goals and values. To fuel your employee advocacy program and build your content repository, make sure your content checks all the essential boxes.

Educational resources

Your advocacy content should be rooted in providing value to your audience. Share educational resources that’ll inform, engage and spark conversation. Focus on relevant topics that’ll help your community approach common industry challenges.

Share-worthy educational resources include in-house and third-party:

• Blog posts
• Videos
• Social media posts
• Data reports
• Templates and tools
• Case studies

Behind-the-scenes/company culture content

Employee experiences are the most compelling examples of your company’s culture. Share content that gives people an inside look at working at your company. Include blog posts or videos from the point of view of your employees. Ask your team members to take people behind-the-scenes of industry events, development trainings or volunteer opportunities.

This content will humanize your brand, resonate with your audience and give your team members a chance to cheer on their colleagues.

Executive thought leadership (owned and earned)

Strong executive communication plans are a must for managing brand identity, boosting employee morale and recruiting talent. Incorporate executive thought leadership into your advocacy strategy. Share blog articles, videos, social posts and other content created by your C-suite or leadership team.

Take your strategy to the next level by keeping track of the publications quoting and interviewing your execs. Prioritize curating earned media placements to build your brand’s thought leadership credibility.

Recruitment content

A compelling employer brand helps you convince talent that your organization is the best place for them to build their careers. Many of today’s candidates wish they knew more about what it’s really like to work at a company before joining.

That’s why employee testimonials are a powerful recruitment tool. By incorporating employee advocacy into your recruitment strategy, you can amplify your open job posts while inviting your team members to infuse their personal experiences into their social messages. Afterall, your employees’ perspectives matter three times more to prospective candidates than your CEO’s.

Candidates are also interested in industry awards and recognitions. Share award press releases, graphics and videos in your employee advocacy platform to spread the word. At Sprout, this content is our most widely-shared by employees.

Philanthropic announcements

Prospective candidates, current team members, customers and industry partners want to know that you follow-through on your corporate social responsibility commitments. While taking a stand through tactics like social activism is important, you must share what actions you’re taking to back up your words.

In your advocacy platform, share announcements related to scholarships you fund, off-site volunteer days or donations that support your philanthropic initiatives.

Product news/industry partnerships

One of the best ways to keep your team and your customers up to date on industry news and product changes is by tapping into your employee advocacy channel. Share press releases, blog posts and videos announcing product enhancements, new releases, seasonal launches and trend reports.

When announcing new partnerships with other industry leaders and brands, lean into employee advocacy to generate major buzz. For example, when Sprout announced our Salesforce partnership, 95% of our 740,000 social impressions related to the launch were a result of employees sharing content from the advocacy platform.

Evergreen content

Curating generic and evergreen posts for employee advocacy ensures your content remains relevant, engaging‌ and useful over time, regardless of current events or trends. Employees can share these posts throughout the year, offering ongoing value without needing frequent updates. Think: work anniversaries or personal milestones. It could also mean “Thank You” posts highlighting an employee’s journey and contributions to the company.

5 ways to ensure you never run out of content for your employee advocacy program

Gathering all the content you need for a successful advocacy program can seem overwhelming. You don’t have to do it alone. Here are a few tips on recruiting other departments to curate so you always have enough content on-hand.

1. Collaborate more closely across your marketing team

Work closely with your content, communications, product and customer marketing teams to stay in the loop on upcoming articles, important news and company updates. Have regular meetings and work in shared calendars to promote visibility.

Your content team can also help you curate. As the writers and editors behind blogs, videos, case studies and more, they can efficiently draft prepackaged social copy to accompany each curated post. Not only will their curation productivity fuel your advocacy strategy, it’ll help them meet their traffic goals.

2. Build relationships outside of marketing

Partnering with other teams in marketing is a great start, but to achieve an employee advocacy strategy that appeals to your entire organization, you need to go beyond marketing. Form cross-functional relationships across your business.

Ask yourself who can be your points of contact in HR, sales, engineering, R&D and operations. Work with them to surface content relevant to their team’s goals and find out what resonates with their external audience. Each team might have completely different content they want to share.

3. Source ideas across your organization

Your team members have a pulse on trending content. Use them as sources for interesting third-party articles, reports and analyses from your industry.

Sprout’s Employee Advocacy solution offers all users the option to curate content. By clicking the “Add Story” button in the upper right corner, you can suggest a content piece be added to your company’s current stories feed.

4. Find out what your employees want to share

Design an employee advocacy program your team members actually want to participate in by measuring your performance results at every stage of your program. Determine which stories are being shared the most, which topics resonate and where there are gaps in your content strategy.

Don’t be afraid to ask your employees for feedback. Consider asking:

• How would you rate our employee advocacy program?
• Has our employee advocacy program helped you expand your personal brand on social?
• What do you need help with to maximize your use of our advocacy solution?

Try our free checklist, where we’ve boiled it down to 6 easy steps for launching an employee advocacy program.

5. Engage your executives

Engage your executive team to attract more attention to your content and boost engagement. Executives sharing their insights, successes and personal stories can humanize leadership, making the brand more relatable and authentic. And this can inspire confidence and pride among employees, for a culture of transparency and trust. Plus, when executives actively participate, it shows how important the initiative is and encourages employees to join.

However, managing executives and keeping them engaged in curating stories requires a proactive approach. Encourage them to share personal experiences, insights‌ and successes that align with the company’s mission. It’s also important to regularly communicate how valuable their participation is and how their involvement can inspire the broader team and strengthen the company’s brand.

Tools like Sprout can simplify this process by enabling your exec team to easily share content as well as see the impact of their posts. This also ensures they stay actively involved without interruptions to their busy schedules.

Ensure a steady stream of employee advocacy content

Employee advocacy is no longer just “nice to have.” Today’s social teams are up against constant algorithmic shifts and resource deficits that make organic social growth challenging. A sophisticated employee advocacy program is critical to gaining impressions, increasing awareness, securing leads and finding top talent.

To make the most of your advocacy program, collaborate with other departments to help you source and curate content. When you consistently supply your team with new content, the results on your business goals will speak for themselves.

Want to determine the impact of employee advocacy on your company’s bottom line? Try Sprout’s employee advocacy ROI calculator tool.

The post The complete guide to create your employee advocacy content strategy appeared first on Sprout Social.