Do you ever lie awake at night, plagued by questions like: How do you measure employee advocacy success? What are the key metrics for employee advocacy success?
Well, you can sleep tight. We’re sharing everything we know about measuring employee advocacy success.
Spoiler alert: It’s not by counting how many selfies your sales team posted at last week’s offsite. Measuring employee advocacy success means tracking metrics. Metrics that prove your people’s posts are moving your business forward.
Measure the right KPIs and you’ll show how your employee advocacy efforts:
- Boost reach and brand awareness
- Drive engagement
- Help recruiting
- Save on ad spend
With the right data, you’ll win over even the most spreadsheet-loving exec in the room. Let’s put the receipts behind the retweets, people!
Key Takeaways
- Track what matters. Measure KPIs like reach, engagement, and conversions to prove your advocacy program drives real business results.
- Show the impact. Use data to highlight wins, from boosted brand awareness to money saved on ads or recruiting.
- Make it easy to join in. Tools like Hootsuite Amplify help employees share approved content, track results, and stay motivated through friendly competition.
- Build a sharing culture. Advocacy works best when employees feel proud to post and know their voices make a difference.
What does it mean to measure employee advocacy success?
Measuring employee advocacy success means evaluating the impact of your employee advocacy program through key performance indicators (KPIs). Track metrics that show how employees are amplifying your brand. And how brand ambassadors drive meaningful results for the business.
Typically, these metrics will show:
- Reach and brand visibility
- Engagement
- Employee participation
- Business impact
Tracking results turns fluffy numbers into evidence. With proof, you can show leadership why advocacy matters. And with the right data, you’ll sharpen your strategy into an advocacy machine.
For expert advice, we spoke with Victoria Samways, Major Tom’s Marketing & Brand Manager. Samways is an early Hootsuite adopter, too. She has long used Amplify to support her employee advocacy program.
One example Samways shares is how measuring advocacy success led her to prove a three-figure ROI.
When promoting a campaign, Samways leveraged UTM tracking codes alongside Amplify. Her program encouraged employees to share high-quality content.
“Amplify landed within our top 5 traffic sources for the campaign,” says Samways.
“Thanks to the UTM tracking links, over the coming weeks, we saw a healthy amount of leads that we attributed back to this campaign. This resulted in over $100k in our pipeline and, as a channel, provided a higher-than-average win-rate due to the referral-like context of these leads.”
Why is it important to measure employee advocacy success?
Measuring employee advocacy success does three critical things:
- Proves ROI to leadership
- Keeps employees motivated
- Guides smart optimization
For businesses, measurement delivers:
- Accountability: You can show how your program moves the needle on reach, leads, and recruiting. It’s far more impactful to point to cold, hard numbers in the boardroom rather than a well-liked social media post.
- Smarter strategy: When you know what’s working (and what’s not), you can scale the wins and stop wasting energy on duds.
- Momentum: Data turns advocacy from a one-off experiment into a repeatable, scalable growth engine.
For employee advocates, measurement builds trust and momentum:
- Real results: Shows your brand advocates that their posts have a real impact on the business.
- Personal wins: Demonstrates how individual team members have built up their online presence and networks using company advocacy programs.
- Shared success: Share results transparently so employees feel they’re contributing to something bigger than just “likes.”
The bottom line: measuring advocacy keeps everyone focused on what matters. Sure, a post that racks up a thousand likes feels great. But if those likes aren’t turning into top talent, qualified leads, or customers, then what’s the point?
Source: Balaji Mohanty
What are the key metrics to measure employee advocacy success?
Measuring employee advocacy success means looking at how your program serves your business. You can break this down by business goals through marketing outcomes and people outcomes.
Marketing outcomes include:
- The company’s reach
- Engagement rates
- Lead generation
- Awareness
People outcomes include:
- Participation
- Program adoption
- Morale and culture
- Retention
“Major Tom tracks the percentage of people sharing, and sees if the employees with the largest followings are participating,” says Samways.
“Along with tracking social impressions, we track the traffic and conversions generated on our website from Amplify traffic. Conversions can be newsletter sign-ups, job applications, or leads.”
Before you dive into metrics, think about how you might benchmark your data. You can measure your employee advocacy efforts against your competitors. Or you can benchmark your data against your own company from
Awareness and reach metrics
Are employee posts putting company content in front of new eyeballs? Metrics like reach, impressions, and share of voice show how far your brand message travels outside of the corporate trench.
How you communicate your reach and awareness metrics matters, too. Saying “Our employees’ posts reached 100,000 people” is totally fine. But follow it up by saying, “That’s the equivalent of $15,000 in paid impressions we didn’t spend,” and you’ll blow the socks off your C-suite.
Engagement metrics
Are people actually stopping to interact? Track likes, comments, shares, click-through rates, and sentiment on advocacy content to see if employees spark more authentic engagement than branded posts.
The data supports employee advocacy as an engagement tool, too. LinkedIn reports that the click-through rate (CTR) on a piece of content iss typically 2x higher when an employee shares it compared to a brand.
Recruiting metrics
Are your employees working to pull others into the orbit of your organization? The more potential top talent knows about what it’s like to work at your company, the more likely they may be to apply.
Take a look at your applicant pool, see if the quality of potential new hires has increased, and ask HR about the time-to-hire.
Source: Shawna Olsten
Sales and lead-gen metrics
The big one: Is advocacy moving the money needle? Monitor site traffic, leads, conversions, and even pipeline influence. These metrics prove advocacy is more than a feel-good project; it’s an ROI engine.
Psst: Your salespeople may also find they’re converting more by being more active on social. LinkedIn says those who do are 45% more likely to beat their sales quota.
Employee participation metrics
How many employees are actually using the program? Look at the adoption rate, number of active users, and average shares per employee. This tells you if advocacy is part of your culture or just a ghost town.
When you speak to your team about participation, frame it as a cultural win. You can say something, “Half our workforce is actively building their thought leadership.” You can also give out incentives to the brand advocates who regularly post.
Cultural impact metrics
Does advocacy make employees prouder to work at your company? Does it impact their careers by developing their reputation as thought-leaders online? How do employees feel about the program?
Survey scores, retention rates, and the number of employees building their own thought leadership brands can show how advocacy pays off within the office, too.
Employee retention metrics
Pride in your brand often translates into loyalty to the workplace. And when employees feel valued enough to advocate for their company, they’re more likely to invest their future with that company.
If your retention rate improves alongside advocacy efforts, it suggests pride and loyalty are increasing. You can tie this indirectly to your program in your reports as money saved on recruitment.
How can businesses measure the ROI of employee advocacy?
By connecting your advocacy metrics to the bottom line. Here’s where the real magic happens:
- Revenue: Track likes and clicks from employee posts to conversions, demo requests, or sales.
- Recruiting costs saved: Every time an employee share brings in a qualified candidate, that’s money you didn’t have to hand over to a recruiter.
- Content costs saved: You can create one post that’s shared by 100 employees, which means more juice squeezed from one piece of content.
- Employee engagement: Happy employees stick around, and turnover is expensive. Advocacy quietly trims those costs.
- Paid ad cost saved: Advocacy can boost share of voice, positive sentiment, and earned media value. Translation: you’re getting ad-level exposure without ad-level spend. Your potential savings on paid media are money in your pocket.
“The number of impressions Amplify generates for us for the cost of the platform and draw prizes is astounding compared to paid ads,” says Samways.
What tools help measure employee advocacy success?
There are plenty of employee advocacy tools to help you measure success in your program, ranging from tracking and analysis to custom reporting.
Obviously, we’re big fans of Hootsuite Amplify, and think you will be, too. The platform is an all-in-one employee advocacy platform that integrates with your Hootsuite ecosystem.
Hootsuite Amplify lets admins create and distribute pre-approved content that employees can easily share with one click. You can automate your employee advocacy by scheduling and publishing pre-approved content.
You can also track adoption rates, post-impact, engagement metrics, and so much more, all within the app using Hootsuite’s analytics tools.
You’re able to easily track engagement and see who is participating in your program. You can check how your employee-shared content is performing.
At a glance, you’ll see how much social reach and engagement come from employees vs. branded channels. Plus, employees can compete on a public leaderboard, encouraging program participation.
“We promote Amplify during company-wide meetings, and we gamify our employee advocacy initiative by doing two draws the week the content is published,” says Samways. “For each share, the employee’s name goes into the draw for a gift card, charity donation, or swag of their choice.”
Amplify metrics help you figure out how you’re doing on Amplify, which are available to anyone who has access to your Hootsuite analytics. You can print custom reports with your Amplify metrics and show off your post impact, user adoption, and engagement within your program.
We love this tool so much that we actually published a case study on our own strategy and success using it.
Spoiler alert: We ended up achieving:
- 250% year-on-year growth in generated revenue
- 80% Amplify sign-up rate (+9% year-over-year)
- 4.1M of brand impressions in Q1 (all attributed to employee posts from Amplify)
The success of your employee advocacy program can sometimes depend on how easy and intuitive your tools are.
What are the best practices for measuring employee advocacy success (according to the experts)?
The best practices for measuring employee advocacy success emphasize delivering clear, meaningful results.
Samways shared the best practices that worked for her employee advocacy success below.
Build a culture that naturally supports your employee advocacy initiative
Samways advises building and maintaining an environment where employees are genuinely proud to share, one that encourages open recognition.
“If your employees view their work as a point of pride, and the content as a valuable way to build their personal brand, rather than a corporate requirement, they’ll feel more naturally inclined to share.”
Be careful with your mandates
Remember that you’re asking employees to share on their personal profiles — a platform the brand has no right over.
“If you’re in a spot where you need to encourage more shares, focus more on LinkedIn, where work-related content aligns with the social media platform,” says Samways.
Source: Lyn Bryan
Track adoption and activity rates
Monitor what percentage of your employees sign up and actively share content to understand the health and internal buy-in of your program.
Use UTM tracking on all links
Implement unique UTM parameters for your advocacy links to accurately attribute website traffic, conversions, and leads directly to employee shares.
Measure engagement metrics
Analyze clicks, likes, comments, and reshares on employee posts to determine which content and platforms resonate most with external audiences.
Calculate earned media value
Assign a dollar value to the organic reach and engagement your program generates to quantify its ROI against what you would have spent on paid advertising.
Make sure all employees understand the “why”
During the initial roll-out and onboarding of new employees, make sure it’s clear why this initiative exists and the value employees bring.
Connect to business goals
Integrate your advocacy platform with your CRM to track how many leads, influenced sales deals, and even new hires originate from employee advocacy touchpoints.
Stay on top of tech
Make sure you have the ability to quickly resolve any issues. “Repeated issues, like social profiles disconnecting, can erode the trust and ease of using the platform,” says Samways.
Analyze content performance
Identify which articles, blog posts, or updates are shared most frequently by employees to inform your future content strategy and marketing efforts.
Identify top advocates
Recognize and reward your top-performing employees to gamify the experience and encourage continued participation across the organization.
Identify advocates with the most followers
Hootsuite, for example, can show you the number of followers each person registered with the program has. If you need to encourage more shares, focus on this segment first.
Employee advocacy measurement FAQ
How do you measure employee advocacy success?
You measure employee advocacy success by tracking specific key performance indicators (KPIs) to prove the business impact of your program.
What are the metrics for employee advocacy?
The metrics for employee advocacy involve both people metrics (active advocates, content shared, participation rate) and business metrics (website traffic, conversions, job applicants). Bonus points if you track sentiment to see how advocacy is shaping brand perception.
How do you measure employee success?
Employee success in advocacy comes down to consistency and impact. Are they sharing regularly? Are their networks engaging? Do they report a lift in their personal brand? And empowering employees will often lead to greater success.
How do you prove the value of advocacy to leadership?
You can prove the impact of employee advocacy to leadership by showing tangible business results. Translate your results into ROI by showing the cost savings on recruitment efforts, the revenue attributed to social shares, or the potential savings on paid advertising.
What tools track employee advocacy metrics?
Tools like Hootsuite’s Amplify, analytics and reporting can track employee advocacy metrics. Amplify can automate your employee advocacy efforts.
What is the staff advocacy score?
The staff advocacy score is a composite metric some programs use to measure advocacy impact per employee. Usually, it blends activity (how much they share) with outcomes (how much engagement and reach they generate).
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