Employee advocacy is one of the easiest ways to get your brand in front of more people without spending more on ads. When your team shares company content on their own social channels, it reaches audiences you’d never hit from your brand account alone.
This guide will walk you through:
- How employee advocacy works
- Why it matters in 2025
- How to build a program that actually gets your employees excited to share
What is employee advocacy?
Employee advocacy is when employees promote their company online through their own social media profiles.
That can mean sharing company posts — like job listings, blog articles, company news, or product launches — or creating their own content that shows what the business is about.
Advocacy isn’t limited to re-posting. It could be an employee posting photos from a company event, commenting on industry news, or sharing a behind-the-scenes moment from their workday. If it promotes the brand and it’s coming from an employee, it counts.
The appeal is simple: people trust people more than they trust brands. And when those people are your own employees, the impact can be massive.
At Hootsuite, for example, our revamped employee advocacy program — powered by Amplify — helped generate more than 4.1 million employer brand impressions in a single quarter.
We also saw an 80% sign-up rate, with nearly two-thirds of employees actively sharing content. That activity translated into a 250% year-over-year increase in sourced revenue.
Why employee advocacy matters in 2025
In 2025, employee advocacy is one of the most effective ways to drive results by letting real people share your story.
1. Organic brand reach is declining — employees can help expand it
Even the best brand content often struggles to reach its full potential when posted from a company page alone. For years, organic reach on social media platforms has been shrinking as algorithms prioritize personal connections over business accounts.
Your employees’ combined social networks are a powerful workaround. LinkedIn research shows that employees have 10× more followers than their company’s account on average. That means every time a team member shares your content, it has a chance to reach entirely new, relevant audiences — without paying for ads.
And the numbers back it up. Content shared by employees gets 8x more engagement than the same post from a brand account, and click-through rates can be 200% higher.
While only about 3% of employees share company content, those posts can drive 30% of the total engagement a brand sees online.
2. People trust people more than brands
In 2025, trust is a rare commodity. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer shows trust in all major news and brand sources (including social media) is declining.
Not only that, but according to a recent Statista survey, U.S. consumers said they trust product recommendations from friends and family more than any other source.
This is exactly why employee advocacy works so well. When an employee shares a post, it feels like advice from someone you already believe in. Even if they’re just resharing company content, it comes wrapped in their personal brand and reputation.
3. It turns employees into thought leaders and industry voices
When employees share insights, resources, and commentary, they build their professional reputation. Over time, they become recognized voices in their field, which reflects positively on the business, too.
Consider these stats from LinkedIn’s Official Guide to Employee Advocacy:
- Salespeople who are active on social media are much more likely to hit their targets. In fact, they’re 45% more likely to beat their quota.
- When a lead comes through an employee’s social post, it’s more likely to turn into a customer compared to other leads.
- Companies with socially active employees are 57% more likely to see an increase in sales leads.
And it’s not limited to sales teams. Subject-matter experts in HR, product, design, or customer support can all become go-to resources in their industry by sharing their expertise online. When people see consistent, thoughtful content coming from your team, they associate that authority with your company as well.
Armanino LLP, for example, used its advocacy program to equip more employees across the business with the skills and tools to become social superstars — and build the firm’s reach and reputation along the way.
The results? Armanino reached 19.2 million (yes, million) people with employee networks. That’s a more than 600% increase in reach and $232,375 in potential ad value created. Not too shabby!
PS: Armanino also used Hootsuite Amplify, our advocacy tool, to help equip their 595 active users with plenty of content to reshare and make their own.
What does employee advocacy look like in practice?
Employee advocacy is employees talking about their work in ways that feel natural. It’s not a scripted campaign or a once-a-year push. It’s those everyday posts that make people stop scrolling for a second.
For example, employee advocacy could be:
- Sharing a recent project you’re proud of
- Reposting a company announcement with your own quick take
- Snapping a photo from an event or behind the scenes at the office
- Celebrating a teammate’s win or a company milestone
When it’s authentic, it works.
Take Hootsuite’s CEO, Irina Novoselsky. When she started posting daily on LinkedIn, she thought it would be a good way to connect with her network. A year later, her posts were showing up in ChatGPT, Google AI, and other AI tools — right in front of the kinds of buyers Hootsuite was looking to reach.
In just three months, Irina’s posts earned over 10 million impressions and influenced 37% of Hootsuite’s monthly leads.
Those results make two things clear about employee advocacy:
- It helps your content reach places you don’t own or control, and
- It brings in qualified leads that can turn into real revenue.
How to build an employee advocacy program on social media
Ready to build your own advocacy program? We’ll walk you through it.
1. Set goals and define success
Before you ask people to start posting, get clear on why you want them to do it. Are you trying to get increased brand awareness? Drive traffic to your site? Help sales open more doors? Attract new hires?
Your answer will shape your content creation and how you measure results.
Example goals could be:
- Acquiring more leads
- Recruiting top talent
- Improving brand awareness
- Increasing share of voice on social
- Top contributors. Which individuals or teams are sharing the most? Which advocates are generating the most engagement?
- Organic reach. How many people see the content shared through your employee advocates? (Psst: try our employee advocacy calculator to calculate your potential reach.)
- Engagement. Are people clicking links, leaving comments, and re-sharing content from your advocates? What is the engagement per network?
- Traffic. How much traffic did the content shared by employee advocates drive to your website?
- Brand sentiment. How has your advocacy campaign impacted your overall brand sentiment on social media?
If you create a company hashtag, be sure to track mentions. Branded hashtags can help employees show off your culture, improve recruitment and brand sentiment, and feel more connected to the company and each other.
2. Choose the right employees to involve
An advocacy program works best when it starts with people who genuinely want to be part of it.
Look for employees who are already active on social, have a knack for sharing industry insights, or naturally post about your company and the work they do.
You’ll get better results if employee participation is voluntary. People can spot a forced post from a mile away, and authenticity is what makes advocacy effective.
While it may be tempting to pick your executive team as program leaders, the team members who are already social media all-stars are actually your best bet.
What to look for in potential brand ambassadors:
- People building a strong personal brand on social media
- Team members who naturally share industry content or company updates
- Employees with high visibility in your industry (speaking events, PR mentions, large networks)
- Genuine enthusiasm for the company and the industry
Tips for building your first group of advocates:
- Start with a pilot group of motivated, socially savvy employees.
- Gather feedback and use their early wins to inspire others to join.
- Work with “advocacy leaders” to find in-house beta testers before launching company-wide.
- Use beta testers to shape your social media strategy, provide honest feedback, and keep participation steady after the launch.
- Maintain strong internal leadership to prevent enthusiasm from fading and make advocacy an ongoing habit, not just a one-time push.
The right people can deliver outsized results. Just ask Hootsuite’s own Social and Influencer Marketing Strategist, Eileen Kwok.
One employee-generated LinkedIn post she wrote — announcing the launch of our DM automation guide — drove 221 sessions (136 from new users), 52 content downloads, and 1 product trial. That’s from a single post!
3. Make it easy for employees to share
The real key to getting your employees to share is providing them with content that will either make their job easier or help position them as industry experts.
Here’s how to help employees share content without slowing them down:
- Give them ready-to-go posts. Provide pre-written copy, branded content, and visuals they can post right to their social media accounts.
- Keep everything in one place. Use an employee advocacy platform like Hootsuite Amplify so employees can easily find, personalize, and schedule company content.
- Offer variety. Share a mix of formats (short videos, infographics, social media posts, and LinkedIn articles) so employees can choose what fits their personal brand and professional networks.
- Encourage their voice. Pre-approved content is great for speed, but a personal touch can build trust and authenticity.
- Make it relevant. Curate content that helps them connect with their target audience, whether that’s future hires, customers, or peers in their industry.
Athletico Physical Therapy uses Hootsuite Amplify to expand its reach by coordinating content around key events when they know engagement will be high, like Patient Experience Appreciation Month.
After launching their advocacy program, the Athletico team saw a 39% increase in engagement across all social media channels. That’s the lift you get when you make it easy for employees to share at the right moment.
4. Provide training and support
Even the most confident social media users benefit from guardrails.
Start with two essentials:
- Social media content policy. A “do’s and don’ts” of what employees should share, topics to avoid (e.g., politics, etc.), answers they can provide to common questions (FAQ), and more.
- Brand style guidelines. This is the visual guide, including how to use the company logo, unique terms or spelling your company uses (e.g., it’s Hootsuite, not HootSuite!), hashtags to include, and more.
Clear guidelines help protect your company’s reputation and avoid security risks. Some guidelines are common sense — for instance, avoiding vulgar or disrespectful language or sharing confidential information. Other guidelines may need input from the legal department.
Once the boundaries are clear, help employees grow their skills so advocacy feels natural. Support can include:
- Personal branding tips: How to blend their own voice with your brand message.
- Network growth strategies: Ways to connect with peers, customers, and influencers on social media.
- Thought leadership guidance: How to share ideas and experiences that build authority while supporting company content.
Keep your resources by refreshing training throughout the year. Offer lunch-and-learns, short webinars, or even Slack posts with examples of posts that worked well.
Most importantly, make sure employees know where to go for help. Share the contact info of your advocacy program lead or internal communications team, so there’s always a real person to answer questions.
5. Recognize and reward participation
Since you’re asking your employees for something, it’s only fair to offer something in return (beyond increasing their visibility and credibility as thought leaders and subject matter experts).
Tangible incentives like gift cards or prizes can help employees feel like they have a stake in the program. Gamification is also a great strategy. Many brands make social media advocacy into a game or contest.
For example, you could create a hashtag to promote a specific advocacy campaign. Then, create a leaderboard and gift a prize to whoever earns the most impressions or engagement for the hashtag.
Other tactics you can apply to sweeten the deal include:
- VIP programs
- Development opportunities
- Early access
- Badges
- Challenges for teams or individuals
Learn more about how to roll out an employee advocacy program with our program guide (below).
PSA: Download a free employee advocacy toolkit that shows you how to plan, launch, and grow a successful employee advocacy program for your organization.
What is the best tool to support your employee advocacy strategy?
Hootsuite Amplify
The hardest part of running an employee advocacy program is keeping it organized.
People need to know where to find approved content, how to share it, and what’s on-brand. They also need a simple way to stay updated when there’s something new to post.
Hootsuite Amplify solves all of that. This employee advocacy management tool gives your team one central place to browse ready-to-share posts, branded visuals, and links. Everything is pre-approved, so employees can post straight to their social media accounts in just a few clicks.
If your team already uses Hootsuite for planning and publishing, Amplify fits right in. Add the app to your dashboard to manage your entire advocacy program alongside your other social media activity.
No extra logins, no complicated setup.
A central hub like this pays off. At Hootsuite, Amplify has a 94% adoption rate and a 64% share rate. That adds up to more than 4.1 million organic impressions every quarter.
Amplify also tracks the impact of your advocacy efforts. You can see which posts get the most traction, measure your program’s ROI, and keep all your social media metrics in one place.
When employees have a tool that’s this easy to use, they keep showing up. And that’s when advocacy becomes part of your culture, not just another marketing tactic.
4 examples of great employee advocacy in action
Need inspo for your next employee advocacy campaign? Start here.
1. Good company culture = good employee advocacy
One of the easiest ways to get employees to talk about your company is to keep them happy and engaged.
Engaged employees want to post about your brand. They want people to come work for you. And, they’ll promote you without even being asked.
Here’s an example from Lululemon’s Global Corporate Communications Leader Melanie Gaboriault, who just can’t wait to tell you how awesome her workplace is.
2. Adobe takes advocacy IRL
Not all advocacy happens online. Adobe’s recent Interns vs. Legends basketball game took place off social media, but offered an opportunity for connection in the real world.
When Chief Revenue Officer Stephen Frieder shared it on LinkedIn, it gave employees an easy, feel-good story to repost.
3. Tombras’ Joe Meier uses comedy to extend his reach
Sometimes employee advocacy is buttoned up. And, sometimes, it looks like Tombra’s Creative Director Joe Meier posting jokes and memes that get everyone interested in their brand.
Meier’s content is proof that employee advocacy programs work even harder when you give space for individual personalities to shine. Treat them like the influencers they already are, and you’ll tap into audiences you’d never reach on brand accounts alone.
4. Keep the advocacy up, even after they leave
The best employee advocacy happens when employees add their own story to a brand moment. Even better when it’s a former employee still repping your brand!
This post from former Coach employee Liz Alessi shows that your employee advocacy reach can extend beyond those who work for you currently, into past employees, future employees, and their networks.
How to measure the success of employee advocacy
You’ve built the program, your team is sharing. Now, how can you tell what’s working? Here’s how to track impact across marketing, recruiting, and brand awareness.
Reach and engagement on shared posts
Start by tracking the raw visibility of employee posts (reach or impressions) and the level of interaction (likes, comments, shares, saves, or clicks). Most social platforms give you these numbers natively. For example, LinkedIn post analytics or Hootsuite Analytics.
If you don’t know what kind of engagement you should be seeing, check out these engagement rate benchmarks as a reference. Then, use our free engagement rate calculator to see where you stand.
Top advocates by shares/ engagement
One way to see if your advocacy program is paying off is by identifying which employees consistently generate the most impact. Track two main metrics for each participant:
- The total number of shares their posts receive.
- The engagement those posts earn, such as likes, comments, and clicks.
Look at these numbers over a set period, like a month or quarter, so you can spot patterns rather than one-time spikes. Consistent high performers are a signal that your program is resonating and that the training, tools, and content you’re providing are working.
To estimate how much further your best brand advocates could take your reach, use Hootsuite’s free employee advocacy calculator.
Just plug in your total employees plus your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn follower counts, and it will show your current maximum reach and the potential reach you could get with Amplify.
Brand visibility and sentiment
To see if advocacy is improving how people see your brand, track both the tone and the volume of conversations about you. Start with Hootsuite’s free brand sentiment analyzer to get a quick snapshot of whether mentions are positive, neutral, or negative.
Then use Hootsuite Listening to go deeper.
With Hootsuite Listening you can:
- Spot trends sparked by employee shares. Use Quick Search to see if hashtags, topics, or keywords tied to your advocacy campaigns are picking up traction.
- Track advocacy-related keywords. Monitor up to two keywords over the last 7 days, such as your brand name plus the campaign or event your employees are promoting.
- Compare mentions before and after campaigns. Check whether visibility grows in the weeks following a coordinated employee push.
- Understand what’s driving positive or negative sentiment. See if tone shifts when employees share certain types of content, such as behind-the-scenes posts or thought leadership articles.
- Review real posts influenced by advocacy. Filter results by sentiment or channel to see exactly how employee-shared content is shaping the conversation.
Traffic or conversions from employee content (via UTMs)
If you want to know whether advocacy drives business results, track the clicks and actions from employee-shared links. Adding simple UTM parameters lets you see exactly how much traffic came from advocacy, and what those visitors did next.
With UTMs, you can spot which posts (and which people) bring in the most qualified visitors, and see how many of them convert — whether that’s signing up, downloading, or buying.
If you’re using Hootsuite Amplify, UTMs can be baked in automatically so you get clean, consistent data without the hassle.
Recruiting and talent retention
If part of your employee advocacy goal is hiring, track whether those shared posts are actually helping fill roles. Recruiting is expensive and slow. According to ADP, it costs an average of $4,129 and takes an average of 42 days to fill an open position.
Anything that speeds that up or lowers those costs is worth measuring.
Here’s what to look at when measuring your talent pipeline for employee advocacy:
- Traffic to your careers page from employee-shared posts (use UTMs so you know where it’s coming from).
- Applications that can be traced back to advocacy content.
- Quality of candidates, measured through your applicant tracking system.
- Time-to-hire before and after your advocacy program launched.
Over time, you’ll see which advocates and which types of posts bring in the most qualified candidates. That insight can shape both your recruiting strategy and your content plan.
4 employee advocacy best practices, from the experts
Josh Rangel, Senior Director of Social at Ogilvy, has helped shape employee advocacy programs for some of the world’s biggest brands. His advice? Keep it real, and keep employees at the center.
1. Let employees be real, not rehearsed
Audiences can spot a scripted post a mile away. Instead of handing employees a rigid set of captions, give them room to share what their work actually feels like.
“When it comes across as natural, not forced… truly sharing what their lived experience has been with the organization,” Rangel says, “the more real you let your employees be — the funny moments, the pain points, the ‘ah ha’ moments — the more relatable they’ll be to your audience.”
2. Focus on content that’s real and unexpected
Trends change, algorithms shift, but authenticity sticks. Rangel says the most effective employee content usually has one of two qualities: “(1) it’s real and/or (2) it’s unexpected.”
One example: Atlassian’s Dispo Diaries. The company handed employees disposable cameras at an event and let them document the experience their way. The results had “humanity, humor, relatability, and a touch of nostalgia,” and performed far better than standard event recaps.
3. Make it about them, not the brand
Many advocacy programs fail because they’re engineered around brand goals, not employee perspectives.
“Listen to the employees. Make it about them, not about the brand,” Rangel says. That means asking them what they care about, what challenges they see, and what makes them proud to work for you. Then, let those answers shape the content.
4. Encourage participation without forcing it
Mandatory advocacy feels like homework. Instead, Rangel recommends making it easy for employees to raise their hand.
“The employer should help enable, not mandate the process, content or direction.”
Provide ready-to-use content assets alongside the freedom to build their own. A mix of guidance and autonomy keeps posts authentic while still supporting your goals.
FAQs about employee advocacy
What is employee advocacy in simple terms?
Employee advocacy is when the people who work at your company actively share content about the business on their personal social media channels. This could be anything from reposting a company announcement to sharing a behind-the-scenes moment from their day.
What are the benefits of employee advocacy?
When employees talk about your brand, it feels more trustworthy than a paid ad. Their posts can help:
- Increase brand awareness by reaching networks your company account might never reach
- Drive more web traffic to your site or campaigns
- Build credibility in your industry through thought leadership
- Attract new hires by showing what it’s really like to work at your company
- Strengthen employee engagement by making them feel like part of the brand story
How do I get employees to participate in advocacy?
Start by making participation optional. People are more likely to post if it feels voluntary, not like an obligation. Give them content ideas or ready-to-share assets, but leave room for them to add their own perspective. Recognize and celebrate employees who participate. Even something as small as a public thank-you in a meeting or a mention in the company Slack can motivate others. Offering occasional perks, contests, or spotlight features can also keep momentum going.
What’s the best platform or tool for employee advocacy?
The right platform makes it easy for employees to find, personalize, and share approved content. Hootsuite Amplify, for example, lets you upload content for employees to share with one click, track performance, and stay compliant with brand guidelines. It also works on mobile, so employees can post on the go.
Can employee advocacy replace brand marketing?
No. Employee advocacy works best as part of a bigger marketing strategy. It can’t replace your paid campaigns, PR efforts, or owned content, but it can make all of them more effective by adding an authentic, human layer.
How do I track ROI from employee advocacy?
You can measure ROI by looking at both reach and business outcomes. For reach, track impressions, engagement, and top advocates. For business impact, add UTM codes to links so you can see exactly how much traffic and conversions came from employee posts. Employee advocacy tools like Hootsuite Analytics and Amplify give you these numbers in one place so you can compare results over time and refine your program.
Save time managing your social media presence with Hootsuite. Publish and schedule posts, find relevant conversions, engage your audience, measure results, and more — all from one dashboard. Try it free today.
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