Get Staff Active on LinkedIn with Sprout Social’s Employee Advocacy

What if you could encourage staff at your organization to share thought leadership, company news, industry insights, and more on LinkedIn? According to a study commissioned by Sprout Social, you could increase your organic reach by 85% on social media, improve staff productivity by 55%, and cut $233K in paid media spend over the next 3 years. Welcome to Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social, a tool that allows you to draft pre-approved social media posts for staff to easily share from their own accounts.

Online Optimism started using Employee Advocacy in August of this year, and I’m here to share the results for any other organization that is interested in inspiring its staff to get more active on LinkedIn.

How Does Sprout Social Employee Advocacy Work?

Employee Advocacy is a premium solution of Sprout Social, meaning your organization must pay for a Sprout Social plan and add on Employee Advocacy. This will make the most sense for marketing agencies like ourselves, companies that manage at least some aspects of their social media in house, and organizations that would benefit significantly from employee engagement on social channels.

Once your organization is set up on Advocacy, your employees will also need to sign up and connect any personal social media accounts they wish to use to post. While you can share posts across a variety of platforms, including Facebook, X, Instagram, Threads, Pinterest, TikTok, and more, we think it makes the most sense to ask staff to opt into sharing on LinkedIn.

Writing Posts

When you start the process of adding a story, you’re given the option to share a link or piece of media. There is also an option for sharing stories just with your internal team, but that isn’t relevant to our goal of getting staff to share on LinkedIn.

Next, you can customize a number of different features for the post, most notably:

• Choosing or uploading a thumbnail (if you’re sharing a link)
• Writing one or more messages to accompany the post (with an option to use AI to help you write)
• Setting the start and end date for when the post can be shared

Sharing Posts

There are several options for sharing posts from Sprout Social’s Employee Advocacy platform. First, you can either create a new post (as discussed above) and share it, or you can take a look at the current stories available for your team to share. At Online Optimism, we’ve found success having our Social Media Department add posts for other employees to share. This makes it easier for staff to not only know what content to post, but also to get ideas for what to say about it with pre-written message ideas.

Users can choose any of the available message ideas and tweak them as needed. We encourage our staff to personalize the messages a little with their own perspectives, insights, or language. This should make the posts resonate better, while also avoiding the issue of multiple staff sharing the exact same post.

Once the post details have been decided, users can either share the post immediately or schedule it for later. If you choose to send a post later, you’ll be informed how long the story is shareable, see a five-day calendar of your other scheduled posts, and have the option to either choose the publication time yourself or use the time that Sprout Social determines to be best.

The calendar feature makes it easy to post with a regular cadence by seeing what you’ve already scheduled. This is convenient if you decide to move any scheduled posts around—if, say, there is a major company announcement or industry story that you’d like to share right away instead of something you had previously planned. I am a big proponent of making data-driven decisions, so I always like to at least see when Sprout recommends posting.

Data and Metrics from Employee Advocacy

Another nifty feature of Sprout Social’s Employee Advocacy is the reporting it provides. You can see how Advocacy is being used by your staff as well as how the posts are performing to determine if you are meeting your goals.

Sprout reports on the following (and more!) data, with filters that allow you to see the results of specific team members or time periods.

• General Report
  • How many active stories there were
  • How many times stories were shared
  • The average number of shares per active user
  • Shares and potential reach by network
  • Sharing trends, including average shares by day of week
  • Top users by shares and by potential reach
• Content Report
  • Number of active stories per day
  • Number of shareable versus internal stories
  • Comparison of active stories from the previous period
  • Metrics for individual stories, including days available, views, shares, engagements, and clicks
• User Report
  • Percentage of users that are active
  • Percentage of users that shared at least 1 story
  • Average shares per user
  • Team data, including shares and potential reach per team
  • Employee data, including shares, potential reach, engagements, and clicks
• Curator Report
  • Number of stories added
  • Number of curators
  • Average stories per curator
  • Individual data on the number of stories for each curator
• Distribution Report
  • Email open rate
  • Email click rate
  • Email share rate
  • Emails received per day, including broadcast, digest, and newsletter
• Leaderboard
  • Engagements by team member

Our Results with Sprout Social’s Employee Advocacy

Although Online Optimism has only been using Employee Advocacy for a short while, we’ve already seen promising results:

• 61.1% of users (11 out of 18 total) were active our first month, sharing 8 posts each on average.
• 5 users added a total of 57 stories our first month.
• Active stories increased 8.6% from 81 to 88 from August to September, and we still have a week left in September.
• Both months have seen around a 50% open rate and 2% click rate for the digest emails sent to our team by Sprout Social with stories to read and share.
• Our most engaging story in August was about a client’s new website. The most engaging story so far in September was about our Specialist Program.

Contact Us for Help with Your Social Media Presence

Getting staff active on LinkedIn can be a major win for your brand, but it requires a strong foundation of quality content to share and effective company social media accounts to establish trust in your business. At Online Optimism, we offer content marketing, social media management (paid and organic), video, and more to improve your presence online. Fill out a contact form or schedule a call with us to learn how we can help with your marketing.