Maximize your social reach through employee advocacy

Engage your workforce to help you spread the word about your company, build trust, and gain followers. With the help of your colleagues, you can promote your brand and increase your reach.

For the best results, develop a plan that meets your business goals, increases user advocacy, and delivers results you can track.

Know your brand goals and social strategy

Review your marketing and social media goals and initiatives before developing yourParliament (formerly Amplify) content plan. Whether you want to grow your brand, increase engagement with your community or improve your customer experience, knowing your goals will guide the content strategy you create. By including brand and social objectives in your plan, you can also track the progress of your social strategy with Parliament metrics.

It’s also important to know your company’s voice and brand guidelines so that Parliament will support and drive your existing social media strategy.

Understand your advocates

Parliament has better adoption when you understand your advocates. How do they prefer to communicate online? What sort of social content do they respond to and share? The more you know about them, the more successful you’ll be at building content to share. Combine knowledge of your advocates with social marketing initiatives to offer content that’s on-topic and consistent with your brand goals.

The more tactics you use to reach and get to know your advocates, the more engagement you’ll have. Here are some tips to keep in mind:

• Use a variety of communication methods - Try several ways of interacting with and gathering information from advocates, such as email, text, phone calls, and both remote and in-person meetings. This maximizes your reach and helps your advocates feel included and invested in your mission.
• Keep track of platforms advocates are using - What social networks do they use? Who is their audience and what are they like? Include team members with audiences on different platforms to expand your brand reach.
• Try a phased approach - If you’re planning something new or different that your advocates might be unfamiliar with (such as sharing different content or exploring new topics), consider rolling it out to employees with advanced social media experience before opening it to the rest of the team. Their feedback can help you analyze and correct any issues with audience responses or engagement.

Communication is central to launching, onboarding, and driving excitement for your Parliament program.

Develop effective topics

Content is the engine that drives your Parliament program. Have a wide variety of content ready for your advocates to share, sorted into topics for ease of use.

There are two components to content: topics and posts. Topics are categories you use to group your posts. Topics can be broad or specific, but they should support your Parliament goals and be relevant to your advocates. Posts are the individual pieces of content within the topics that people can share.

Take a close look at the advocates in your program. What are their roles within the business? What are their goals for joining the program? For example, you may have advocates across different departments, such as human resources, marketing, and sales. What topics would they find relevant and worth sharing with their social audience? To encourage engagement, include an image, a video, or a link within your posts.

Plan your posts

Develop a consistent publishing plan to maintain momentum and keep your advocates engaged. Consider your ideal post volume (how much you post) and publishing cadence (how often you post). Consistency isn’t only about the frequency of posting, but also the distribution of content among your topics. Organizing your content across four to eight well-populated topics will showcase your brand identity and provide richer analytics. Advocates who are only subscribed to one or two topics will still have plenty of content to choose from.

The most successful Parliament programs publish 10 to 15 pieces of content per week for advocates to share, spaced out up to four times a day. If this volume seems like a stretch, start with one new post per day. To encourage advocates to come back to the tool regularly, it's important to give them fresh, relevant content to share.

See the following table for some ideas on content types for different kinds of topics.

Discover relevant content

A great Parliament program is about more than sharing articles and posts. You can’t build a solid strategy at random—everyone responds to different content. An effective content strategy pulls content from different sources like social media and blogs to ensure broader appeal to different audiences. Here are a few ways to drive your content pipeline:

• Reuse existing content - Review your owned social content from the last two to four weeks, or anything that’s not time-sensitive. Look at blog posts, articles, or reports from your website. Share your most popular content to Parliament so your advocates can re-share it using their own voice.
• Repurpose your content - Like much of your longer-form content, one blog post can translate into more than one post. Consider turning articles, reports, or blogs into four to five pieces of content that you can schedule for sharing over the course of a month.
• Lean on your advocates to help - The “Suggested posts” feature in Parliament can help drive suggestions from your advocates. Involve them! Consider content with a more personal touch like an on-the-ground post from an employee volunteer day, or a behind-the-scenes look at your booth at a conference. Encourage your advocates to upload photos or attach links that you can later vet, edit, and include in Parliament for the wider organization to share.

Measure your success

For your employee advocacy strategy to be effective, you should consider a few key indicators. Your goals are to increase your brand awareness, increase traffic to your website, and create more customer engagement. You may also have more marketing-specific goals such as increased hotel bookings, or more likes and follows.

Set clear, quantifiable goals that you can clearly measure through Analytics or your own internal business measures. Parliament measures post impact and adoption as well as engagement for Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. Viewing these metrics will give you a good idea of how your posts are being received, which platforms need more support, and how new strategies are working.

Keeping track of your analytics is one of the best ways to see how your strategy is being received and where you can do better. Those numbers will tell you which content is performing well and which content isn’t. If you’re just starting out, post a variety of content to see what gets more traction. See Track Amplify engagement to learn more.

Some things you might want to look for when reviewing your Parliament metrics:

See Get started with Parliament for admins to start building your employee advocacy program.