Changes in algorithms. Economic unpredictability. Overloaded feeds. Similar to other social marketers, this is the social environment our team encounters. At Sprout, we embrace employee advocacy as a solution to tackle our biggest challenges and enhance our content’s visibility.
“Advocacy is our unparalleled strength for fostering awareness,” states Olivia Jepson, Senior Social Media Strategist at Sprout Social. “Amplification is crucial for cutting through the clutter, expanding our reach, and distinguishing ourselves on social media.”
In this piece, we’ll highlight how employee advocacy transforms our most significant obstacles into our most robust opportunities. Continue reading for an in-depth exploration of our strategy and practical steps that can help you energize your advocacy program.
The Importance of Advocacy
Our employees represent our most valuable resource on social. This is why we leverage advocacy to address our toughest issues and strengthen our overarching strategy. Below are four ways our advocacy program offers solutions to prevalent social media challenges.
Broadens reach and visibility
Social media challenge #1: Gaining organic reach on social media is increasingly challenging.
If you’re finding it difficult to stand out on social, consider utilizing your employees to broaden your audience and cultivate your brand community through advocacy. Generally, content disseminated by individuals garners more interactions than content shared by brands. Sprout’s Employee Advocacy solution allows you to assemble and share brand content with employees in just a few clicks. You can ensure compliance with pre-approved messages for employees to disseminate, and you receive automated reports to showcase your impact through analytics.
Advocacy serves as the simplest method to broaden our outreach. Through Sprout’s Employee Advocacy solution, we achieved a reach of 28.9 million in 2024. We also generated an earned media value (EMV) of $898,000.
EMV is a pivotal metric in our strategy that reflects the financial impact of our initiatives. Overall, the reach and awareness from employee advocacy equates to more than three times the combined results from all our other channels. When employees celebrate our company’s culture and achievements and share their genuine experiences, interest in Sprout spreads across their social networks.
Draws in top candidates
Social media challenge #2: While social teams are expanding, discovering the right candidates in a saturated market can be challenging. Approximately 86% of marketing leaders expect to hire at least two new team members in 2025.
Let your existing employees broaden your candidate outreach and spark interest in joining your organization. At Sprout, advocacy creates increased opportunities to attract exceptional talent. Our team members are enthusiastic about sharing their experiences with our brand. Their narratives are the strongest representations of our company culture we can provide to potential candidates, helping us distinguish ourselves in a competitive field.
Employee advocacy remains one of the most effective channels we have for disseminating hiring updates. Biweekly, our recruitment partners compile priority open positions and utilize it to cultivate a pool of highly qualified applicants.
Numerous Sprout teams unite to curate posts about job openings, product accolades, and cultural achievements. Our advocacy program simplifies sharing these announcements among team members by centralizing all content in one place.
When Sprout was recognized as the top product by G2 in 2024, we experienced our most successful EA post ever. Our employees shared it over 600 times, their networks engaged with it 10,000 times, and it reached nearly 1 million people. EA not only serves as a powerful tool to amplify notable brand milestones but also enhances our employer branding by allowing our team to take pride in their achievements.
Involves and empowers employees
Social media challenge #3: Organizations often find it tough to encourage employees to post on social media. They also need to manage the risks associated with employee-generated content while promoting the voices of internal advocates.
By allowing your employees to be part of your company’s identity, you grant them trust. Be sure to offer valuable resources and a steady stream of employee advocacy content to ensure your program’s success.
When assembling a narrative for our team to share via our advocacy platform, we supply pre-approved social copy so they can feel confident in staying on-brand—while we are assured they’re positively representing our brand. Employees have the option to personalize the suggested message before sharing, increasing the chances that not every post looks the same.
Regardless of an employee’s comfort level with social media or their experience in building their thought leadership, employee brand amplification simplifies representing Sprout online.
Micaela McGinley, Senior Internal Communications Strategist, states, “In a digital-first remote work environment, the days of visiting the next cubicle are a thing of the past. We must ensure our content resonates and is easy to share. Sprout’s Advocacy solution empowers individuals to remain active on their social networks and disseminate exciting news.”
Jepson adds, “Advocacy allows us to engage our whole team in amplifying a campaign. Every single employee can participate, regardless of their department or social media proficiency—it extends far beyond marketing.”
EA can also act as a vital resource during a crisis—helping convey essential messages to our customers and other stakeholders in the industry. For instance, when we published two posts about the potential TikTok ban, we achieved 198 shares, 375 engagements, and reached 388,000 individuals within the first 24 hours. Having pre-approved copy safeguarded our brand and enabled Sprouters to share relevant messaging with our audience.
Reinforces confidence in social
Social media challenge #4: Securing social buy-in.
Advocacy yields results and enhances the ROI of your social strategy.
Demonstrating the worth of social to stakeholders can be difficult, especially on platforms where gaining traction is becoming increasingly complex and costly for advertisements. By evaluating employee advocacy efforts and illustrating the impact of your EA program, you can help secure additional investment and resources.
Rachael Goulet, Director of Social Media, indicates, “When you assess the audience’s size and reach you can achieve through advocacy, you can juxtapose that with what you would need to spend on a media budget for similar results. With EA, we’ve reached the right individuals—something that isn’t always certain with paid media.”
However, to harness the advantages EA offers, you must design your program for success. Refer to our employee advocacy launch checklist for all you need to initiate or enhance your EA strategy.
How We Utilize Sprout’s Advocacy Platform
The responsibility isn’t solely on our social team. There’s considerable collaboration across functions. Here’s how we utilize our Advocacy platform along with other Sprout tools to bolster our brand amplification efforts.
How We Curate
We have around 20 teammates throughout Sprout who regularly assist us in curating new stories within our Advocacy platform. Typically, we share four to five stories weekly. Our social, public relations, and content teams work together to determine which pieces of content to highlight in our Advocacy platform. We share Sprout-specific content (launch materials, blog posts, social updates, etc.) along with external articles.
We prioritize the sharing of:
- Employer branding content
- Both owned and earned thought leadership
- Industry insights and news
- Recruitment-related content
We’ve recently revised our curation workflow to include a new approval process ensuring that EA offers a unified, streamlined overview of Sprout’s most vital content—enhancing the platform’s intuitiveness and value. This process essentially provides guidance for company priorities and supports our employer branding strategy.
At Sprout, we face the unique challenge of sometimes having an abundance of content in EA, so this approval workflow gives us cross-department visibility and fosters robust collaboration. Whenever teams contribute content for curation, I or a member of the social team will evaluate it based on the following criteria:
- Timing: Is this message evergreen? Will it compete with other priority messages if we publish it now? Is EA the appropriate channel?
- Best practices: Can we make this more engaging for social? Is it pertinent to our audience or clients?
- Reporting needs: Are the correct tags assigned? Is the campaign correctly identified? Is the right Topic chosen?
Our Internal Distribution Strategy
Following this, our team can share the story to their social profiles directly from the Current Stories feed in Employee Advocacy.
To promote sharing among our team, we distribute weekly summaries featuring our latest high-priority content stories, including company-wide announcements. We have biweekly newsletters targeting our internal influencer audience—this includes Team Sprouters who boast large followings across social media or have a significant impact when sharing EA posts. Links in the newsletter direct team members to our Advocacy platform for sharing our content. Additionally, we promote key updates on internal channels to guarantee everyone remains informed.
We have also recently introduced a cross-team calendar that provides insight into what other teams are planning to add to EA in the upcoming weeks and months, allowing us to coordinate it with our content on organic social channels.
Sprout Features That Assist in Integrating Advocacy into Our Broader Strategy
According to Goulet, her favorite advocacy-centric features within Sprout include:
Advocacy reporting tools
The platform enables data extraction on potential reach, earned media value, shares, engagements, and other metrics which help you ascertain which stories resonate best with your team and their audiences.
Tagging
Across all Sprout features, you can tag your messages according to your workflows, business goals, and marketing strategies—facilitating easy tracking of Advocacy content performance. The platform also provides UTM tagging, an advanced tool that helps illustrate how curated content influences your website traffic.
Send to Advocacy function
Whether it involves posts you’ve already published or third-party content you’re sourcing, the Send to Advocacy feature in Sprout’s Compose tool allows for the seamless integration of new sources into our advocacy platform.
Topics
If your organization has a vast amount of content to share like Sprout, you might encounter the challenges of social media saturation. To combat this problem, utilize Topics within the platform so users can personalize their Feed based on content that closely relates to their role and interests. We have Topics for specific products, messaging pillars, and Company News.
Sprout’s Advocacy Platform: The Key to Elevating Your Brand
The obstacles faced by social marketers are persistent. However, a robust performance on social media is becoming increasingly crucial for brands.
The essential element for amplifying your brand’s social performance is engaging your employees and their networks on social media. Employee Advocacy assists in expanding your brand’s reach, attracting top-tier candidates, empowering your employees, and demonstrating social’s value to stakeholders. Experience it firsthand and sign up for a demo.
The post An impactful employee advocacy example in practice: How Sprout utilizes EA to amplify our brand appeared first on Sprout Social.
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