One of the most effective but underrated platforms for employee advocacy is LinkedIn. LinkedIn marketing enables your staff to create and share content with their professional networks, a strategy that benefits both the company and the individual employee. This also enables them to humanize your brand and engage with prospects. This article examines why LinkedIn is the ideal platform for employee advocacy, an untapped brand voice.

What Does B2B Employee Advocacy Entail on LinkedIn?

B2B employee advocacy involves encouraging employees to share their company's insights, content, and work experiences on their social media profiles. This can consist of different aspects such as:  

• The employee shares essential industry insights, thought leaders, and company updates on LinkedIn.
• Employees are guided by their company on the content to make.
• Employees engage in conversations regarding the company, industry, and their experience as a way of building credibility.

By sharing this kind of content, employees help humanize the brand, expand its reach, and encourage engagement with the target audience. They become brand ambassadors, enabling companies to connect with prospects in a genuine and impactful way. 

Why Choose LinkedIn for B2B Employee Advocacy

Over the last couple of years, LinkedIn has emerged as the ideal platform for B2B employee advocacy, surpassing X as the most preferred choice. Since LinkedIn is the most popular platform for professionals, it's an excellent platform for your brand and employees. By implementing employee advocacy on LinkedIn, you can: 

Expand the Reach of Your Brand

The LinkedIn page of a company can have a limited reach. On the other hand, employees can have extensive professional networks. According to LinkedIn statistics, a company employee can have ten times more connections collectively compared to the company page. 

Additionally, the LinkedIn algorithm tends to prioritize content shared by individuals over content shared by company pages. Ultimately, posts created by employees generate higher engagement, leading to increased visibility.

Studies indicate that the content created by employees receives eight times more engagement compared to brand channel content. Therefore, the content created by employees can have a significant impact. 

For instance, let's assume your company has a white paper it wants to promote. Instead of sharing it on the company page, it can be shared with employees of different departments to reach thousands of professionals in various industries. Employees can also leverage LinkedIn groups for industry networking.

Increasing Credibility and Trust

When it comes to B2B marketing, sales are primarily driven through relationships and trust. When your employees promote your B2B, this is equivalent to word-of-mouth marketing. When you encourage them to become thought leaders, you can strengthen your brand's trust by amplifying its voice. When customers feel connected to your brand, they are more likely to choose it over the competitors.

Studies show that 72% of customers feel connected to a brand when they can trust it. This primarily works for high professional B2B thought leadership. Therefore, you can leverage the relationships of your employees. An Edelman Trust Barometer report indicates that employees are seen as more credible than company pages.

Employees also help to humanize your brand, resulting in stronger connections with your audience. For instance, a sales manager can create a post showcasing how the company's SaaS platform has enhanced client workflow. When an employee shares the content, it looks more like a brand.

Connecting with Decision Makers

One reason for this is that LinkedIn is where most B2B decision-makers are made. According to a 2022 Sprout Social Report, 68% of marketers suggest they have an advocacy program on LinkedIn, enabling them to reach the untapped market. Since employees consider LinkedIn a professional platform for sharing work-related content and leadership insights, it is the best platform to kickstart your program. 

LinkedIn is home to over 65 million decision-makers, making it the ideal platform for connecting with other B2B buyers. The key thing is to ensure you are sharing relevant content, such as deep thought leadership, industry insights, and thought-provoking ideas. With reports indicating that most B2B buyers use social media for purchasing decisions, you need to focus on creating interesting, relevant, and persuasive content. 

Tips on Mastering LinkedIn B2B Employee Advocacy

To get the most out of your B2B employee advocacy, here are tips to help you get started:

Optimize Your LinkedIn Page

The fact that it's your employees who will be posting doesn't mean you should abandon your company page. A Sprout Social report indicates that for every six posts shared on LinkedIn, they result in 13 business page views, one follower, and six career views. There are several tips you can use for optimizing your LinkedIn profile, such as: 

• Great branding. Ensure your profile picture and the cover image align with the image specs. It should be of high quality, up-to-date, and eye-catching.
• Have a complete profile. If your profile isn't full, it will lower the amount of trust people have in your brand.
• Fresh job positions. Statistics indicate that, on average, there are eight new hires on LinkedIn every minute. If you have open roles, post them on your page and remove any outdated ones.
• Recent post shares. Ensure your posts are up to date. Also, be sure to engage with the employee's posts.

Understand the Best LinkedIn Posting Time

The time when your employee posts content on LinkedIn will determine whether their strategy is successful or not. You want to ensure they post at the right time when most of your audience is online. The posting time will differ depending on your target audience and the kind of content you want to post.

A good idea would be to experiment with different posting times to determine what works best for your industry and audience. You can leverage LinkedIn analytics to track the performance of other posts at various times of the day or week. 

Employee Training and Onboarding

It is essential to provide employees with guidelines on specific areas, such as:

• What they shouldn't post. If they are posting your content, you need to clearly state the kind of content they aren't allowed to post. You can offer guidelines on brand values, on-brand language, the dos and the don’ts.
• Posting guidelines. Guide theme on the type of insights, thought leadership, and resources that are best suited for shaping the employee strategies.
• Best copywriting practices. Guide them on how to use hashtags, LinkedIn writing guide, best practices on using emojis, and more.

Create a Culture of Mutual Support

Ensure your employees are supporting one another by liking, sharing, and commenting on each other’s posts. You can onboard employees on platforms such as Slack, where they can share their content and receive feedback from others. By doing that, you will make yourself heard. You can also have a mentorship program where old members train new ones. With a supportive team culture, you can take your employee advocacy to the next level.

Track the Results

After the B2B employee advocacy program has started, you need to track whether they are producing the right results. Like any other social media marketing strategy, the employee advocacy program won't be perfect at first. Therefore, you will need to evaluate its performance, conduct employee surveys, and meet with industry stakeholders to determine what is working and what isn't. 

Ensure you share the progress with employees. After all, they are the ones who helped you reach that point. Celebrate their contributions to the campaign's success on LinkedIn. You can use the built-in LinkedIn Analytics to measure the results. Alternatively, you can use third-party tools such as Sprout Social for more tailored reporting.

Final Thoughts

When utilized effectively, LinkedIn can be a valuable platform for B2B employee advocacy. A good example of a brand that has done that well is Tech Enterprise Gong. Through their employee advocacy program, the company was able to grow its business size by eight times within two years. 

However, employee advocacy programs are only as good as the minds behind them and their strategy. By using the steps above, you can create an effective B2B employee advocacy program to take your business to the next level.