What is employee advocacy on LinkedIn?
Short answer
Employee advocacy on LinkedIn is employees publishing about their company, their work and their industry from their own profiles, to audiences they personally own. It is different from resharing company posts: origination carries the reach and the trust. The programs that last start with the few employees who already have an audience.
Employee advocacy on LinkedIn is employees publishing about their company, their work and their industry from their own profiles, to audiences they personally own. That is the definition. Everything after this is implementation.
How is advocacy different from resharing company posts?
Resharing pushes brand content through employee accounts. Advocacy in the sense that works is origination: the employee writes it, in their voice, about something they know first hand. Readers can tell which is which inside a sentence, and so can the feed.
- Reshares carry the brand voice and inherit the discount readers apply to brand content.
- Original employee posts carry personal credibility and reach second and third degree networks.
- Reshares scale easily and convert poorly. Original posts scale slowly and convert well.
Why does this work on LinkedIn specifically?
LinkedIn is the only large network where a person's job, employer and buying role are public and linked together. A post from a named engineer at a named company arrives with context no other platform supplies, and it is where B2B buying committees are actually reachable.
What is employee advocacy worth?
The value is easiest to see as a ratio. Add up the visible follower or connection counts of your ten largest employee audiences, then compare that with the company page following. Past fifty employees the employee total is normally several times bigger. That multiple is the size of the channel sitting idle.
The second half of the value is trust. Buyers, candidates and partners reply to people. Advocacy turns an audience you already own into conversations rather than impressions.
Is employee advocacy free?
The distribution is free. The time is not. Someone has to help busy people publish, which in practice means editing, ghostwriting, or a short weekly ritual with a calendar hold on it. Platforms are optional and usually premature until a small group posts reliably.
| Resharing company posts | Employee originated posts | |
|---|---|---|
| Voice | Brand copy | The employee's own words |
| Distribution | Limited, often skipped by the feed | Travels through commenters' networks |
| Comments and replies | Rare | Common, often from buyers |
| Effort per post | Minutes | Fifteen minutes with a writer |
How do you start in one week?
- 1Rank your employees by visible LinkedIn audience and take the top ten.
- 2Pick three who are willing, starting from the top of the ranking rather than from volunteers.
- 3Draft their first four posts from things they already said internally.
- 4Publish weekly for a month, tracking followers gained and replies received per person.
- 5Decide about tooling or a wider rollout only after that month.
Step one is the one people underestimate, because LinkedIn offers no view that ranks your own employees by audience. Invisible Reach, our report at Invisible Keyboard, produces it in one pass: the ten largest LinkedIn audiences inside a company, with names, titles, profile links, follower or connection counts, and combined reach.
Advocacy is not asking people to share your posts. It is finding out who already has an audience, and helping them use it.
Frequently asked questions
- What is employee advocacy on LinkedIn in one sentence?
- It is employees publishing about their work and industry from their own profiles, to audiences they personally own, rather than resharing posts from the company page.
- How do I measure employee advocacy?
- Per person: posts published, followers gained, replies and DMs received, and conversations sourced from that profile. Compare the combined employee audience with the company page following to size the opportunity.