Your employee advocacy program is gaining momentum. You're seeing more shares internally, and employees are posting on LinkedIn and Twitter. But how do you find out if it's working?
Well, the key is to start with a clear goal in mind. Whether you're aiming for brand awareness, hiring, or a sales boost, your employee advocates can help you get there. You need to figure out the right mix of metrics to demonstrate their impact.
Let's explore six metrics you can use to determine whether your program is meeting its goals. With the right combination, you can track employee engagement, measure the business impact, and see how the program is doing over time.
What Are Employee Advocacy Metrics?
Employee advocacy metrics are simply numbers that track how well your program is working. They help you see what's going well, what needs improvement, and how your program is impacting your company's goals.
This can include key performance indicators (KPIs) like:
- Number of employees participating
- Engagement rates
- Reach
- Website traffic
Remember, the power of an employee advocacy program isn't limited to external metrics. Tracking internal metrics is equally important.
But wait, what are internal and external metrics?
Internal metrics: These numbers show how involved your employees are in the program, what kind of content they're creating, and how well that content is doing.
External metrics: These numbers measure the impact your program is having on important areas of your business. Some examples include:
- How many people are seeing your employees' posts?
- What kind of engagement are those posts getting (likes, comments, shares, clicks, etc.)?
- How many leads, customers, or partners are coming from those posts?
- How much traffic are the employee advocates driving to your website?
- How much free publicity or earned media coverage are you getting from your employees' efforts?
- What's the impact on your brand goodwill and how do people feel about your brand overall?
Six Employee Advocacy Metrics to Measure
So, you know about the two metrics, but which one should you track first?
Well, if you’re starting with a clear slate, begin with the internal metrics. Because before you analyze your social media performance, it's important to understand employee engagement within the program. That means not only how many have joined, but also how actively they are participating and creating content.
From our experience managing hundreds of employee advocacy programs, here are the top 6 metrics that you should be tracking to measure your success:
1. Employee adoption
Employee adoption is the total number of active users (those who have logged in and who post regularly) compared to the total number of users invited to your program.
Employee adoption is an essential metric for program administrators. If you want to see bigger results, like more shares, engagement, and website traffic, you need to ensure that your employees are logging in and sharing content on your platform.
Getting employees active is key. If your adoption rate is high, it means your employees understand the value of advocacy and are eager to participate.
As a program admin, your job is to promote your employee advocacy program internally. This will ensure your employees know about the program and are logging in regularly.
If participation is low, consider incentives or gamification to boost engagement.
If you have strong employee adoption, your platform will become the go-to source for content. It becomes part of your employees' daily routine, which leads to more shares.
Why track?
Tracking employee adoption rate helps you see:
- Number of employees actively participating in the program.
- Number of employees completing the required training.
- Number of employees consistently following the program's guidelines.
To track employee adoption rates, using Highperformr is the easiest option. Highperformr is a complete social media management suite, capable of tracking the number of enrollments, sign-ups, and active accounts promoting your company’s content. Highperformr lets you see how well your advocacy program is being adopted by employees.
2. Share-rate
What kind of content are employees most excited to share? What do they think their audience will like best?
This shows you what kind of content your employees and their audiences are most interested in. It also helps you figure out where those customer shares are coming from.
Often, the fear of social media can hold employees back from sharing.
That's why tracking your share rate is essential. It helps you determine what encourages or discourages your employees from participating in advocacy.
Why track?
Tracking this metric is important because:
- It helps you determine areas where content variety is needed.
- It informs future content strategy decisions based on what's working and what's not
Highperformr tracks the total number of shares by employees compared to the total number of active users. It helps you analyze what content works and what doesn’t.
3. Reach
You'll definitely want to know how many people are seeing your advocates' content.
To do this, keep track of things like:
- The number of posts employees are making.
- How often those posts are shared.
- how many people they reach.
This will give you a good idea of how far your brand message is spreading through your employees' networks.
If you're running a small program without any fancy software, you can just ask your advocates to tell you how many people saw their posts each week or month, and then add it all up in a spreadsheet.
But if you have a bigger program with more than 10 advocates, this can get a bit messy and inconvenient. In that case, an employee advocacy tool like Highperformr can take care of all this for you.
Why track?
Tracking this metric helps you:
- To see what types of content connect most with your audience.
- To identify your most influential employees and leverage their reach.
- To measure the overall success and impact of your advocacy program.
To measure reach, Highperformr gauges the visibility and amplification of brand messages through employee networks.
4. Interactions
It's basically the number of times people interact with an employee's posted content within a certain timeframe. For example, if an employee gets 27 interactions within 30 days, that's their engagement rate for that period.
An interaction could be anything from likes, favorites, shares, and retweets to replies, comments, or clicks on a shared link. So, you can figure out how many interactions your posts have received by seeing how many people clicked on or retweeted your content.
Why track?
Tracking interaction metrics in employee advocacy helps you see:
- How actively people interact with your brand's content when shared by employees
- Who are the ones engaging most frequently, what they do, where they are from, etc.
5. Click-through rates
Click-through rate (CTR) is simply a measure of how many people clicked on a social media post shared by an employee. It's a good way to see how interesting and engaging your content is.
Here's a simple formula to know your click-through rates:
Total Measured Clicks / Total Measured Reach x 100
Why track?
The main reason for tracking CTR is to measure engagement. It's especially important if your employees are sharing content from other sources, as you'll need a way to see if people are actually reading it. You'll be able to understand things like:
- How much traffic is going to your website?
- How many visitors are converting into customers or leads?
- How engaged people are with your content.
6. Earned media value
Earned media value is all the positive publicity you get organically – through word-of-mouth from customers, social media fans, or your own employees sharing your content.
When used to measure the success of your employee advocacy program, it provides a direct comparison to paid advertising efforts.
This allows you to demonstrate the tangible return on investment of your program and shows how it stacks up against traditional marketing spending.
Why track?
- Show the real-world value of your employee advocacy program.
- Understand how your employees are boosting your brand's reputation organically.
Why Measuring Employee Advocacy Metrics Matter
Metrics are the backbone of any successful employee advocacy program.
It matters because:
- They help you see how your program is doing over time.
- You can see how your results compare to similar companies.
- You can use those numbers and the return on your investment to show your bosses how valuable your program is.
Don’t Guess, Assess! Measure Your Advocacy Success Today
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) help you find out what's working and what's not in your employee advocacy program. So, don't just measure them, learn why they're high or low.
Remember, though, that while data is important, employee advocacy helps your brand in lots of ways that you can't always directly measure. And since it can do more than just help with marketing and sales, the benefits are huge.
With Highperformr’s advanced analytics and AI capabilities, you can effectively measure and optimize your employee advocacy program today, and drive better engagement, reach, and business outcomes.
