People want to connect with people, not logos.
Yeah, yeah, you already know this.
But we’ve seen the conversation around employee advocacy ramp up like crazy over the past year, and for good reason. Unless you’re living under a rock, you know that individual LinkedIn accounts are outperforming branded accounts by roughly 9,546%* when it comes to driving pipeline for B2B.
(*A highly unscientific ‘arb estimate. But probably not that far off.)
Your built-in brand ambassadors—your employees—are one of the easiest, lowest cost ways for you to quadruple your marketing results. So naturally, folks are asking a lot about this.
We’re here to answer.
I’ve spent a lot of time running employee advocacy programs across multiple B2B agencies. At storyarb, we’ve managed exec social media for brands from creator AI solution Beacons to a social media unicorn with 60M+ MAUs. And recently, we ran ourselves a little experiment.
10 weeks. 14 employees (co-founders don’t count). And a $5,000 cash prize for whoever could get the most attention posting on LinkedIn.
The results:
- 7M+ impressions across the team
- 1.7M impressions from just our top 3 employees!
- 55% uptick in website sessions
- 54% growth in LinkedIn followers (with a majority being in-niche marketers)
- 16% of new site traffic driven by LinkedIn
- Sales prospects regularly mentioned the contest in demos—even months later
- Job candidates finding us through #OTI (we even hired one)
- Feedback like “OTI got me to finally book a meeting” and “storyarb has invaded my feeds”
And while “buzz” is a slippery thing to measure, we sure created a nice lil trend cycle for ourselves:
Here’s our playbook for employee advocacy programs that work.
Where employee advocacy programs go wrong
Trying to get people to post on LinkedIn is a little like trying to get them to do karaoke sober at a work event.
Awkward, forced, and incredibly off-key.
We get it. We’ve been the annoying social media manager reminding everyone to post the Best Place to Work Award on social media. We’ve been the bleary-eyed content lead sending social media boilerplate that is “so easy to copy and paste!”, and yet, is never copy-pasted. And we’ve been the two-factor-authentication codebreaker trying to get into an exec’s account so they will post the damn product announcement.
And so we know: Those strategies don’t work. Employee advocacy programs fail when they lack:
- Proper incentives,
- team spirit, and
- gamification—something to make posting fun, measurable, and just a little competitive.
What does work? Our equation is simple:
This approach means treating social posting as a compensated skill development opportunity—rather than an extra unpaid task.
Employee enablement FAQ
When should I get started?
Start when you can commit real incentives and sustained effort.
How do I get started?
Here’s a checklist:
- Set up your tracking tool and leaderboard (we used Shield—get 20% for 12 months with code ARB20)
- Secure budget and set financial incentives
- Create a Slack channel for sharing posts and supporting peers
- Schedule weekly leaderboard reviews (we baked ours into our all-hands meeting)
- Host a kickoff session explaining the rules, incentives, and how to connect to your tracking tool
- Schedule L+D sessions on topics like writing great hooks, your company’s content pillars, AI prompts, and office hours for writing support
- Run week-long mini-competitions to keep momentum as you go
Who should participate?
Every department has unique insights. Encourage product managers, recruiters, and engineers to post about what they’re learning. These are the stories that make your brand human.
But if you’re nervous to go all in with the full team, or a large team, start with a small pilot group who’s excited about the opportunity. Ideally, one participant from each department. Then expand to the broader team once you’ve run for a quarter and oiled up the machine.
How do I help my employees figure out what to write?
Teach them! We held regular L+D sessions and open office hours where our leadership teams shared quick tips and tricks for more engaging content. Training sessions also helped level the playing field so non-writers and people newer to LinkedIn could compete.
Loop in your marketing or social team to lead quick sessions on topics like writing strong hooks, content pillars, formats to experiment with, and LinkedIn best practices.
Should all posts be about our company/content?
Nope. Employees should post about topics that they (1) know a lot about, and (2) are actually interested in. Over the course of our competition, our employees posted about everything from music journalism and stand-up to playwriting and parenting.
Encourage employees to write about topics and experiences within their role that they find genuinely useful, surprising, or just plain cool. Our rule was that 50% of content needed to be related to one of our content pillars, which we purposefully kept broad.
How long should I run the competition for?
We recommend 6–12 weeks. (Our campaign lasted 10 weeks.)
It’s enough time to require some sustained effort—you can’t just ride early leader dominance to the end—but short enough that there’s an end in sight, so momentum doesn’t fizzle out.
Do I need a financial incentive?
Yes. People won’t post as much without a financial incentive, full stop. We recommend making it a meaningful one too.
For our competition, we offered $5,000 to our first place winner, $1,000 to second place, and $500 to third.
How do I motivate sustained excitement + interest in posting?
Keyword: sustained. Here are a few strategies you can try:
1. Share your leader board in recurring meetings (we put ours up in our weekly all-hands) to whip up public recognition and friendly competition.
2. Try running week-long “mini-competitions” with smaller rewards (lunch, gift cards, coffee) throughout the competition for employees who achieved things like:
- Publishing 5 posts in a week
- Getting the most impressions in a week
- Writing the most-viewed post about a specific topic
- Most creative hook
3. Make your employees look good—literally—with branded, high-quality headshots and banners. It’s a nice visual touch to make you look like the team you are. We find people are more likely to post when they feel their presence is polished, and they’re more likely to get engagement when they have a clear, up-to-date profile picture.
How do I easily track performance?
First: Stop doing this manually! That is its own nightmare you will not wake up from. We used Shield to track impressions, top posts, and other key data for each employee account week by week, then shared both weekly and aggregate results in our all-hands meetings.
(ICYMI above: storyarb readers can get a 20% discount on Shield with the promo code ARB20.)
Should I make participation mandatory/tie it to goals and performance?
Encourage participation, but don’t make it mandatory. Forced advocacy fails. Empowerment wins. Give your employees the tools to succeed—but let them opt in, make it their own, and watch the authenticity come through.
How do I know it’s working?
These are the success metrics to watch:
- Impressions, likes, and comments on employee posts
- Follower growth on individual and corporate accounts
- Prospects who mention your competition on their demo (ask your sales team!)
- Job candidates who find you through LinkedIn
- Inbound partnership or collaboration requests
- Speaking opportunities and podcast invites for employees whose posts take off
One last thing: LinkedIn growth takes time. Give your experiment enough time to run before you declare it a success or failure.
Benefits beyond the 10-week contest
Beyond the hard numbers, there were a few unexpected benefits:
- Team Collaboration — The camaraderie and collaboration between people who otherwise might not have connected was so fun to see and feel. Our writers pinging ops people about their posts, ops congratulating our strategists on going viral, our strategists asking the writers for hook-writing tips. The work encouraged tons of extra collaboration and support that brought the team closer together.
- Recruitment Tool — Several job candidates mentioned finding storyarb through our employee’s LinkedIn posts. Even months later, we get qualified candidates who explicitly mention #OTI as the thing that piqued their interest in storyarb. Not mad at that!
- Raising Employee Profiles — Employee advocacy is the best of thought leadership: original, visible, and human. It gives your ICP the touchpoints they need to make you a familiar and trusted source. And it elevates your internal SMEs as thought leaders in their own right, building their authority, visibility, and networks.
You already invest in training and coaching your team. A competition like #OTI is the exact same thing—an investment in your employees, so they can learn the LinkedIn skills that will elevate them individually and your brand as a whole. In fact, it’s one of the best training investments you can make, because the results are so measurable and tangible.
Now, if you want to dive deeper into what to post about…
…our winner wrote about it on LinkedIn.
