Algorithm shifts. Financial uncertainty. Crowded feeds. Like all social entrepreneurs, that is the social panorama our group faces. At Sprout, we flip to worker advocacy to assist us overcome our most urgent challenges and amplify our content material.
“Advocacy is our secret superpower for creating consciousness,” says Olivia Jepson, Sprout Social’s Senior Social Media Strategist. “Amplification is the important thing to breaking via the noise, rising our attain and standing out on social media.”
On this article, we’ll showcase how worker advocacy turns our best challenges into our strongest alternatives. Maintain studying for a deep dive into our technique and actionable steps you possibly can observe to gasoline your advocacy program.
Why advocacy issues
Our workers are our best asset on social. That’s why we depend on advocacy to unravel our hardest issues and bolster our general technique. Listed here are 4 methods our advocacy program delivers options to widespread social media challenges.
Extends attain and consciousness
Social media problem #1: Attaining natural attain on social media is tougher than ever.
For those who’re struggling to interrupt via on social, flip to your workers to widen your viewers and develop your model group via advocacy. On common, content material shared by individuals receives extra whole engagements than content material shared by manufacturers. Sprout’s Worker Advocacy resolution allows you to curate and share model content material with workers all inside a number of clicks. You possibly can keep compliant with pre-approved copy for workers to share, and also you get automated studies for instance your affect via knowledge.
Advocacy is the best method to lengthen our attain. By way of Sprout’s Worker Advocacy resolution, we drove a attain of 28.9 million in 2024. We additionally drove an earned media worth (EMV) of $898,000.
EMV is a key metric in our technique that demonstrates the affect of our work with a greenback signal. General, EA’s attain and consciousness is greater than 3 times what we drove from all our different networks mixed. When workers have fun our firm’s tradition and accomplishments and share their genuine experiences, curiosity in Sprout ripples throughout their social networks.
Attracts the perfect candidates
Social media problem #2: Social groups are rising, however it may be arduous to search out the precise candidates in a crowded market. Some 86% of promoting leaders anticipate hiring not less than two new group members in 2025.
Permit your present workers to broaden your candidate search and generate curiosity in working to your firm. At Sprout, advocacy facilitates extra alternatives to draw high expertise. Our group members are desirous to put up about their expertise with our model. Their messages are essentially the most compelling examples of firm tradition we will supply potential candidates, they usually assist us stand out in a crowded enjoying discipline.
EA stays among the finest channels we now have for amplifying hiring information. On a biweekly foundation, our companions on the recruitment group curate precedence open positions and depend on it to construct a pipeline of highly-qualified candidates.
Many Sprout groups work collectively to curate posts about open roles, product awards and cultural recognitions. Our advocacy program makes it as straightforward for our group members to share these bulletins with their networks by placing them multi function place.
When Sprout was named #1 product by G2 in 2024, we had our top-performing EA put up ever. Our workers shared it over 600 occasions, their networks engaged with it 10,000 occasions and it reached virtually 1 million individuals. EA is an effective way to not solely amplify key model milestones, but in addition enrich your employer model by giving your group an opportunity to take delight of their accomplishments.
Engages and empowers workers
Social media problem #3: Organizations battle to have interaction workers to put up on social media. They have to additionally stability mitigating potential dangers from employee-generated content material with amplifying the experiences of inner voices.
By permitting your workers to take a shared position in your organization’s id, you give them your belief. You’ll want to present useful assets and a steady pipeline of worker advocacy content material to make your program profitable.
When curating a narrative for our group to share on our advocacy platform, we offer pre-approved social copy in order that they really feel assured they’re staying on-brand—whereas we’re reassured they’re representing our model positively. Workers can personalize the message thought earlier than sharing it, bettering the percentages that not each put up is identical.

No matter a group member’s consolation with social media or expertise creating their thought management, worker model amplification makes representing Sprout on-line extra accessible.
Based on Micaela McGinley, Senior Inside Communications Strategist, “In a digital, remote-first work atmosphere, the times of popping over to the subsequent cubicle are behind us. We’ve to ensure our content material resonates and is definitely shareable. Sprout’s Advocacy resolution empowers individuals to remain lively on their social networks and unfold thrilling information.”
Jepson says, “Advocacy allows us to focus on our total group to amplify a marketing campaign. Each single member of our firm can take part, regardless of their division or social media expertise—it goes past advertising.”
EA can even function a lifeline throughout a disaster—amplifying key messages to our prospects and others within the trade. For instance, after we shared two posts concerning the impending TikTok ban, we drove 198 shares, 375 engagements and reached 388,000 individuals within the first 24 hours. Having ready and authorised copy protected our model and empowered Sprouters to share related messaging to our viewers.
Fortifies religion in social
Social media problem #4: Securing social buy-in
Advocacy pays off and improves your social technique ROI.
Proving the worth of social to stakeholders might be difficult, particularly on networks the place it’s more and more troublesome to achieve traction and costly to position adverts. By measuring worker advocacy efforts and displaying the affect of your EA program, you possibly can assist safe funding and assets.
Rachael Goulet, Director, Social Media says, “When you think about the scale and scope of the viewers you’re capable of attain with advocacy, you possibly can evaluate how a lot you’d’ve spent on a media funds to make the identical affect. With EA, we’ve been capable of attain the precise individuals—one thing that isn’t all the time assured with paid media.”
However to reap the advantages EA can convey, it’s essential to set your program up for achievement. See our worker advocacy launch guidelines for every part it’s good to get began or optimize your EA technique.
How we use Sprout’s Advocacy platform
All of the accountability doesn’t fall on our social group’s shoulders alone. There’s lots of cross-functional partnership. Right here’s a breakdown of how we use our Advocacy platform and different Sprout instruments to assist our model amplification operate.
How we curate
We’ve about 20 teammates throughout Sprout that assist us curate new tales in our Advocacy platform regularly. General, we normally share 4 to 5 tales per week. Our social, public relations and content material groups collaborate to determine which content material we promote in our Advocacy platform. We embrace Sprout-specific content material (launch supplies, weblog posts, social content material, and so on.) and third-party articles.
We prioritize sharing:
- Employer model content material
- Owned and earned thought management
- Trade insights and information
- Recruitment content material
We lately up to date our curation course of to introduce a brand new approval workflow to assist guarantee EA gives a centralized, simplified view of Sprout’s most crucial content material—making the platform intuitive and extremely useful. This course of primarily units a north star for firm priorities and helps our employer branding technique.
At Sprout, we now have a singular drawback of typically having an excessive amount of content material in EA, so this approval workflow empowers us to achieve cross-department visibility and foster robust collaboration. Each time groups add content material for curation, myself or a member of the social group will overview it based mostly on the next standards:
- Timing: Is that this message evergreen? Will it compete with different precedence messages if we launch it now? Is EA the precise channel?
- Greatest practices: Can we make this extra social-first? Is it related to our viewers or prospects?
- Reporting wants: Are the precise tags chosen? Is that this the precise marketing campaign? Is the precise Subject chosen?
Our inner distribution technique
From there, our group can share the story to their social profiles proper from the Present Tales feed in Worker Advocacy.
To encourage sharing amongst our group, we ship weekly digests with our newest high-priority content material tales, like company-wide updates. We’ve biweekly newsletters to succeed in our inner influencer viewers–this contains Workforce Sprouters who’ve giant followings throughout social media or have extensive affect after they share EA posts. Hyperlinks from the publication will take group members to our Advocacy platform, the place they’ll share our content material. Lastly, we additionally cross-promote key updates on inner channels to make sure everybody will get the knowledge they want.

We additionally lately launched a cross-team calendar that offers visibility into what different groups are planning so as to add to EA within the coming weeks and months, and we will see the way it pertains to programming on our natural social channels.
The Sprout options that assist combine advocacy into our bigger technique
Based on Goulet, her different favourite advocacy-forward Sprout options are:
Advocacy reporting instruments
Throughout the platform, you possibly can pull knowledge like potential attain, earned media worth, shares, engagements and different metrics that can assist you decide which tales carry out greatest together with your group and their audiences.
Tagging
Throughout all Sprout properties, you possibly can tag your messages based mostly in your workflows, enterprise aims and advertising methods—which makes it straightforward to trace how nicely Advocacy content material performs. The platform additionally affords UTM tagging, a classy software that may allow you to show how curated content material impacts your web site’s visitors.
Ship to Advocacy operate
Whether or not it’s posts you’ve already printed or third occasion content material you’re sourcing, you need to use the Ship to Advocacy functionality in Sprout’s Compose software to seamlessly add new sources to our advocacy platform.
Subjects
When you have lots of content material to share like Sprout, you may begin to really feel the results of social media saturation. To mediate this problem, use Subjects throughout the platform so customers can customise their Feed based mostly on the content material that greatest aligns with their position and areas of curiosity. We’ve product-specific and messaging pillar Subjects, in addition to a Subject for Firm Information.

Sprout’s Advocacy platform: The important thing to amplifying your model
The challenges social entrepreneurs face aren’t going away. But, a robust efficiency on social media is turning into increasingly more necessary for manufacturers.
The important thing to amplifying your model’s social efficiency is tapping into your workers and their networks on social media. Worker Advocacy helps you lengthen your model’s attain, appeal to the perfect candidates, empower your workers and show the worth of social to stakeholders. Expertise it for your self and join a demo.