Why employee advocacy is the best media channel you have.

Here's a fun experiment. Look up Sir Richard Branson on LinkedIn. Then look up the Virgin company page.

According to Virgin's own website, Branson has close to 40 million followers across social media. On LinkedIn alone, he has more than 18 million. The company page for one of the most famous brands on the planet has a small fraction of that.

No offence to Virgin's social team.

People follow people. They always have. And yet most organisations lock their entire employer brand away on the company page.

Why employer brands get stuck on the company page.

Usually, it's a defensive instinct. There's a fear that someone will say the wrong thing, so it feels safer to keep everything official.

I understand the instinct. But it means your most trusted voices are sitting on the bench.

And the reach you're giving up is enormous. LinkedIn's own data shows a company's employees have, on average, ten times as many connections as the company has followers. When employees share exactly the same content, they get twice the click-through rate.

Here's the thing. Inside your business, people are already posting, sharing and creating. Plenty of others would happily say great things about working with you. They just don't think they're allowed.

That's what employee advocacy is really about. Giving proud people permission to be heard, and a bit of help doing it well.

How to start an employee advocacy program.

Start with the people who are already creating. You don't need to convince anyone who doesn't want to post. Look around and find the people who share regularly, even if it's about topics that have nothing to do with work. Enthusiasm for creating content is the thing you're looking for.

Then bring them together. A structured program works far better than a one-off email encouraging everyone to "get involved". We often run it as a 12-week sprint:

• Month one sets the ground rules. What good looks like, a few do's and don'ts, and plenty of ideas.
• Each week after that has a theme people are encouraged to post about, so nobody stares at a blank screen.
• A small league table tracks who's getting the most engagement. Nothing motivates an engineer quite like being beaten by someone from finance.
• Recognition and awards at the end, because people who put themselves out there deserve to be celebrated.

Two tips make a big difference. Guide rather than censor, because themes help and scripts kill it. And get your advocates engaging with each other's posts. LinkedIn's internal research found employees are 60% more likely to engage with posts from coworkers, and more engagement means more people see the post.

If you can, help them make video too. A short clip from someone on site will outperform a polished corporate post almost every time. That's where our recruitment video work often starts.

Connect employee advocacy to your employee referral program.

This is the one I'd be doing in every hard-to-hire industry, whether that's healthcare, engineering or anywhere the talent pool is small.

It's the talent challenge Townsville Hospital and Health Service faces with nurses and specialists, and the one Ghella faces when it wins a major rail project and needs hundreds of tunnelling specialists quickly.

If you already have a decent referral bonus, give each advocate their own tracked link. When someone applies through an advocate's post and gets the job, it counts as a referral. That's a fair, genuine incentive, and nobody has to pretend.

It also hands you something HR teams rarely get: a clean ROI story. "Our advocates' links led to 26 hires. Our average cost per hire is this. So the program returned that." That's the kind of number that gets a CEO's attention.

And referred hires tend to be better hires. When I worked inside a talent acquisition function, employee referrals were by far our best source of hire on six-month retention. People recommend friends they'd happily vouch for later.

Amplify your best employee posts.

Now for the advanced play, and honestly one of my favourite things we do.

Look at everything your advocates post and pick the top three to five performers. Then put paid media behind them, aimed at exactly the people you want to hire.

Say you're an engineering firm that needs more engineers. Build a LinkedIn audience of your 50 nearest competitors, filtered to the engineering job titles you're hiring for. When one of your engineers has a post that takes off, sponsor it as a Thought Leader Ad, with their permission, and put it straight in front of engineers at those competitors.

Real people, real stories, delivered with precision to the exact people you'd love to hire. That's employee advocacy with an engine attached, and it sits at the heart of how we approach recruitment marketing.

Start with ten names.

Here's something you can do this week. Search LinkedIn for people who list your organisation as their current employer, and look at who has posted recently. Write down the ten who already share, comment or create.

That's your first cohort. You've just started an employee advocacy program.

If you want the bigger picture of how advocacy fits into your employer brand, start with what employer branding is and why it matters.