A powerful employee advocacy example in action: How Sprout uses EA to amplify our brand

Algorithm shifts. Economic uncertainty. Crowded feeds. Like all social marketers, this is the social landscape our team faces. At Sprout, we turn to employee advocacy to help us overcome our most pressing challenges and amplify our content.

“Advocacy is our secret superpower for creating awareness,” says Olivia Jepson, Sprout Social’s Senior Social Media Strategist. “Amplification is the key to breaking through the noise, increasing our reach and standing out on social media.”

In this article, we’ll showcase how employee advocacy turns our greatest challenges into our strongest opportunities. Keep reading for a deep dive into our strategy and actionable steps you can follow to fuel your advocacy program.

Why advocacy matters

Our employees are our greatest asset on social. That’s why we rely on advocacy to solve our hardest problems and bolster our overall strategy. Here are four ways our advocacy program delivers solutions to common social media challenges.

Extends reach and awareness

Social media challenge #1: Achieving organic reach on social media is harder than ever.

If you’re struggling to break through on social, turn to your employees to widen your audience and grow your brand community through advocacy. On average, content shared by people receives more total engagements than content shared by brands. Sprout’s Employee Advocacy solution enables you to curate and share brand content with employees all within a few clicks. You can stay compliant with pre-approved copy for employees to share, and you get automated reports to illustrate your impact through data.

Advocacy is the easiest way to extend our reach. Through Sprout’s Employee Advocacy solution, we drove a reach of 28.9 million in 2024. We also drove an earned media value (EMV) of $898,000.

EMV is a key metric in our strategy that demonstrates the impact of our work with a dollar sign. Overall, EA’s reach and awareness is more than three times what we drove from all our other networks combined. When employees celebrate our company’s culture and accomplishments and share their authentic experiences, interest in Sprout ripples across their social networks.

Attracts the best candidates

Social media challenge #2: Social teams are growing, but it can be hard to find the right candidates in a crowded market. Some 86% of marketing leaders anticipate hiring ‌at least two new team members in 2025.

Allow your current employees to expand your candidate search and generate interest in working for your company. At Sprout, advocacy facilitates more opportunities to attract top talent. Our team members are eager to post about their experience with our brand. Their messages are the most compelling examples of company culture we can offer prospective candidates, and they help us stand out in a crowded playing field.

EA remains one of the best channels we have for amplifying hiring news. On a biweekly basis, our partners on the recruitment team curate priority open positions and rely on it to build a pipeline of highly-qualified candidates.

Many Sprout teams work together to curate posts about open roles, product awards and cultural recognitions. Our advocacy program makes it as easy for our team members to share these announcements with their networks by putting them all in one place.

When Sprout was named #1 product by G2 in 2024, we had our top-performing EA post ever. Our employees shared it over 600 times, their networks engaged with it 10,000 times and it reached almost 1 million people. EA is a great way to not only amplify key brand milestones, but also enrich your employer brand by giving your team a chance to take pride in their accomplishments.

Engages and empowers employees

Social media challenge #3: Organizations struggle to engage employees to post on social media. They must also balance mitigating potential risks from employee-generated content with amplifying the experiences of internal voices.

By allowing your employees to take a shared role in your company’s identity, you give them your trust. Be sure to provide helpful resources and a continuous pipeline of employee advocacy content to make your program successful.

When curating a story for our team to share on our advocacy platform, we provide pre-approved social copy so they feel confident they’re staying on-brand—while we’re reassured they’re representing our brand positively. Employees can personalize the message idea before sharing it, improving the odds that not every post is the same.

Regardless of a team member’s comfort with social media or experience developing their thought leadership, employee brand amplification makes representing Sprout online more accessible.

According to Micaela McGinley, Senior Internal Communications Strategist, “In a digital, remote-first work environment, the days of popping over to the next cubicle are behind us. We have to make sure our content resonates and is easily shareable. Sprout’s Advocacy solution empowers people to stay active on their social networks and spread exciting news.”

Jepson says, “Advocacy enables us to target our entire team to amplify a campaign. Every single member of our company can participate, no matter their department or social media experience—it goes beyond marketing.”

EA can also serve as a lifeline during a crisis—amplifying key messages to our customers and others in the industry. For example, when we shared two posts about the impending TikTok ban, we drove 198 shares, 375 engagements and reached 388,000 people in the first 24 hours. Having prepared and approved copy protected our brand and empowered Sprouters to share relevant messaging to our audience.

Fortifies faith in social

Social media challenge #4: Securing social buy-in

Advocacy pays off and improves your social strategy ROI.

Proving the value of social to stakeholders can be challenging, especially on networks where it’s increasingly difficult to gain traction and expensive to place ads. By measuring employee advocacy efforts and showing the impact of your EA program, you can help secure investment and resources.

Rachael Goulet, Director, Social Media says, “When you consider the size and scope of the audience you’re able to reach with advocacy, you can compare how much you would’ve spent on a media budget to make the same impact. With EA, we’ve been able to reach the right people—something that isn’t always guaranteed with paid media.”

But to reap the benefits EA can bring, you must set your program up for success. See our employee advocacy launch checklist for everything you need to get started or optimize your EA strategy.

How we use Sprout’s Advocacy platform

All the responsibility doesn’t fall on our social team’s shoulders alone. There’s a lot of cross-functional partnership. Here’s a breakdown of how we use our Advocacy platform and other Sprout tools to support our brand amplification function.

How we curate

We have about 20 teammates across Sprout that help us curate new stories in our Advocacy platform on a regular basis. Overall, we usually share four to five stories per week. Our social, public relations and content teams collaborate to decide which content we promote in our Advocacy platform. We include Sprout-specific content (launch materials, blog posts, social content, etc.) and third-party articles.

We prioritize sharing:

• Employer brand content
• Owned and earned thought leadership
• Industry insights and news
• Recruitment content

We recently updated our curation process to introduce a new approval workflow to help ensure EA provides a centralized, simplified view of Sprout’s most critical content—making the platform intuitive and highly valuable. This process essentially sets a north star for company priorities and supports our employer branding strategy.

At Sprout, we have a unique problem of often having too much content in EA, so this approval workflow empowers us to gain cross-department visibility and foster strong collaboration. Whenever teams add content for curation, myself or a member of the social team will review it based on the following criteria:

• Timing: Is this message evergreen? Will it compete with other priority messages if we release it now? Is EA the right channel?
• Best practices: Can we make this more social-first? Is it relevant to our audience or customers?
• Reporting needs: Are the right tags selected? Is this the right campaign? Is the right Topic selected?

Our internal distribution strategy

From there, our team can share the story to their social profiles right from the Current Stories feed in Employee Advocacy.

To encourage sharing among our team, we send weekly digests with our latest high-priority content stories, like company-wide updates. We have biweekly newsletters to reach our internal influencer audience–this includes Team Sprouters who have large followings across social media or have wide impact when they share EA posts.  Links from the newsletter will take team members to our Advocacy platform, where they can share our content. Lastly, we also cross-promote key updates on internal channels to ensure everyone gets the information they need.

We also recently introduced a cross-team calendar that gives visibility into what other teams are planning to add to EA in the coming weeks and months, and we can see how it relates to programming on our organic social channels.

The Sprout features that help integrate advocacy into our larger strategy

According to Goulet, her other favorite advocacy-forward Sprout features are:

Advocacy reporting tools
Within the platform, you can pull data like potential reach, earned media value, shares, engagements and other metrics to help you determine which stories perform best with your team and their audiences.

Tagging
Across all Sprout properties, you can tag your messages based on your workflows, business objectives and marketing strategies—which makes it easy to track how well Advocacy content performs. The platform also offers UTM tagging, a sophisticated tool that can help you demonstrate how curated content impacts your website’s traffic.

Send to Advocacy function
Whether it’s posts you’ve already published or third party content you’re sourcing, you can use the Send to Advocacy capability in Sprout’s Compose tool to seamlessly add new sources to our advocacy platform.

Topics

If you have a lot of content to share like Sprout, you might start to feel the effects of social media saturation. To mediate this challenge, use Topics within the platform so users can customize their Feed based on the content that best aligns with their role and areas of interest. We have product-specific and messaging pillar Topics, as well as a Topic for Company News.

Sprout’s Advocacy platform: The key to amplifying your brand

The challenges social marketers face aren’t going away. Yet, a strong performance on social media is becoming more and more important for brands.

The key to amplifying your brand’s social performance is tapping into your employees and their networks on social media. Employee Advocacy helps you extend your brand’s reach, attract the best candidates, empower your employees and prove the value of social to stakeholders. Experience it for yourself and sign up for a demo.