How to measure the impact of your teams on LinkedIn and beyond

How to measure the performance of employee advocacy

A lot of metrics and KPIs come into play when we talk about measuring the impact of employee advocacy. When you want to have a clear overview of how your program is performing, how engaged your ambassadors are, and what impact they’re having, it might be useful to have a comprehensive overview of the metrics available to you.

If you want to measure your employees' impact as advocates, you need to focus on specific metrics that align with your targets. 

Engagement metrics

The first set of metrics to consider are the engagement metrics. They give you insights into the performance of your program in relation to your content and to your members.

With engagement metrics, you can track the performance of your employee advocacy program, gain insights into interactions and member activity, and collect individual member data to identify your most active employees.

Three important engagement metrics we always recommend tracking are: 

• Content interactions: the number of interactions per type of content. This is an important metric because it tells you how active your ambassadors are, but also what kind of content they prefer to consume. And, of course, you can leverage those insights to tailor your content output and strategy.
  
  
• Conversion rate: the number of interactions per view. That gives you an insight into how active your employees are and how much they interact with your content. 
  
  
• Engagement value estimates the monetary value generated by your members' interactions. It is an important metric that we can also calculate in the Ambassify platform.

Sharing metrics

The second set of metrics is the sharing metrics. These are also crucial for tracking the performance of your employees' content on social media and giving you insight into their sharing behavior.

Important sharing metrics are:

• Potential reach: the (potential) number of people that are reached by your content. The potential reach is a very impressive metric because on average, your employees collectively have 10x more connections on LinkedIn than you — a company — have followers.
  
  This means that every time your employees share your content, they will automatically reach a much, much wider audience, which obviously impacts brand visibility, awareness, and presence and, in general, your perception as a company and as an employer.
  
  
• Click cost: an estimation of how much your employee-generated clicks would have cost you through traditional advertising. This metric shows the direct impact of your employees' efforts and their impact on your marketing strategy.

LinkedIn KPIs to measure the impact of your teams

I already mentioned that according to LinkedIn research, employees have on average, 10x more connections on LinkedIn than companies have followers. There follows that if we turn it around, that means that 90% of your company’s brand impression on LinkedIn doesn't come from the company page. 

90% of the brand impressions or the total brand impression that a brand receives on LinkedIn are actually coming from the content posted by ambassadors — and from the little logo on the company on the employees’ profile on LinkedIn. 

Again, that means that if you are working with your company page on LinkedIn, you are missing out on 90% of the platform’s untapped potential.

To maximize the ambassadors’ impact and succeed at employee advocacy, it’s important to set the right KPIs for each stage of the journey. I will break down every stage — from awareness to lead generation and candidate journey — to understand how to set up properly the KPIs for each journey and maybe have a an effort-value formula.

Leveraging your employees’ network on LinkedIn

The first requirement is to understand whether our company can start or scale an employee advocacy program. In both cases, it’s important for the employees to know that the company is orchestrating this strategy with a specific goal in mind and that the company actually has a plan to achieve this through LinkedIn (and/or other channels, of course).

By extension, the company should have a clear narrative. This goes for both your brand narrative – so the message you want your employees to spread as ambassadors — and also what you are communicating about the program — why you are starting an employee advocacy program, what you hope to achieve with it, and through what platform. 

And then we have to ask ourselves if the right eyeballs are on that platform. If LinkedIn is the main platform to focus your efforts, then consider these metrics:

• % of employees connected to the company page. The first base metric is the percentage of the employees connected to your company page vs the total employee base. Are they connected to top management? Are they following the company page?
  
  
• # of employee interactions. Are you training our employees on LinkedIn? Do you have some kind of guidelines policy to help them? 

Effort-Value formula: # employees * 1.000 * 12

In other words, if each one of our employees, by the end of the year, would publish one single post that does a thousand impressions on LinkedIn for each month, how many organic impressions could we gain?

Of course, this is a ballpark number because there are a lot of variables in your employees’ sharing behavior (which you can track with an employee advocacy platform). But if you take that number as a baseline and compare it to the total annual impressions of your company page, then you can truly glimpse at the immense potential you would unlock by leveraging your employees on LinkedIn.

Boost advocates content production for extra reach

Organic reach is undoubtedly the best way to effectively double your content production. Your own content capabilities as a company cap out at the max during the year for several reasons — from resources to budget, etc.

So, how do you scale that? Well, you scale that by having your employees repost your stuff — which you can do and will also yield impressive results — and creating their own content. Employee-generated content will raise the bar in terms of content available with which you can communicate.

Encouraging and supporting employees in their content production will effectively double your posting frequency, the amount of content you produce, and the reach of that content. 

At this stage, you can measure impact and growth by tracking the following:

• # of advocates' posts * month
• Total impressions * month (or * year, if that’s your time frame)
• Top management network growth & content impressions
• ROI. You can effectively assign a monetary value to your efforts, calculate what that effort investment (or the investment in a tech partner) results in, and know how much was saved.

EV Formula: organic reach * avg CPM

And even if you don't attach a monetary value to those efforts, you will still have doubled your content production, which is, in itself, a metric. By extension, that means you won’t have to go to another agency to produce more content or advertise it to promote it.

Measure impact in your customer journey

At this stage, we are getting into the qualitative aspects of the KPIs. LinkedIn can impact several customer journey steps, from raising awareness to establishing thought leadership. 

You can have thought leadership metrics by tracking the metrics of a campaign and understanding how a specific URL shared on a specific profile is performing and what kind of traffic it’s driving traffic. And then, you can measure the number of leads generated by that campaign.

Metrics you can track in this stage:

• # of active ambassadors in the last 30 days (or a different time frame)
• Total impressions * year
• Engagement value
• € saved in paid ads

EV formula: # of lead * avg. CLTV (customer lifetime value) 

Measure impact in your candidate journey

The candidate journey is another crucial part of LinkedIn, as the platform's core is talent acquisition. 

Talent attraction and acquisition heavily depend on your Employer Branding, a process in which you would ideally tell people that you are a good fit for them, why you are a good fit for them, and what your offering as an employer is. 

With recruiter licenses on LinkedIn, you can understand and track how much a candidate actually costs. With these kinds of metrics, you can understand each step of the candidate journey on LinkedIn, how the talent flows from company to company, where you gain talent, and when you lose talent, or vice versa.

Core key metrics of talent acquisition:

• Direct hire
• Influenced hire
• € saved on agency costs

EV formula: direct hire * avg agency fee

You can really start tracking these metrics and directly tie them to employee advocacy efforts. You can also generate some links for the advocates to promote job posts so that when the application comes in, the job post is directly related to the advocates.