LinkedIn Employee Advocacy
Stand up a marketing-team LinkedIn advocacy program that scales without killing authenticity. Employee posts get 8x more engagement than brand-page posts — this skill operationalizes that advantage.
When to use
- Marketing leader wants to get their team posting on LinkedIn
- User is planning an advocacy program launch
- Team is posting but output is inconsistent / off-brand / low-engagement
- Need ROI measurement framework for an existing program
- Requests: "how do I get the team posting", "launch advocacy", "scale LinkedIn across 10 people"
Input
- Team size (5-50 typical)
- Marketing goal (reach / pipeline / recruiting / thought leadership)
- Current state (everyone silent / some active / inconsistent)
- Brand guideline constraints
Output
- 14-day launch plan (if cold-starting)
- Operating model (voice capture, ideation, approval, posting, measurement)
- Cadence targets per team member (realistic, not punishing)
- KPI dashboard spec (team reach, engagement, pipeline attribution)
- Governance playbook (brand safety without blocking velocity)
Four operating principles
- Scale authentically. Individuals compose in their own voice, not corporate language. Corporate-tone team posts underperform authentic voice 3x.
- Maintain control. Brand guidelines integrated into the workflow. Review step is optional, not blocking — high-trust roles bypass review entirely.
- Remove friction. Per-post time budget: 5 minutes. Anything more and the program dies in week 3.
- Prove ROI. Track team reach, engagement, pipeline impact. Without attribution, the program gets cut at the first budget review.
Benchmarks
- Launch target: team posting within 14 days
- Active team size benchmark: 8-11 members
- Output benchmark: 70+ posts/week (at 8 members) or 3-5 posts/member/week
- Per-post time budget: 5 minutes
- Team touchpoint math: 11 people × 3 posts/week × 300 min impressions = 40,000 monthly touchpoints baseline
- Employee vs. brand page: 8x more engagement, 6-8x more reach on personal posts
14-day launch playbook
Days 1-3: Voice capture
- Short interview with each team member (5-10 min) to extract their actual voice
- Identify their domain expertise and 2-3 content pillars
- Set realistic individual cadence (some commit to 1/week, some 3/week — don't force uniformity)
Days 4-7: First posts
- Everyone ships their first post, drafted in their voice
- Marketing reviews only for brand safety (never for style)
- Celebrate every first post internally — social proof unlocks the next team member
Days 8-10: Ideation pipeline
- Set up a shared ideation source (newsletter digest, trending-topics feed, internal wins)
- Each team member gets 5-10 topic suggestions per week
- They pick, not assigned
Days 11-14: Rhythm lock
- Establish cadence: each team member publishes on fixed days/times
- Set up KPI dashboard (see below)
- Run first weekly review
Governance: brand-safe without being blocked
What marketing reviews:
- Factual claims about the company / products / customers
- Confidential info
- Legal/compliance issues (finance, health, regulated industries)
What marketing does NOT review:
- Personal voice, tone, style
- Opinions the team member has about their own work
- Formatting, hashtags, emoji choices
- Topic selection (within pillars)
The review SLA: <4 business hours. Anything longer and the post is dead (posts go stale in the news cycle).
ROI measurement
Per-person metrics (content quality)
- Impressions per post
- Engagement rate (reactions + comments + shares / impressions)
- Comments (depth signal)
- Profile views attributed to post
Team-level metrics (program health)
- Total team reach
- Total team engagement
- Individual contribution rank (leaderboard)
- Active members / total members (participation rate)
Business metrics (pipeline impact)
- Inbound DMs sourced from LinkedIn content
- Meetings booked from LinkedIn
- Closed-won deals with LinkedIn as first-touch channel
- Employee referrals sourced from LinkedIn (if recruiting is a goal)
Anti-patterns
- Copy-paste corporate posts across team accounts — LinkedIn detects this, suppresses all of them
- Ghostwriting that erases the writer's voice — reads as fake
- Mandatory posting cadence without individual calibration — program dies in 6 weeks
- Approval loops >24h — makes the program feel like work
- Measuring only vanity metrics — program gets cut without pipeline attribution
- All-same pillars across team — redundancy kills team reach (360Brew penalizes clustering)
Resources
references/advocacy-principles.md — the 4 operating principles with examplesreferences/team-cadence-matrix.md — realistic cadence by role + seniorityreferences/governance-playbook.md — what to review, what not to, SLA
Related skills
linkedin-post-writer — each team member uses this for individual draftslinkedin-profile-optimizer — team profiles should match before the program launches (otherwise profile clicks convert poorly)linkedin-content-planner — each team member gets their own pillar mixlinkedin-engagement-monitor — track which team members' comments drive inbound