How to start an employee advocacy program people want to be part of

If you work in internal comms or social, you've probably been asked to "get employees posting" at some point. Usually it goes like this: someone builds a toolkit, sends it out with a deadline and a Slack reminder, and then a handful of people share the post and everyone else goes quiet.

A recent issue of HubSpot's Marketing Against the Grain newsletter dug into why that happens. Laura M. Browning talked with Jenny Gardynski, who leads content and communications at G2, about how she runs employee advocacy. A lot of it lined up with conversations we've had in The Marcomm Grind, so we wanted to pull out what stood out and add a few thoughts for those of you doing this on a small team.

Why don't employees post?

Most programs ask for too much, too soon. Employees get guidance before they've seen anyone at the company actually do it, and before they really understand what they're being asked to talk about. Then the posts that do go out all sound the same, because everyone pasted the same copy.

What G2 does instead

They start with leadership. Gardynski's view is that employees are far more likely to post when they can already see their executives showing up on LinkedIn regularly. She also suggests a small early group of employees who get first access to new things and give feedback, so they have something real to talk about. From there you build slowly, maybe starting with asking people to engage with leadership posts before ever asking them to write their own.

She also makes a point that a lot of us will find hard to hear: don't start by measuring ROI. In her words, "Adoption should be your first metric."

They offer options instead of one script. Pre-written copy is easy, and it does lower the bar for people to post. But ten identical posts from one company in your feed reads like marketing wrote them, because it did. G2 shares a few key messages and a few sample posts, then encourages people to make them their own.

They use AI to help people find their own voice. Gardynski built a simple AI skill from her ten best-performing LinkedIn posts so it could learn how she writes, and her team is building a guided version for employees. She's also clear that anything AI drafts still needs a human edit.

What we'd add if you're a small team

A few thoughts if you're a comms team of one or two and this sounds like a lot.

One leader is enough to start. The newsletter suggests getting three executives posting first. If you're at a smaller company, one leader who posts consistently and sounds like themselves does the same job. Help them get into a rhythm before you ask anyone else.

Keep the adoption number simple. Track how many people posted at least once this month, and who posted for the first time. That's enough to show momentum, and it tells you who might want to be in that early group.

The voice exercise works for the posts you ghostwrite, too. A lot of us draft for our executives. Feeding their best posts into your AI tool and asking it to describe how they write gives you a much better starting point than a blank page. You still decide what needs to be said and add the context only you have. Then you edit it by hand, and so do they.

Ask people why it matters to them. G2's advice is to have employees tie a post back to why it matters to them personally, with a real detail from their own work. That's also the easiest thing to ask for in a toolkit. One question like "what did you see or do on this that your network would find interesting?" will get you better posts than another sample caption.