Getting started with Advocacy Program for Brands – Vista Social

Vista Social's Employee Advocacy feature empowers your team to seamlessly share branded content on their personal social networks. This also amplifies your brand's reach and authenticity while ensuring adherence to brand guidelines. 🚀

In this guide, we'll go through the following:

Importance of Employee Advocacy for brands
Creating an Advocacy Program
Inviting Advocates
Managing your Dashboard

Why is Employee Advocacy important for your brand or company?

Employee advocacy isn’t just about expanding your brand’s reach—it’s about creating a culture of engagement and ownership within your organization. By encouraging employees to share company content, you amplify your brand’s message through authentic voices that people trust. 🙌🏻

This not only increases brand awareness but also boosts employee morale and involvement. When employees feel like they’re part of something bigger, they’re more likely to be engaged and invested in your company’s success. As an admin, harnessing this power can transform your workforce into passionate advocates, driving your organization forward. 🎉

Creating an Advocacy Program

To get your team started with sharing your organization's content:

1. Go to Advocacy at the main menu on the left side.

2. On the upper-right side, click on Create Advocacy.

Note: You can only create one advocacy per profile group.

3. Start by selection the profile group you want to create this advocacy for, then fill out the rest of the details.

Slack notification - You can set up Slack integration to send notifications to a channel when new advocacy posts are ready to be shared.
Send email notification - Notify your team as soon as a new advocacy post is available.
Send email digests - Send out email digests that are tailored for each reader to contain current stories they have not shared.
Suggestion notifications - Want employees to suggest content for your team? Provide an email address for them to send their suggestion to (this will show up in all advocacy notification emails).
Earned media value - Calculate the value of activity generated by employee advocacy.
Campaign tracking - UTM parameters you specify are automatically added to any link posts. In other words we append the parameters to every shareable link added to advocacy posts shared by your advocates.

Inviting Advocates

When inviting advocates, it's essential to understand the distinction between your Social Media Management (SMM) team and your Advocacy team.

Important: While these two groups are separate, a user who is part of your SMM team cannot use the same email address to join your Advocacy Program.

So how do you invite the same person to get the best of both worlds?

To invite a user to both teams, consider using the “+” trick with email addresses. This allows you to add a "+" followed by a unique identifier before the "@" in your email address (e.g., john.doe+advocacy@yourcompany.com). This method ensures that messages is still directed to their original inbox, but it can be treated as a separate address for the purposes of the Advocacy Program.

You have 2 ways to invite your employees:

CSV Import

Super simple ─ add a column for your employees' first name, last name, and email address in a spreadsheet, then export it in a CSV file.

Manual Invites

Invite advocates one by one by manually entering their name and email address. Don't forget to click Save once you're done!

Download a CSV template here.

Managing your Dashboard

To get started, hover to the main menu on the left and click Advocacy.

In your Employee Advocacy dashboard, you'll see a list of your brands or businesses, etc. Click here to learn how to create a new advocacy program!

Clicking on one of them will take you to another dashboard, specific to your brand's advocacy program.

1. Settings - configurable options and preferences within the admin interface that allow administrators to tailor the employee advocacy program to the needs of their organization.

2. Inviting advocates - admins can add team members to participate in the advocacy program.

3. Create a new advocacy post - generate content for employees to interact with and share through their personal social media channels.

Additionally, your dashboard contains sections dedicated for your advocacy metrics, content, advocate activity and leaderboard, etc. Learn more about each section by clicking here!

Now that you have your very own Advocacy Program set up, find out how to create your first advocacy content here! 🎉