To help these folks out our team pulled together some of our recent greatest hits: data, case studies, stories, reports, etc. Resources that clearly paint the picture of the value of advocacy across marketing, sales, comms and recruiting. Advocacy can be applied to ANY person or team, and the beauty of it is that it directly impacts the things that are MOST important to any company: revenue and people. And fortunately, after more than a decade of supporting the world’s largest advocacy programs we have plenty of data and examples to share!

Sales: Driving Revenue

I’ve been an honorary salesperson all my life. You don’t have a choice when you’re a founder or CEO. And I’ve loved doing it. I love talking with prospects and customers. If I had to sum up what I’ve learned about sales over the last 20+ years it’s that being seen and heard, participating in the conversation and giving, contributing value is really the key. We buy from those we know, we like and we trust. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about buying a pair of socks or some multi-million dollar technical solution, the equation is fundamentally the same. That’s why social is SO important for salespeople. And contrary to what some salespeople and leaders may think, it’s not complicated. Your buyers are on social. Salespeople need to be talking with those buyers, they need to be engaging with them. Period. As the saying goes, 80% of life (of sales) is simply showing up (on time, with something to contribute).

Sales use case resource: Case study and data on how the use of EveryoneSocial + Linkedin Sales Navigator by sales teams led to increased pipelines, win rates and deal sizes.

Marketing: This Is Word Of Mouth

Marketing is the bread an butter of the advocacy world. This is where it all started and it’s still a core pillar of how advocacy drives ROI. I mean look, it’s really simple, advocacy is word of mouth marketing! This was the idea that drove us to start EveryoneSocial so many years ago, the idea that all of us, the PEOPLE inside companies were connected with everyone we wanted to reach as a business: customers, prospects, partners, candidates, etc. There isn’t a CEO in the world who hasn’t asked his team to share good news with their networks. Advocacy is how you do that repeatably and at scale and it’s the reason why Ogilvy called out advocacy as the #1 influencer trend for 2025.

Marketing use case resource: Ogilvy report highlighting advocacy as the #1 influencer marketing trend for 2025 (featuring EveryoneSocial customers!).

Recruiting: Winning The Talent War

If you’ve talked with me before you know that recruiting and employer branding is one the strongest use cases for advocacy. Honestly I would say that if you could only choose one way to use advocacy, use it for this. Why? Everyone you will hire is on social media. All of your current employees are on social. Everyone who has been a member of your team is on social media. Further, people LOVE sharing about their work, what it’s like to work at your company, and open opportunities to join the team. Further, there are LOTS of people looking for their next opportunity (something like >50% of the global workforce is open to new opportunities). Just a single example for you: the average job post (a link, leading to your company’s career site) shared from EveryoneSocial generates 36 clicks. Advocacy for employer branding and recruiting just works and there is NOTHING more important, there is NOTHING your CEO cares about more than people. The people are the business.

Recruiting use case resource: Comprehensive guide and data on why advocacy + (employer branding + recruiting) are a match made in ROI heaven.

Comms: How You Activate Your C-Suite

I think comms plays a way more important role at most companies than maybe it gets credit for. This is coming from me and I’m not a comms professional, but we’ve had the opportunity to work with comms teams and leaders and this is why I say that: unlike marketing, comms is crenated on people. They’re not afraid of people. Their job is to get messages to employees and get messages to key audiences outside the company. That’s advocacy! Advocacy is just a tool for them. AND they hold the ace, which is they’re the ones that support the senior most executives, the C-suite. And in 2025 the C-suite are quite possibly the most important advocates you can activate at your company. This is really the #1 trend amongst our customers right now and it makes sense. Activating your C-suite is absolutely critical. They can grow their networks faster than anyone at your company and the content they share will reach a bigger audience than anyone else. Perhaps most importantly (and unlike in the past) your C-suite knows they need to be seen and heard on social. It’s a critical pillar of any advocacy strategy in 2025.

Executive comms use case resource: Data on how your C-suite (especially your CEO) positively impacts all areas of your business when they’re active on social media.

The post The ROI of Advocacy in 2025: Resources, Case Studies, Data appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

Are OpenAI and the major social networks headed for a collision? Who knows? (Meta sure isn’t going to take it lying down.) But it’s definitely worth thinking about — especially if you’re a marketer!

I had a chance to talk with Scrunch AI CEO Chris Andrew the other day about SEO, and he shared a dashboard with me highlighting the referral traffic EveryoneSocial receives from ChatGPT and other AI apps. While it’s nowhere near the traffic we see from Google, it’s headed in that direction. 

And it got me thinking about who these visitors were. What were they asking? 

Just the other day I used ChatGPT for a research project that led me to a service provider that I may spend a bunch of money with.

Search is totally different. You have to ask the questions and sift through the results. You’re clearly talking with a computer.

But ChatGPT is basically another person, and one thing we know is that people are FAR more likely to make purchasing decisions that are recommended by a trusted connection…

Because ChatGPT is friendly, helpful, smart, patient, and always there to answer your questions, does that make it a trusted companion? I think it does. It’s why my wife refers to ChatGPT as simply “Chat.”

This is why people like Yuval Harari worry about AI: Because it’ll soon be at a place where we can’t distinguish it from another human. And in many ways it’s better than another human because it’s more helpful, more patient, etc. (Have you ridden in a Waymo vehicle? Best driver I’ve ever had!)

As the CEO of a B2B software company, I’m very excited for ChatGPT (and maybe others) to be the primary starting point for “search.” No doubt content marketers will do their best to figure out how to exploit it like they did with search, but I think it’s going to be harder to do. I think starting a search with ChatGPT is going to be really beneficial for good businesses, those companies that customers love and that provide real value. And I think it’s going to be bad for poor businesses because I don’t think you’re going to be able to BS Chat. It’s all-knowing and has a strong BS meter! 

It can be very hard to tell the difference between a good and a bad vendor, especially in B2B. After all, buyers are constantly being marketed to, and the vendors they go with are often the ones with the best marketing — not necessarily the ones with the best offerings. In these cases, the buyers simply connected with the right people who said the right things and made the buyers feel special.

But if you have a super smart trusted connection like ChatGPT that’s weighing all the options and guiding you toward the best solution… Well, it’s hard to see marketing and sales winning the day in that world.

What does all this have to do with advocacy? Like I said earlier, people are far more likely to make purchasing decisions based on recommendations from trusted connections, and these days a lot of those connections and recommendations are found on social.

In fact, 71% of decision-makers say social is influential when considering or researching a new product for their company, so if people aren’t talking about your product on social — especially the people you employ — you’re missing out on a massive part of the market.

Want to increase your brand’s presence and influence in the place where it matters most? Book a demo.

The post How AI Is Reshaping Buyer Decisions — And What It Means appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

Many teams we meet with are in the same boat: They use an advocacy tool like Sprinklr or Sprout that comes bundled with a larger social media marketing solution.

(Here’s why you shouldn’t do that.)

These teams typically assume there aren’t many differences between their bundled advocacy tool and EveryoneSocial, but what they come to learn after a single call with us is that the differences are MASSIVE.

The reason why is simple: Advocacy tools that come bundled with larger social media management solutions haven’t received any development or innovation for years.

The companies that sell them have never seen advocacy as a priority. It doesn’t make them as much money as their publishing and ads tools, so the advocacy sides of things doesn’t get any investment.

For us at EveryoneSocial, every minute of our time and every dollar we spend goes toward the improvement of our platform to ensure our customers have the most successful advocacy programs that generate incredible ROI.

Related: Get a custom report of the ROI you’ll generate with EveryoneSocial

That’s why the differences are massive and why the largest advocacy programs in the world — including Amazon’s, Meta’s, and NVIDIA’s — run on EveryoneSocial.

So if you’re using a bundled advocacy tool, we’d love to connect and show you what you’re missing out on.

You’ll see that it’s like going from The Flintstones to The Jetsons.

Ready to get started? Request your free Modern Advocacy Report!

The post Why the World’s Largest Advocacy Programs Run on EveryoneSocial appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

In the past, most senior leaders didn’t believe that social media was important. The problem was they just weren’t early adopters — they assumed social wasn’t important simply because they weren’t using it themselves!

Thankfully, that’s no longer the case. The majority of senior leaders ARE on social and we’re heading toward 100% in the next few years. Anecdotally, I’d guess we’re at around 85% adoption right now.

Having these senior leaders active on social is important for MANY reasons, one of which (maybe the biggest) is that it creates the opportunity to build a bridge between them and the teams that actually run social for their company.

This bridge is built with data. When the social team posts content to their brand pages  or to their execs’ profiles, it reaches critical audiences, chiefly customers, prospects, and employees.

Reaching these audiences and getting them to engage and take action is what POWERS every single company on Earth, from a new startup to an Amazon or an NVIDIA. It’s the reason why reaching and engaging these audiences is the PRIMARY responsibility of every senior leader at every company.

And the social team makes it happen.

So that’s one of the things I’m most excited about for 2025: helping our customers build those data bridges between their social teams and their senior leaders.

We spent a good part of 2024 doing this, and not only was it energizing and inspiring, but it also opened up many new and exciting opportunities.

When that bridge is built, so much more becomes possible. Execs develop a greater appreciation for the social team and its efforts, linkages and connections start getting built with other teams (data, comms, marketing, HR, etc.), the social team gains a deeper understanding of what makes the business run, and more.

It’s going to be an incredible year. Thanks to the EveryoneSocial team and our amazing customers for being on this journey together!

Want to see how your senior leaders are doing on social? Get a free executive data report!

The post What I’m Most Excited About for Advocacy in 2025 appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

Years ago, LinkedIn had its own employee advocacy product called LinkedIn Elevate, but ultimately the social network decided to discontinue that as well.

(Actually, when LinkedIn did that, the company redirected traffic from Elevate to EveryoneSocial!)

Why is LinkedIn getting rid of these features? Because it’s not a business it should’ve been in in the first place. It’s tempting for these large platforms to want to build products and services in and around the core platform.

I get it. When I was on the team at Reddit, it was a constant discussion, right? You have all these users, you have all this traffic, so why shouldn’t we build this thing, or that thing, or this other thing?

And what you come to realize is that any effort spent outside of the core platform, the core user base, isn’t time well spent.

So at Reddit, we built a variety of things, but they almost all got shut down after a period of time.

The same fate was true for the LinkedIn Elevate product. And when they sunset it, I think it was kind of an attempt to do a soft landing. So they introduced this My Company tab and a couple of lightweight employee advocacy features.

In a few days, there will be no more My Company and Employee Advocacy tabs.

The message here, of course, is that if you’re serious about advocacy — if these features gave you a bit of a taste for it and you want to continue scaling your program — you need a purpose-built solution.

When you have a true advocacy solution in place like EveryoneSocial, a whole wide world of possibilities open up for your staff, your executives, and your organic brand content.

Want to see what’s possible? Request your free Modern Advocacy Report to see which of your employees are active on social, which companies engage with their content, and what kind of ROI your advocacy program could generate.

 Get your free report.

The post LinkedIn Steps Back From Advocacy Once Again appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

Her big takeaway?

Share your ideas and opinions now, whether in meetings or social media,” she says. “Your voice matters.”

It’s a wonderful message from Teresa about speaking up and expressing yourself, and it’s clear why she was named one of the Top 25 Women Leaders in IT Service.

There’s something else I’d like to point out about her message though: Research shows that when senior leaders like Teresa are active on social, they financially outperform their competitors.

Why?

Let’s imagine two B2B companies, each of which is roughly the same size — let’s say 100,000 employees. One of these companies has a leadership team that doesn’t really prioritize the use of social. The team just doesn’t see it as important.

However, the other company has a leadership team that does see social as important — perhaps even critical — and prioritizes time (including their own) and resources to creating, sharing, and engaging with content.

Which company would you bet on?

Think about it this way:

• Which of these companies is going to have greater brand recognition?
• Which one is going to have a better understanding of market trends and their customers’ needs?
• Which company is going to be more successful at attracting and retaining critical talent?

I know which company I’d bet on.

The truth is that execs are responsible for 45% of company reputation and 44% of the company’s market value because everything starts with leadership, and social is no exception.

When senior leaders like Teresa prioritize social for themselves, they broadcast that it should also be a priority for everyone else in the company. And when everyone starts sharing, amazing things happen.

Ready to get your senior management active on social? Join me for my weekly webinar on activating execs.

The post What a CMO Wishes She Could Tell Her Younger Self appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

We didn’t know the answer then, but we believed that it would be “yes.” After all, employee advocacy is simply word-of-mouth marketing at scale. It’s something we’ve all been doing and asking others to do for millennia.

So that was our bet, but, like all new things, we didn’t actually know if it would turn out to be true.

Fortunately, based on our last 10+ years of data and learnings, there’s no doubt that the answer is “yes.” Your people 100% want to share company news and content to their networks.

Honestly, I can’t remember ever meeting anyone who said they wouldn’t want to do that.

It’s good for employees as individuals (they can build a personal brand, grow their networks, expand their industry knowledge, discover new opportunities, etc.), and it’s good for their companies.

But some major things have changed over the last 10 years that affect how you build and run an advocacy program. For one, the vast majority of all employees are now already active and sharing on social.

When we launched our first clients in 2012, LinkedIn had 90 million registered users. Today it has more than 1 billion.

The same goes with all the other networks: They’ve all seen a >10x increase over that period. So what does that mean for employee advocacy now and in the future?

What it means is that regardless of whether you have an employee advocacy program, most of your people are already sharing and engaging with content on social. And, in most cases, it’s content they created themselves!

So the question for marketing and comms teams shouldn’t be, “How do we get people to share our content?” It should be, “How do we benefit from what they’re already doing?”

Here’s an example to paint the picture: A client we recently met with had 60,000 shares over a 12-month period from their advocates in EveryoneSocial.

That’s awesome, but here’s where it gets interesting: 30,000 of those shares were company content and news (stuff the marketing and comms teams created), whereas the other 30,000 shares were content that the EMPLOYEES created (videos, photos, GIFs, etc.).

And I bet you can guess which shares drove the most impressions, clicks and engagements.

We’re in a new era of employee advocacy and it’s extremely exciting, but success really comes down to your platform and your strategy. There’s a HUGE difference between what we refer to as legacy tools and strategies, and how we approach advocacy here at EveryoneSocial.

It’s not about  if or how you get your people to share your content — it’s about making it super simple for them to do so. It’s about not getting in your peoples’ way and leveraging the amazing stuff they’re already doing!

Want to see how EveryoneSocial makes this happen? Get your free Modern Advocacy Report!

The post Do Employees Really Want to Share Company Content? appeared first on EveryoneSocial.

Well, we’ve started doing some audience analysis work for EveryoneSocial customers to answer these questions.

Below is an analysis we did for one customer and it highlights why it’s SO important to invest in all three of these.

An Overview of Our Findings

Brand pages may be the most commonly used, but you’re leaving massive reach and engagement opportunities on the table if you haven’t also activated your senior leaders and your employees. Just take a look.

Advocacy program

• 2,000 posts over the last 6 months
• $0 spent on paid promotion (ads)
• 50,000 engagements
• 11% of those who engaged are employees
• 89% are non-employees
• 2,500+ people engaged multiple times
• 27% were VPs and above (VP to CXO)

CEO profile

• 38 posts over the last 6 months
• $100,000 estimated spent on paid promotion (ads)
• 38,000 engagements
• 10% of those who engaged were employees
• 90% were non-employees
• 1,000+ people engaged multiple times
• 29% were VPs and above (VP to CXO)

Brand page

• 82 posts over the last 6 months
• $200,000 estimated spent on paid promotion (ads)
• 70,000 engagements
• 8% of the people who engaged were employees
• 92% were non-employees
• 1,300 people engaged multiple times
• 19% were VPs and above (VP to CXO)

Overlap analysis

This is where things got REALLY interesting. The total audience overlap among the advocacy program, their CEO, and their brand page? Just 5%!

Looking at it from the opposite direction, 95% of the audience who engaged across brand page posts, executive posts, and employee advocate posts were unique.

Clearly, doing all three is how you reach the biggest audience.

Advocacy Works Hand in Hand with Brand Pages and Execs

The main thing this analysis points to is that, for marketing and comms teams, employee advocacy is an extremely efficient way to reach a broader audience in the MOST authentic manner.

Some teams continue to see advocacy as an outlier, like it’s not the same as brand pages or a CEO’s LinkedIn profile. To the contrary, they’re all arrows in the same quiver.

With advocacy there a few things to really get excited about:

• Your people WANT to share your content.
• It doesn’t require ANY paid promotion  — you’ll never have to put a dollar toward boosting employees posts.
• It requires very little effort to run an advocacy program on EveryoneSocial.

Ready to get your senior management active on social? Get a free report on your exec’s social presence.

The post Your Brand Page, CEO Profile and Advocacy Program Work Together — and Get Results appeared first on EveryoneSocial.