Linkedin Employee Advocacy

SKILL.md

---
name: linkedin-employee-advocacy
description: Stand up and run a LinkedIn employee advocacy program for a marketing or sales team. Covers 14-day launch playbook, brand-guideline governance, per-post time budget, cadence benchmarks, and team ROI (reach, engagement, pipeline). Triggers on "employee advocacy", "get the team posting", "scale LinkedIn across team", "advocacy ROI".
---

# 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

1. **Scale authentically.** Individuals compose in their own voice, not corporate language. Corporate-tone team posts underperform authentic voice 3x.
2. **Maintain control.** Brand guidelines integrated into the workflow. Review step is **optional, not blocking** — high-trust roles bypass review entirely.
3. **Remove friction.** Per-post time budget: **5 minutes**. Anything more and the program dies in week 3.
4. **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 examples
- `references/team-cadence-matrix.md` — realistic cadence by role + seniority
- `references/governance-playbook.md` — what to review, what not to, SLA

## Related skills

- `linkedin-post-writer` — each team member uses this for individual drafts
- `linkedin-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 mix
- `linkedin-thread-monitor` — track which team members' comments drive author replies
- `linkedin-engager-analytics` — see who's engaging with each team member's posts