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Case Study: Should He Be Fired for That Facebook Post?

• Mary Anne Watson
• Gabrielle R. Lopiano

A small-business owner deals with a prized employee’s very public misstep.

By the time Susannah Winslow remembered that her ringer was off, she had seven text messages from her father, Dell, who was also her boss. Dell was the president of Downcity Motors, which owned BMW, Range Rover, and Mercedes-Benz dealerships in Charlotte, North Carolina, and had been in the Winslow family for three generations. Susannah, the general manager, was poised to take over in five years, when her dad retired.

• MW Mary Anne Watson is a professor of management and the associate director of the TECO Energy Center for Leadership at the University of Tampa.
• Gabrielle R. Lopiano is a PhD candidate in organization and management at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School.

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How to Create an Employee Engagement Social Media Strategy: Tips and Tools

Learn how to turn employees into brand advocates with a successful employee engagement social media strategy.

An employee engagement social media strategy doesn’t have to be complicated. Simply involve employees in your social strategy to keep them more engaged at work while extending your social reach.

The Edelman Trust Barometer shows that people have much higher trust in regular employees (54%) than in a company’s CEO (47%). Their trust in a company’s technical experts is even higher (68%).

Getting employees involved in social media allows you to reach your market through the voices they are most likely to trust. At the same time, it allows employees to showcase their company pride and industry expertise.

Table of Contents

Bonus: Download a free employee advocacy toolkit that shows you how to plan, launch, and grow a successful employee advocacy program for your organization.

What is a social media employee engagement strategy?

A social media employee engagement strategy is a plan that outlines how your employees can amplify your brand’s visibility on social media.

It should include tactics that encourage your employees to share branded content to their social media profiles as well as tools that help you distribute content to your team and track performance.

6 quick tips for creating an employee engagement social media strategy

1. send out an employee survey.

According to the Edelman Trust Barometer , 73% of employees expect to be involved in planning at their job. If you plan on using social media to improve employee engagement, it only makes sense to ask employees how the program could work best for them.

Hootsuite surveyed employees and learned that different teams wanted different social resources. The content employees wanted to share varied across departments and regions.

So, when planning how to engage employees on social media, you need to…

2. Provide the right content to the right employees

Hootsuite created a content council to make sure employees have access to the content they’re most likely to share.

The council includes representatives from various regions and departments across the organization. Each member of the council provides at least two relevant pieces of content per month that employees can share to their social channels.

Each of the content council members is also an advocate for the employee social engagement program within their team.

When the food services and facilities management company Sodexo launched their employee engagement program, they started with the executive team and senior leaders.

They designed the content around thought leadership and stakeholder outreach. It was enormously successful, reaching 7.6 million people and helping secure a high-value contract.

After this initial success, Sodexo expanded into more employee engagement on social. This extended employee engagement focuses less on thought leadership. The content is designed to motivate employees. It helps them expand their social reach while driving traffic to the Sodexo website.

Employees’ social posts, often using the #sodexoproud hashtag, now drive 30 percent of all traffic to the site.

3. Provide plenty of content

Employees are much more likely to share when they have plenty of options. They want content that feels relevant and interesting to their social connections.

The most successful employee engagement programs provide their employees with 10 to 15 pieces of shareable content to choose from every week.

But don’t let those numbers overwhelm you. You don’t have to create this much content right from the start. The important thing is to get your program going. Aim for one new post every day at first. Work your way up to a few posts per day once you start to learn which types of content resonate best with your team.

Remember that your employee engagement content shouldn’t only promote your products. You want employees to feel like there’s value in the content they share. That could include informative blog posts, job listings, or industry news.

4. Run a contest

As we’ve shown in our posts on social media contests , prizes can be a great motivator. A contest can be a good way of getting employees involved in social media. It could be a one-time giveaway or a regular monthly competition.

Hootsuite runs an ongoing incentive program anchored by a monthly contest. The details are different every month. One month, entry might be based on meeting a minimum number of shares. Another month, employees might have to be among the top sharers to enter. The goal is always the same — getting as many employees to share the company’s content to their social media accounts.

The prizes are different every month so there’s always new motivation for employees to check for great content they might want to share.

5. Get employees involved in product launches

Odds are, your employees are excited when your company creates something innovative and new. Get them involved in spreading the word by creating shareable social content for each new campaign.

“Our employee engagement program has become a key pillar of our go-to-market for campaign launches,” says Brayden Cohen, Hootsuite’s Social Marketing and Employee Advocacy Team Lead.

Get your creative teams involved in planning how to create content for employee engagement campaigns. The approach might be a little different from the launch content you create for your own social channels. Give your team something they’ll be truly excited to share.

“We work with our creative teams to ensure the content is innovative and stands out for our employees to share to their networks,” Brayden says. “This has been a new approach for us with incredible results thus far.”

Once your launch campaign content is ready to go, send an internal announcement. Provide details about the launch and any campaign-specific incentives for your team.

Meliá Hotels International launched a #StaySafewithMeliá campaign to welcome guests back to its hotels after closures last year. They worked with both influencers and employees on the campaign to expand their reach.

A romantic dinner with your loved one watching the sunset is ALWAYS a good idea 🧡 #Love #StaySafeWithMelia #MeliaSerengetiLodge pic.twitter.com/xiAUN0b791 — natalia san juan (@NataliaSJuan) March 22, 2021

Employees shared the campaign more than 6,500 times, with a potential reach of 5.6 million.

6. Share company swag

Who doesn’t like free stuff — especially if it’s high-quality and useful?

Provide your employees with branded company shirts, jackets, stickers and other promotional items. It helps them show off their workplace pride — both in real life and on social.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Kendall Walters Moisey (@kendallwmoisey)

Using company swag is one of the most common forms of “nonverbal advocacy behavior,” according to a recent study .

This is a great way to involve employees who might not be as comfortable sharing promotional content.

3 tools to help engage employees on social media

Hootsuite Amplify is a specialized tool for employee engagement through social media. Amplify makes it easy for employees to share approved social content from their desktop or on the go with a mobile app.

When new social content is ready to post, simply add it to Amplify. You can divide the content into topics so employees have easy access to the right material for their roles and interests. Employees log in whenever they want to see what new content is available and share it with just a couple of clicks.

For critical messaging, you can alert employees with a push notification on their smartphones, or share a post through email. You can also create internal announcements through Amplify to keep employees informed.

2. Workplace by Facebook

Workplace by Facebook is a workplace collaboration tool used by many of the world’s leading businesses. With so many employees already using this tool every day, it’s an important communication resource for employee engagement programs.

By connecting Amplify to Workplace, you can post Amplify content to specific Workplace Groups.

You can also use Workplace to look for new content ideas. What kinds of topics are employees already talking about? What kind of content are they sharing among themselves?

3. Hootsuite Analytics

To grow an effective employee engagement program, you have to track your results and learn as you go. You need to understand employees’ sharing habits as well as the impact of the content shared.

With Hootsuite Analytics , you can create custom, easy-to-share reports. They help you learn what’s working best for your program and prove its value to your boss.

Important metrics to track include:

• Adoption rate: The number of active employees divided by the number of employees who signed up.
• Sign-up rate: The number of employees who signed up divided by the number of employees invited to participate.
• Share rate: The number of sharers divided by the number of active users.
• Number of clicks: Total clicks from employee engagement content.
• Goal completions: The number of people who took the desired action on your content (signed up for a newsletter, made a purchase, etc.).
• Total traffic: The number of visits to your website from the content shared.

Tap into the power of employee advocacy with Hootsuite Amplify. Increase reach, keep people engaged, and measure results—safely and security. Learn how Amplify can help your organization today.

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Hootsuite Amplify makes it easy for your employees to safely share your content with their followers— boosting your reach on social media . Book a personalized, no-pressure demo to see it in action.

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Christina Newberry is an award-winning writer and editor whose greatest passions include food, travel, urban gardening, and the Oxford comma—not necessarily in that order.

Brayden Cohen has spent the past 7+ years working with disruptive brands helping them grow and scale their marketing strategies through digital channels.

He’s worked on and consulted for small and large teams at start-up and enterprise B2B and B2C organizations building integrated social, content, influencer, and employee advocacy campaigns and programs to grow their brands globally.

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Brady Robards receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Darren Graf does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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What you say and do on social media can affect your employment; it can prevent you from getting hired, stall career progression and may even get you fired. Is this fair – or an invasion of privacy?

Our recent research involved a study of 312 news articles about people who had been fired because of a social media post.

These included stories about posts people had made themselves, such as a teacher who was fired after they came out as bisexual on Instagram, or a retail employee let go over a racist post on Facebook.

It also included stories about posts made by others, such as videos of police engaging in racial profiling (which led to their dismissal).

Racism was the most common reason people were fired in these news stories, with 28% of stories related specifically to racism. Other forms of discriminatory behaviour were sometimes involved, such as queerphobia and misogyny (7%); workplace conflict (17%); offensive content such as “bad jokes” and insensitive posts (16%); acts of violence and abuse (8%); and “political content” (5%).

We also found these news stories focused on cases of people being fired from public-facing jobs with high levels of responsibility and scrutiny. These included police/law enforcement (20%), teachers (8%), media workers (8%), medical professionals (7%), and government workers (3%), as well as workers in service roles such as hospitality and retail (13%).

Social media is a double-edged sword. It can be used to hold people to account for discriminatory views, comments or actions. But our study also raised important questions about privacy, common HR practices and how employers use social media to make decisions about their staff.

Young people in particular are expected to navigate social media use (documenting their lives, hanging out with friends, and engaging in self-expression) with the threat of future reputational harm looming.

Read more: Doxxing, swatting and the new trends in online harassment

Are all online posts fair game?

Many believe people just need to accept the reality that what you say and do on social media can be used against you.

And that one should only post content they wouldn’t mind their boss (or potential boss) seeing .

But to what extent should employers and recruiting managers respect the privacy of employees, and not use personal social media to make employment decisions?

Or is everything “fair game” in making hiring and firing decisions?

On the one hand, the capacity for using social media to hold certain people (like police and politicians) to account for what they say and do can be immensely valuable to democracy and society.

Powerful social movements such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter used social media to call out structural social problems and individual bad actors.

On the other hand, when everyday people lose their jobs ( or don’t get hired in the first place ) because they’re LGBTQ+, post a photo of themselves in a bikini, or because they complain about customers in private spaces (all stories from our study ), the boundary between professional and private lives is blurred .

Mobile phones, emails, working from home, highly competitive employment markets, and the intertwining of “work” with “identity” all serve to blur this line.

Some workers must develop their own strategies and tactics , such as not friending or following workmates on some social media (which itself can lead to tensions).

And even when one does derive joy and fulfilment from work, we should expect to have some boundaries respected.

Employers, HR workers, and managers should think carefully about the boundaries between professional and personal lives; using social media in employment decisions can be more complicated than it seems.

A ‘hidden curriculum of surveillance’

When people feel monitored by employers (current, or imagined future ones) when they use social media, this creates a “ hidden curriculum of surveillance ”. For young people especially, this can be damaging and inhibiting.

This hidden curriculum of surveillance works to produce compliant, self-governing citizen-employees. They are pushed to curate often highly sterile representations of their lives on social media, always under threat of employment doom.

At the same time, these very same social media have a clear and productive role in revealing violations of power. Bad behaviour, misconduct, racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of bigotry, harassment, and violence have all been exposed by social media.

So, then, this surveillance can be both bad and good – invasive in some cases and for some people (especially young people whose digitally-mediated lives are managed through this prism of future impact) but also liberating and enabling justice, accountability, and transparency in other scenarios and for other actors.

Social media can be an effective way for people to find work , for employers to find employees , to present professional profiles on sites like LinkedIn or portfolios of work on platforms like Instagram, but these can also be personal spaces even when they’re not set to private.

How we get the balance right between using social media to hold people to account versus the risk of invading people’s privacy depends on the context, of course, and is ultimately about power.

Read more: As use of digital platforms surges, we'll need stronger global efforts to protect human rights online

• Social media
• Online harassment
• Invasion of privacy
• Employee rights
• Online harm
• Right to privacy

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Case study: former employee’s private social media not so private after all.

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Employee Advocacy Examples for 2023

We’ve updated this post on employee advocacy examples with new tips that leverage audience and platform preferences for 2023.

An effective employee advocacy strategy can amplify your best marketing campaigns and provide a human touch to each social post . No doubt, the employee advocacy examples we’ll showcase in this post will spotlight the potential of such a program.

But employee advocacy programs don’t guarantee success. It’s possible to have an employee advocacy platform and not see the needle move.

Several key factors determine the success of employee advocacy including executive support, content strategy, metrics and engaged employees.

To build an effective employee advocacy program, you can take inspiration from the brands that have fully embraced social.

We look at 13 employee advocacy examples that show you how social-savvy employees can tell your brand story and lead conversations. We’ll highlight how these brands got enthusiastic participants, built creative approaches, and stirred audience attention.

13 Employee Advocacy Examples To Take Inspiration From in 2023

1. gainsight.

First up on our list of employee advocacy case studies is Gainsight , who primarily uses employee advocacy to promote thought leadership among their employees.

They’re a great example because every employee believes in the power of social media including their CEO, Nick Mehta. He has an active social media presence and through his actions, he has set the tone for the entire organization.

Gainsight had previously been sharing content with employees via email. It was tedious and they had no real way to measure success. With a full-fledged employee advocacy program, their press became more scalable and measurable even when the company was seeing significant growth.

By consistently encouraging employees to participate in the program, Gainsight saw 6,500 site visitors sourced from employee shares. At the same time, their potential reach increased by 1.3 million audience members.

Penske has been a leader in the Supply Chain and Logistics industry for a long time, partially due to its ability to adapt to new challenges and think ahead. When thinking ahead towards keeping their sales team relevant and effective, they realized something:

“We realized we had to take advantage of the fact that our audience is on social media and they’re the next generation of the logistics industry,” said their Director of Sales Solutions.

The company implemented employee advocacy as an easy way for their sales reps to share content with a younger audience.

Within their first quarter, they saw a 9,958% increase in total reach and a 333% increase in website click-throughs.

3. Randstad

Next on our list of employee advocacy case studies is Randstad , the global leader in the human resources service industry.

When Karen Pace joined Randstad’s as the Director of Social and Content Marketing, she identified some key areas where the company was falling short. Ever-changing social media algorithms and the sheer number of employees and variety of teams employed by Randstad made any employee advocacy efforts wildly complicated and not as successful as they’d hoped.

The employee advocacy process was completely streamlined after implementation. They gamified employee participation and simplified access to content, resulting in a $1.5 million earned media value.

4. Starbucks

Starbucks is another employee advocate case study to learn from. The well-known brand developed a more internal employee advocacy program represented on several different social media platforms. Within their groups on each platform, partners can make their own posts following Starbucks’ guidelines.

The company refers to contributing employees as “partners”. They shared a sense of camaraderie and responsibility that helped them accomplish a staff turnover rate that is just 20% of the industry average.

GE refers to their employee advocacy examples as brand ambassadorship. When looking into employee advocacy programs, they were looking for something that would allow their employees and leadership to be an informative resource for potential employees.

This need was partially spurred on by shifts in the company culture that needed to be communicated externally, as well as a need for increased transparency.

GE accomplished its goals by developing a series of training programs that changed over time to reflect shifts in social media. They worked to get buy-in from execs and other employees alike and managed to turn the campaign into an important recruiting tool.

An additional benefit of the program was helping current employees to think about their “why.” Why work for GE? The employees were meant to share this information on social media, but the company believes that making employees aware of their passion and purpose early on will also help reduce turnover.

Boston Consulting Group had no shortage of shareable, high-quality content—but it didn’t seem to be reaching its full potential audience. The company needed a simple and effective way for their employees to get this content out to their own followers. BCG recognized that its consultants possessed a much larger audience than the brand had on its own.

BCG consultants were already familiar with LinkedIn so they easily explored to employee advocacy. Their goal was to take the least amount of effort for consultants to share content. With all of their content centralized, BCG employees were sharing nine times as frequently, greatly aiding the brand in their goal of becoming a more social company.

Next on our list of employee advocacy examples is one of the fastest-growing technology companies, NVIDIA .

Like others, the company was looking for a way to curate a vast library of shareable content organized in an accessible way. However, they were distributing shareable content via emails for a long time. The process was frustrating because they weren’t able to track impact.

Employee advocacy allowed NVIDIA’s workforce to share content more easily, but it also allowed the company to see the impact that such sharing had. This led to a cycle in which employees shared more content because they could see the impact that it had and know it was worth doing.

8. Dynatrace

Employee advocacy programs are nothing without measurable results. It’s hard enough to get executive buy-in, and much more so if it won’t support your corporate goals.

Things were no different for Dynatrace as John Rocker, their social media manager, sought out to implement an employee advocacy program that could deliver an impact on results that truly mattered.

Within the first 30 days, the platform had already seen a 73% adoption rate, with team leaders regularly reaching out to ask him to add their team members to the platform. Not only that, Dynatrace was able to correlate social sharing to more impactful marketing metrics such as website traffic, webinar registrants, new leads and website conversions.

Rocker particularly appreciated the ability to track impact by the user. Such consistent feedback made it even easier to gain employee buy-in on a new platform.

Another trend among these employee advocacy examples is the huge benefit of improving the hiring process. John Graham Jr. of Merck recognized the importance of such a program when analyzing just how limited the talent pool is for pharmaceutical companies.

Getting existing employees on board helps present a strong and enticing front for those limited applicants, making it easier to bring in the best and brightest.

Graham says that each Merck employee has a story and that he’s responsible for giving them a platform to share. By streamlining access and making content shareable, he allows these employees to write the story themselves. Merck’s employees make the necessary connections so that others can see how they, too, might fit into Merck.

10. Shopify

Next up on our list of employee advocacy case studies is Shopify .

Unlike other employee advocacy examples, Shopify doesn’t curate an extensive library of branded content for employees to share. The branded content exists, but they focus their energy on asking their employees to be the expert and speak for themselves.

This allows their employees to create their own spaces as experts in the field and allows Shopify to provide further training opportunities rather than content alone.

11. Cockroach Labs

It doesn’t take a long time for employees to promote your company culture. In this Cockroach Labs employee advocacy example, the good vibes started showing in the first week! In fact, it was the experience before getting hired that motivated Shivam to make this post.

The point is that your HR or People Ops team spent years crafting a stellar recruiting, hiring, and on-boarding process for your company. Let your industry’s top job seekers know that they’ll get positive and impactful experiences with your company from the first point of contact.

Cockroach Labs’ employee advocacy program touches across many areas, from amplifying the employer brand to employee engagement (by encouraging employees to share and even create content), and much more. The company has generated over 1.97 million in reach. Consider employee engagement software as a means to mobilize your team to take on employee advocacy.

Rising leaders play a huge role in driving conversations and defining narratives. So, why not cultivate those leaders internally in your organization?

This is why we love this employee advocacy example from Jeni Asaba at Jamf . Sure, it doesn’t involve Jamf’s own blog or other marketing assets. But it showcases Jeni’s thought leadership and her rise as a customer advocacy expert.

When your target audiences see your employees as leaders, they’ll feel good about putting their business in your hands. Why? Because they know that your employees are passionate problem solvers who’ll take their businesses to the next level.

13. Influitive

As our final employee advocacy example shows, it’s a great step to cast the spotlight on your employees in your own branded content.

In this case, Influitive’s VP of Customer Marketing and Advocacy, Ari Hoffman , is a trailblazer and thought leader in his space. Influitive made sure its customers and partners knew that by having Ari lead webinars, interviews, and events. He’s also heavily featured on the company blog, especially with guides on customer advocacy .

First, it makes your message so much more authentic because it comes directly from actual people. Professionals don’t aspire to be like brands, but other people, like thought leaders who they could put a name and face to when they think about their problems.

Second, this gives your employees a real incentive to share your content. You’re helping them build their personal brands. In turn, it’s in their interest to get that content in front of as many people as possible.

Final Thoughts on These Employee Advocacy Examples

Employee advocacy isn’t about getting your workforce to spam social media with content. As more brands adopt employee advocacy, it’s imperative to think about your use case and what success means.

• If you’re in a competitive job market, enable your employees to share a unique perspective on company culture like Merck.
• If your employees aren’t sharing content, enable your executive to become active first and the organization will follow like Gainsight.
• Or if your sales reps are interacting with younger and social-savvy customers then enable your sellers with content like Penske.
• Perhaps your employees are already consultants and you need a way to amplify their subject matter expertise like BCG.

Learn from your industry peers in the various approaches they’ve taken. Allow yourself to explore employee advocacy to see if they can solve some of your biggest organization’s challenges.

Want to dig deeper into employee advocacy? Check out our definitive guide . 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Why is employee advocacy important.

According to Olapic, 76% of people trust content shared by individuals more than content shared by brands. By not making use of your employees as trusted and informed voices, you’re missing out on a much larger audience.

On a corporate level, an employee advocacy program supports your employees through personal brand building and bolstering their expertise. This recognition is an important part of decreasing turnover and strengthening your employees’ professional growth.

What are the benefits of employee advocacy?

Before spending the time and effort to implement employee advocacy, it’s helpful to know how the benefits.

While employee advocacy has many benefits , the easiest to see is often:

• The increased brand credibility stems from the fact that people trust people more than they trust corporations. Employees advocating on behalf of a brand lend a more human face to the company and builds long-term trust.
• Employee advocacy amplifies marketing efforts by allowing content from a brand to reach an exponentially larger audience. In fact, branded content reaches 561% more audience members when shared by an individual rather than the brand itself.
• Simply stated, employee advocacy increases revenue because employers spend time investing in and trusting in employees. When the company culture improves, revenue increases by about 33%.

What is an Example of Employee Advocacy?

An example of employee advocacy is when an employee carries your brand’s message through their activities both online and offline. Today, most employee advocacy activity occurs on social, but even there, it takes many forms. It can involve LinkedIn posts , video testimonials, quotes in blogs, and much more. However, the key for 2023 and beyond is to drive your advocacy work using the ideas and voices of your employees as much as possible.

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Sharing Employee Stories: An Inside Look at Company Culture

How many of your employees are already on social?

A common employer brand theme you have probably noticed online recently is the power of employee stories.

Of course, internal storytelling has been around for years, but social media now gives everyone insightful glimpses into other companies’ work culture.

But how does your organization activate employee stories more consistently and organically? And how can you enhance your efforts by sharing these stories on social media? 

Consider this an ultimate guide to strategizing workplace stories. Here are the most important topics covered:

Why Employee Stories Matter

How to start approaching workplace stories.

• Types of Employee Stories For Social Media
• Best Examples of Employee Stories on Social

A Harris Interactive Survey for Glassdoor states that, “67% of employers believe retention rates would be higher if candidates had a clearer picture of what to expect about working at a company before taking the job.”

By allowing your employees to drive a narrative and share their stories online, you’ll find employee stories as one of the most effective strategies for building an attractive work culture.

According to LinkedIn , “candidates trust the company’s employees 3x more than the company to provide credible information on what it’s like to work there.”

Think of it this way: the less conflict of interest there is (or the more personal risk there is), the more credible and authentic the story — hence the value of employee stories.

Employees have their skin in the game, but a faceless brand name can promote itself devoid of risk.

Depending on the nature of the content and how your organization presents employee stories, it will undoubtedly shape and strengthen your work culture.

What your employees share with each other and talk about on a frequent basis, becomes the scaffolding to build internal culture.

In work and elsewhere, stories precede culture and no doubt make a clearing for community engagement. 

• Customers and prospects trust your organization more when information comes from employees.
• Audiences will respect your company more when they see how well employees are valued.

Employee stories and highlights build authenticity, an identity for your brand, and create a human connection to outside audiences. 

Whether your company is engaged in sharing employee stories or not, you’ll need to approach it strategically.

For any consistent success, you have to take this process seriously to ensure that whatever you do enables and reinforces the overall desired work culture. 

If you need some tips to improve your organization’s current process or are interested in ramping up employee stories, the priorities described below will help you approach this more strategically. 

Discover stories already in the workplace

Start by listening to the online social chatter see what kind of stories are publicly shaping your brand sentiment.

Talk to departments and employees or get a company survey going to learn what stories are being told, or to simply gauge the themes of existing internal storytelling. 

Your organization will start to learn what narratives exist, how they might be shaping the work culture, and if the brand sentiment is moving in the wrong direction so you can start to improve the overall story.

Create a safe place for stories to be told

Managers, executives, and all company leaders need to make employee stories an essential part of the business. Which means, employees need to feel safe and at ease opening up about their unique perspectives.

If they feel uncomfortable or afraid that their work, interests, or stories will all conflict with each other, then contagious shyness will be hard to overcome.

The more transparent, open, and excited your organization is for employees, the more authentic results and interest you’ll get. 

Build a plan for what stories your company needs

While your company can start randomly sharing employee stories, there still needs to be direction for what you want to focus on. Formulate a plan and strategy based on a sampling of questions like:

• What are your organization’s main needs with employee stories?
• How would these stories tie into company priorities?
• Which stories would have the most impact with the company’s priorities?
• Are there areas of the company that are crucial, but lack in representation where employee stories can help?
• What’s the best way to source and share these workplace stories for maximum impact? 

Provide opportunities for all employees

We’ve touched on a similar concept in a recent post , but starting with a small sample can create a culture of exclusivity.

The goal for your organization should be to create an equal playing field where everyone’s input is valued.

When it comes to input and awesome employee stories, you may not know exactly where the best content might come from. Everyone should have a chance to participate.

Everyone’s story can have an impact on their own professional development and play a vital role in their company’s success.  

Let employees share and create for authenticity

Similar to letting all employees have an opportunity to participate, this also means: let them share and create content too.

This is key to building truly authentic employee stories, instead of contrived corporate jargon. 

Of course, you’ll want to provide guidelines and maybe slightly edit their contributions, but you must let them be creative and use their voice to make it a humanized story. 

This is why employee advocacy platforms become a major component to employer branding and creating employee stories.

Avoid the corporate boilerplate and loosen the generic copy that audiences will see right through. To get genuine participation and trust, you must create the trust first.

For starters, think of it this way: experiential nonfiction is the genre that your audience will find themselves most engrossed in.

Make employee stories an obvious part of culture

The best way to continue the process of employee storytelling is to make it an obvious part of your company culture.

Promoting storytelling is valuable not only to current employees, but also for informing interviewees and brand new hires of how the brand is constituted by the employee voice.

Some ways to go about doing this is to:

• Add sample employee stories to company handbooks
• Hiring orientations, make it a key part to talk about employee stories
• Executives should be sharing these stories on social media as well as the corporate social accounts
• Bring it up in meetings, whether department meetings or a bigger townhall type of meeting
• Any company events

Employees should know that it’s part of the culture, understand it’s encouraged to get involved, and what the benefits are to them and their company. 

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The Types of Employee Stories for Social Media

One of the best ways to drive results, is by activating employee stories on social media. These social platforms are the best outlets to connect with potential talent, new hires, customers, prospects, and other employees.

And because employees are already on social media and up to 50% are already talking about the company they work for, it’s a natural place for employee stories to shine.

So besides your company’s social accounts, encouraging employees to share workplace stories is going to enhance multiple areas of the business. 

Here are the types of employee stories that can help build a great narrative on social media.

Company Events

When your company hosts an event or has a cool celebration, this is the perfect opportunity to get candid moments and share them on social media.

This can highlight employees, leaders, and different departments. And employees all have phones where they can share the cool stuff your company is doing at these events too. 

Volunteer Work

Employees will like to share volunteer work and showing your organization as helping communities is inspiring to audiences.

In the office, business is about driving growth and improving sales, but aligning work with other values is increasingly an expectation and certainly a boon to the brand sentiment.

Employee Spotlights

Job candidates in particular are looking to see how employees are treated and what career development opportunities exist at your company. Showcasing employee spotlights will clarify this information for prospects.

Think of things like new promotions of colleagues, performances — did marketing achieve a milestone? Did sales do something cool? Even showing employees’ outside interests or passions gives a sense of work/life balance — do employees at this company work to live, or live to work?

Employee-Generated Content

Employee stories do not have to just be the company focusing on different individuals. A big portion of what makes storytelling more active and work well, is content created by employees themselves.

This can be a company blog post, pictures they took from their work or a corporate event, video, etc. 

Letting employees create, engage, and share content created by other employees boosts engagement and participation. There is more to it, so if you are interested I recommend our employee-generated guide .

Remember to measure the value of employee stories:

• Monitor the rate of employees opting to be a part of the stories
• Measure the amount of sharing and engagement with stories online
• Report on the user growth of those getting involved in employee advocacy and wanting to join the platform (you should be using a platform if you are not)**
• Is the recruiting and talent pipeline becoming faster and easier?
• Is employer branding engagement going up? 

** The best way to manage and understand the impact of employee stories is by using an employee advocacy tool like EveryoneSocial — a place where your company can add the best stories for employees to easily engage, tag employees, and share to their own social networks. And, it also includes reporting features to see results in both platform use and social media results from the sharing. With mobile apps, browser extensions, and a desktop application, employees can easily create and suggest great content to enhance the storytelling capabilities. 

Examples of Employee Stories

Many of our clients use their employee advocacy platform to highlight and create employee stories in addition to storytelling’s use cases for marketing, sales, and communications.

It’s a key piece to growing their brand and work culture, but is made easier when employees are also sharing personal content. 

But to help you get the wheels turning a bit, here are some great examples of organizations sharing employee stories to drive authenticity and trust via social media. 

The financial industry is primed to leverage employee stories. Consistent with their name, Vanguard is an exemplary forerunner in employer brand strategy.

Vanguard approaches employee stories with precision and encourages their employees to get involved, tell their story, and share on social media. 

This video they posted here on their LinkedIn page is a great example. Take a look through Vanguards LinkedIn feed on their company page and you’ll see a treasure trove of great employee-focused content. 

One of the early adopters of social media in the workplace , T-Mobile is a leader when it comes to building great employee stories.

They highlight employees, quote them, use pictures of team members from outside work, and much more. 

They also are big into employee-generated content, which adds to the workplace storytelling. This is a great instance of an employee creating content within EveryoneSocial.

One of the most well-known companies in the world, Adobe focuses heavily on their culture and storytelling. You can find their employee stories with the hashtag #AdobeLife on many social channels. 

This one was pretty cool, where they interviewed a research scientist at Adobe about her work. 

Mattress Firm

Consumer companies also can really build a unique work culture too. The mattress giant loves showcasing outside interests and company initiatives besides good sleep habits.

I really love this example and seeing their other employee stories.  

Final Thoughts

Direct media and social channels can be filled with negative news or fake stories, but your organization’s authentic employee stories can be a warm-welcomed addition for your audiences. 

Your organization must take the time to showcase the workplace and highlight more about employees and who they are — inside and outside of work. 

Of course, not all brands can easily build an attractive and fun personality that consumers will gravitate towards.

However, letting customers establish more personal relationships with your employees can help your organization grow in multiple areas of the business. 

Ready to build a strategy and start engaging employees to help drive workplace storytelling? See how large and enterprise organizations leverage EveryoneSocial to do just that. Schedule your personalized demo ! 

More posts related to employee advocacy, 30% of ceos still aren’t on social media.

It doesn’t surprise us that more than half of Fortune 100 CEOs are on either LinkedIn or X/Twitter. What surprises…

Related Practices & Jurisdictions

• Civil Procedure
• Constitutional Law
• Corporate & Business Organizations
• Criminal Law / Business Crimes
• Labor & Employment
• Litigation / Trial Practice
• 6th Circuit (incl. bankruptcy)

On August 19, 2020, in  Marquardt v. Carlton, et al. , No. 19-4223, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed summary judgment for the City of Cleveland on a former employee’s claim that the city had terminated his employment in retaliation for his exercising his rights under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The city had discharged Jamie Marquardt, an emergency medical services (EMS) worker, due to inflammatory social media posts he allegedly made regarding the police shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014, which garnered national attention. The Sixth Circuit’s decision applies only to public employers, but it is noteworthy because it sheds light on how courts determine whether an employee’s off-the-clock social media speech constitutes a “public concern” so as to warrant protection under the First Amendment.

In November 2014, Cleveland police officers responded to an alert claiming that a male was pointing a pistol at people at a Cleveland recreation center and park. The officers arrived on the scene and shot and killed the suspect. The purported “suspect” was, in fact, 12-year-old Tamir Rice and the “pistol” was a toy. This incident made local and national headlines and was followed by protests about police officer use of lethal force.

Marquardt was a captain with the Cleveland Emergency Medical Services (EMS). Approximately 14 months after Rice was killed, disturbing posts containing dehumanizing language appeared on Marquardt’s social media feed expressing satisfaction with the killing. The posts were removed from Marquardt’s social media feed within hours. Marquardt denied making the posts and instead claimed that “an acquaintance” with access to his phone had made them while he was sleeping.

Several Cleveland EMS employees expressed concern about the posts. The City of Cleveland ultimately terminated Marquardt’s employment. Marquardt’s termination letter advised him that he had violated the City of Cleveland’s social media policies and that his posts “‘did not involve a matter of public concern.’”

Marquardt sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, which gives public employees a cause of action for public employer violations of the U.S. Constitution. Marquardt alleged his employment had been unlawfully terminated in retaliation for his protected speech in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The district court granted summary judgment to the City of Cleveland, concluding that Marquardt’s posts were not protected speech because the speech involved a matter of private interest—not of public concern.

The Sixth Circuit’s Analysis

To determine if a public employer unlawfully retaliated against an employee for the employee’s speech, courts ask three questions: “one, whether the employee engaged in protected speech; two, whether the action taken against the employee would discourage an individual of ‘ordinary firmness’ from engaging in the activity that led to his discipline; and three, whether the employee’s protected speech was ‘a motivating factor’ behind the adverse action taken against the employee.”

Here, the Sixth Circuit focused only on whether Marquardt’s social media posts constituted “protected speech” under the first prong. The Sixth Circuit stated that to resolve a question of whether an employee engaged in protected speech, it employs “a separate two-part test.” It first asks whether the speech was on a “‘matter of public concern,’” and if it was, it “balance[s] the interests of the employer and employee, asking whether the ‘employee’s free speech interests outweigh the efficiency interests of the government as an employer.’”

The district court granted summary judgment for the City of Cleveland because it determined that the social media posts had not addressed a matter of public concern, and instead related to the author’s personal interest in Rice’s death. The district court therefore did not address whether Marquardt’s free speech interests outweighed the efficiency interests of the City of Cleveland. The Sixth Circuit held that this was a reversible error for three primary reasons.

First, the Sixth Circuit noted that the fatal shooting of Tamir Rice had sparked “fierce public debate over whether the officers’ actions were justified.” To demonstrate this point, the Sixth Circuit cited various national and local news stories published in or around the time that the social media posts were made. Second, the court observed that the author of the posts “seem[ed] to assert that Rice’s shooting was justified because he was ‘terroriz[ing]’ people by pointing a gun at them,” and that “[Rice] … should not be treated as a hero by Clevelanders.” The Sixth Circuit held that these aspects of the posts directly related to a “‘subject of general interest and of value and concern to the public.’”

Finally, the Sixth Circuit was careful to note that as a matter of law “the shocking and no doubt painful aspects of Marquardt’s comments,” which included profanity, racist language, and an expression of pleasure in Rice’s death, did not, by themselves, “alter the broader subject of the speech or transform it into a ‘personal grievance.’” In so doing, the Sixth Circuit further noted that “expressions of opinion, even distasteful ones, do not become matters of personal interest simply because they are phrased in the first person or reflect a personal desire.”

For these reasons, the Sixth Circuit reversed and remanded the case to the district court.

Key Takeaways

Employers are navigating in a time of a global pandemic, political protests, hate crimes, racial tensions, economic disruption, and a potentially divisive upcoming U.S. presidential election. Employees increasingly use their off-the-clock time to make political and social statements on social media. Public employers may want to be mindful of the Sixth Circuit’s decision in  Marquardt  as they make employment decisions that implicate free speech. Despite the toxic language and views expressed in some social media posts, the Sixth Circuit held that “these disturbing first-person sentiments do not, as a matter of law, alter the broader subject of the speech or transform it into a ‘personal grievance.’”

Importantly, the Sixth Circuit did not decide whether the speech in  Marquardt  was actually protected. Instead, it remanded the case to the district court to address whether Marquardt’s free speech interests outweighed the interests of the City of Cleveland in the efficient administration of its duties.

As public debate continues to intensify, the Sixth Circuit’s holding in  Marquardt  will only become more salient for public employers.

Current Legal Analysis

More from ogletree, deakins, nash, smoak & stewart, p.c., upcoming legal education events.

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How to boost employee social media engagement the practical way

Office culture is not what it used to be—or, to be precise, WHERE it used to be. Remember the days of conference rooms, chats in the kitchen, and impromptu meetings in the hallways? Exactly: in-person gatherings and team bonding are rarer these days. As a result, employee social media engagement, in which HR and talent management leaders encourage their employees to engage with or even post about social media posts from their organization , can feel more challenging too. After all, the first part of boosting employee advocacy is getting your employees excited about your culture.

That’s a little harder to do when you’re remote.

However, there’s an unexpected advantage to all of this remote/hybrid work . Online employee advocacy may actually become slightly easier, provided leaders can change how they think about what concrete outcomes they want to achieve. Now that we spend so much time online and working remotely, the virtual space has become far more familiar to all of us. As a result, it’s an ever more vital part of the community—which means that employee advocacy is a way for employees to not only show their company pride, but spend time with their team members.

For more on this topic, check out our post on 11 ways to improve your social media employee advocacy.

Make your expectations clear

Employee social media engagement doesn’t just happen. If you want your employees to share your content, you need to encourage it.

A great way to do this is to make a clear social media policy . Explain why social media advocacy is so important, different ways to achieve it, and what your expectations are. Try to get them excited about it. Most importantly: take time to listen to your employees. Ask them how they feel about engaging with your social media posts, and listen to any concerns they might have.

Another part of this is giving them time to engage. It’s not always practical to expect employees to want to engage with your posts once they’ve already finished work. Giving them several minutes a day to just quickly hop on social media, check what posts they want to engage with, and engage with them is an effective way to boost social media employee engagement.

Boosting employee social media engagement is about getting the (virtual) party started

In any organization, there are the social butterflies and the wallflowers: the people who love posting updates to their accounts every day versus the more introverted employees who still haven’t changed their social media’s default avatar. For HR leaders to encourage more employee interaction, they need to harness the natural enthusiasm of frequent posters as a way of encouraging shyer employees to do the same.

As John G. Graham Jr., VP of Employer Brand, Diversity & Culture at Shaker Recruitment Marketing , explained at our last EMBARC HR Innovators Summit , “I always say, start with the people who are willing, and then the engagement happens. They’re socially active already. They have strong networks. They’re willing to be your front runners. Then other employees/managers start to look left and right, and say, ‘Okay, I guess I can do this too.’”

To encourage more employees to post, HR leaders should vocally commend those employees already engaging with company posts . This positive reinforcement loop will encourage other employees to create their own company-themed posts because 1.) Everybody loves positive attention, and 2.) Most organizations are naturally competitive. By building on organic enthusiasm, employee advocacy transforms from a chore to a contest.

It also doesn’t hurt to throw in some tangible incentives. For example, the company might offer a free lunch to the “winner” of that week’s posting contest, or even some paid time off for an employee who manages to get the most engagement on their company-themed post over the course of a month. Also, managers shouldn’t be afraid to offer some do’s, don’ts, and basic technical training on posting. Just because you’ve mastered the art of embedding photos, tagging friends, and creating those pithy yet catchy hashtags , many employees may be uncertain or simply unfamiliar with the unspoken etiquette of the web. Share the knowledge and reap the rewards!

Craft posts that employees want to share

It may seem obvious, but to boost employee advocacy, you should focus on creating posts your employees will want to share. Some of that will likely happen automatically—eventually, you’re gonna post about something that just happens to align with one of your employees’ interests. But if you want to boost your employee’s social media advocacy, then you should actively create content that will align with multiple employees’ interests.

One way to do this is to create high-quality content that evokes thought, that says something interesting, that shares a fascinating insight that just begs to be shared. The reason this works so well goes back to one of the central reasons employees are sometimes reluctant to share company posts: they consider them uninteresting or largely irrelevant to what they want to talk about. But the more you post about things that are actually objectively interesting, the more your employees are gonna want to share and engage with them, because interesting is always relevant.

Here’s an example of such a post:

Well-being in the workplace = engaged employees. Engaged employees = better business. We chatted with Dr. Grin Lord about ways managers can play a role in promoting well-being at work. https://t.co/sQlHnOKzcH pic.twitter.com/8zX4s778DJ — Qualtrics (@Qualtrics) July 26, 2021

Another approach? Sharing fun company posts. This may seem challenging, especially in the context of a relatively serious institution, but here’s the good news: a bit of positivity and inclusivity will work in any organization. And it can work remotely, too. Like this post:

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by careerarc (@careerarc)

And, by including everyone on the team (ahem: and tagging them!) there’s a greater incentive for each person to share that post on their social media feed, which increases the exposure of the post and helps establish an organic, genuinely positive company image.

As an example, check out this post by BJC Medical Group:

And lastly, employee spotlights are always an excellent way to increase social media advocacy among employees . Who doesn’t want to share something positive their company said about them or about one of their close coworkers? Plus, as we explained here , such posts encourage engagement from your coworkers’ friends, family, and acquaintances—people who might otherwise not fit into your audience.

Here’s just one example of a great employee spotlight:

And as a final thought: talent managers should also welcome the thoughts and opinions of everyone on their team to create content that people feel represents their interests. Inclusivity is about genuinely listening to other people’s ideas. If given the chance, many employees probably have a post or idea they’d like to share. By making them feel like a valued contributor, HR leaders will start to see a significant uptick in employee advocacy.

Enjoy the limelight, but don’t expect the moon

Trying to increase employee social media engagement can be frustrating. The more you post and the less your employees engage, the more it can begin to feel almost personal. You’re posting, day in and day out. Why are your employees ignoring you?

That’s why it’s so important to manage your expectations . Some posts are always going to be more popular than others. Expecting your employees to engage with every single one of your job posts is unrealistic. And even for the important ones, even as engagement grows, it’s gonna wax and wane a little. Sometimes, employees won’t engage with your post because they’re just really busy, they didn’t see it, or they’re just not in the mood. The key point is to rejoice in the growth. Trust in your instincts and keep posting in good spirits: the engagements will follow.

Give your social media presence a super dose of adrenaline

Wanna know our absolute favorite way to boost employee social media advocacy?

Give ‘em a social media presence to be proud of.

With CareerArc, you can put your social media recruiting into hyperdrive: automate your posts on a massive scale while still ensuring you retain full creative control. Even better, CareerArc can seamlessly integrate with your recruiters’ social media accounts AND allow you to create the type of content your employees will want to advocate for.

Wanna see it in action? Click here to access your free demo today .

Want to read about a topic in talent acquisition, social media recruiting, or employer branding that we haven’t covered so far? Share your suggestion in the comments section!

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All aboard: How Purdue University increased their social media engagement by 24%

Known for their engineering school, Purdue University takes a scientific approach with everything they do—including social media. And when it comes to investing in their digital presence, Purdue is going full steam ahead.

“Purdue’s social media content is used to tell stories about Purdue Boilermakers and connect with students—past, present and future,” says Assistant Director of Digital Engagement, Abby Eddy.

When Abby jumped onboard in 2019, she was faced with building a team from the ground up to broaden social’s reach and impact across the Purdue community. The Digital Engagement team was born, and has become a well-oiled machine. Thanks to the team including–three social media professionals and five interns, followers now engage with Purdue’s social content more than ever.

Purdue uses Sprout Social as a cross-departmental hub to level up social listening, create robust reports and keep their content on track.

Engineering engagement for students and alumni

The Digital Engagement team manages all of the University’s non-athletic channels across Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok and Pinterest with more than 900,000 followers combined. And as their name suggests, they have a laser-focus on engagement .

We use Sprout’s Profile and Post Performance Reports to identify our top posts and to see what engagement looks like across channels monthly. We’re always looking at how we can replicate the success of top posts on other channels, and adjusting content accordingly. Abby Eddy Assistant Director of Digital Engagement, Purdue University

“We’ve always had the motto that you can have a million followers, but if only a thousand are interacting with your content, your channels are useless,” Abby tells us.

Using Sprout takes the guesswork out of understanding what content resonates. “We use Sprout’s Profile and Post Performance Reports  to identify our top posts and to see what engagement looks like across channels monthly,” says Abby. “We’re always looking at how we can replicate the success of top posts on other channels, and adjusting content accordingly.”

Sometimes, diving into analytics uncovers surprises that guide future strategies.

“We found that people love our nostalgic ‘then and now content’—it unifies alumni as well as current students, especially on Instagram. But it was surprising to find out that these posts performed really well on LinkedIn,” Abby says.

https://www.facebook.com/PurdueUniversity/posts/10157795323243915

Purdue also uses Sprout to make sure they never miss an opportunity to interact with their audience. “Our interns are in the Smart Inbox daily,” says Social Media Specialist, Kolby Hagmaier. “They filter one channel at a time and look at comments from the previous 24 hours with the hope that everything is marked ‘complete’ at all times.”

The system they’ve developed is working. With 4.5 million total engagements, they’re already 151% to goal for the 2021-2022 school year.

We use Tags for every piece of content that we publish within Sprout, from overarching brand pillar tags to post-specific ones. Kolby Hagmaier Social Media Specialist, Purdue University

Where Boiler Up means listen up 

Purdue’s social team uses Sprout’s Listening feature to keep their ear to the ground and finger on the pulse of campus conversations and brand health. “We have alerts set up to help monitor spikes in conversation around specific topics,” Social Media Manager Ashlee Shroyer tells us. “It’s a helpful way to immediately identify if something is gaining traction—good or bad.”

In catching a crisis, speed matters—especially if a request for more information comes straight from the top.

“We’ve received requests from our President’s office to quickly run a report on topics and how they’re appearing on social media,” Ashlee tells us. “With our general ‘Purdue University’ topic, we’re able to search quickly by keywords to provide a fast snapshot.”

Social listening has also helped them collaborate with the Strategic Communication team to keep an eye on potential crises before they spin out. This keeps them proactive—not reactive. “It’s hard to know when something is starting to bubble up,” Abby tells us. “So if the Strategic Communication team gets wind of something, they can ask us to create Listening Topics to monitor it.”

But listening isn’t all crisis mode and no fun. The team also uses the Word Cloud (see an example of the Word Cloud for Sprout’s fictional coffee brand below) to identify  unexpected gems that inspire content—from conversations and themes to emojis.

“We see a lot of emojis in there,” Kolby tells us. “We’ll implement those same emojis in our posts to stay in lockstep with our audience.”

Using Tags to keep tabs on content and connect students

Purdue has a unique marketing superpower—an ambassador program of around 50 students who bring a first-hand perspective to their digital presence.

“Boiler Ambassadors use Sprout for their student-run Instagram account,” says Ashlee. “We provide Sprout training to all of the students so that they can publish and tag content, as well as run their own reports.”

After receiving Sprout and brand voice training, the students have free reign of their Instagram account and create content themselves. Using a special tag just for the ambassadors helps the student team and the Digital Engagement Team filter their specific posts.

With student ambassadors, interns and a full-time team powering Purdue’s social presence, maintaining one brand voice when responding to comments is key—especially when you’re fresh off of a 2020 rebrand.

Sprout is used as a cross-team hub where everyone can find pre-written responses in a unified brand voice—both evergreen FAQ responses and templates for events like big games or commencement.

“We have specific language we want to weave into comments and responses,” Abby emphasizes. “So we created a set of pre-populated responses in the Sprout Social Asset Library that our interns can pull from, which gives them the flexibility to respond to comments on the fly but also makes sure they’re comfortable with the language we’re using.”

Boiler Ambassadors use Sprout for their student-run Instagram account. We provide Sprout training to all of the students so that they can publish and tag content, as well as run their own reports. Ashlee Shroyer Social Media Manager, Purdue University

Keeping teamwork on track and revolutionizing reporting

A robust social team needs a robust organizational system to match. The Digital Engagement team has mastered the art of tracking and reporting on content. “We use Tags for every piece of content that we publish within Sprout, from overarching brand pillar tags to post-specific ones,” says Kolby.

They use the Tag Performance Report on a weekly basis to help their whole department quickly understand the impact and success of content. And they’ve used Sprout to revolutionize digital reporting —on their own team and interdepartmentally.

“The analytics we pull from Sprout are a major piece of the monthly digital performance reports we share with the full marketing department,” Abby tells us. “Those highlight everything from our social metrics and campaign updates to website analytics.”

Using Sprout, they are able to share social findings with the larger marketing department to celebrate successes, suggest data-driven changes and provide insight into their efforts.

Their ability to prove their efforts and results with data has built trust between the Digital Engagement team and marketing leadership—granting them the autonomy to post content that works.

“Sometimes we have to push back on the amount of content that we’re asked to push out because the volume of posts has gone up. But when that happens, we see engagement dip a little bit,” Abby tells us.

💪 #1 Top Public University in the State 💪 #1 Most Innovative in the State 💪 11 Years of Frozen Tuition #TheNextGiantLeap pic.twitter.com/q3HdmMLQ6h — Purdue University (@LifeAtPurdue) March 12, 2022

All aboard the future of social at Purdue 

Purdue has recognized and harnessed the power of social. They’re even using it to power larger digital initiatives. Having met and exceeded their 2021-2022 engagement goals, the Digital Engagement Team already has their eyes set on what’s next. In the future, they plan to even more closely track the role social plays in driving audiences to their admission site and converting them into future Boilermakers.

If you’re ready to connect your teams and your audience through the power of social media using Sprout Social, start your free 30-day trial or request a personalized demo . Get ready to tap into the game-changing insights waiting for you and your brand.

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• APSC Careers

Case study - APS employee engagement on social media

•  Alex’s friend, X, posts a meme on Facebook that shows a political leader in clown makeup, with the caption: “Elect a clown, expect a circus.”
• Alex clicks ‘like’ on the post.
• Alex shares the meme on their own page.
• Another friend of Alex’s, Q, comments on Alex’s post: “Clowns are meant to be funny. This [expletive] deserves the guillotine”. 
• Alex does not engage with this comment.

Risk assessment

• What is Alex’s APS classification?
• Is Alex in a leadership role?
• Are they a prominent subject matter expert in the APS?

Lower risk:  Alex is an APS5 employee in a large agency, with no supervisory responsibilities. While they have technical expertise in their field, they are not known as a subject matter expert in their agency or the APS.

Moderate risk:  Alex is an EL1 employee in a small central agency, who supervises an APS6 employee and a graduate. Part of Alex’s role is to deliver presentations about their subject area to APS employees across agencies, and, occasionally, at professional conferences.

Higher risk:  Alex is an SES Band 2 employee in a central department, or the Head of Mission at an Australian Embassy or High Commission or the Head of Post at an Australian Consulate-General.

Subject matter

• Who is the political leader in the meme?
• Which agency does Alex work in?
• How close is the subject matter of the post to Alex’s area of work?

Lower risk:  Alex is a Finance Officer in a service delivery agency. The meme depicts the leader of a foreign country. Alex has no dealings with that country or its citizens in their work.

Moderate risk:  The leader depicted in the meme is the Australian Prime Minister, and Alex is a policy adviser in a department that interacts with senior ministers.

Higher risk:  The leader depicted in the meme is the Australian Prime Minister, and Alex is an SES Band 1 employee in a central department that interacts with the Prime Minister’s Office. Alternatively, the subject of the meme is the leader of a foreign country in which Alex is posted.

• How extreme is the tone of the post?
• Would a reasonable member of the community view it as falling within the norms of acceptable social behaviour?
• What is the nature of Alex’s involvement in this scenario?

The meme appears to call into question the competence of the political leader and their government. The clown and circus metaphors suggest they cannot be taken seriously or relied upon to meet the community’s needs or expectations.

While the tone of the meme is clearly critical, it falls within the range of socially acceptable discourse—for example, it does not use obscene language or slurs, depict or incite acts of violence, or make threats. At the same time, the apparent intention of the meme is to insult or mock the politician, which means it poses a higher risk in itself than expressing polite disagreement with a government policy.

The comment made by Alex’s friend Q falls considerably further outside social norms than the meme, and could in itself risk damage to public confidence if posted by an APS employee.

By liking the meme on their friend X’s page, Alex could reasonably be viewed to endorse the sentiment, and this may raise similar risks as reposting it. Arguably, reposting it may be considered a stronger endorsement of its message, and could give rise to a higher risk, than liking the meme.

The presence of Q’s comment does not necessarily call into question Alex’s ability to be professional or impartial, to the extent that Alex does not engage with the comment. That said, it would be advisable for Alex to delete the comment or otherwise indicate that they do not endorse it, to reduce the risk of any perception that Alex supports the sentiment expressed in Q’s comment.

On the basis of the above considerations:

• How high is the risk of this engagement undermining public confidence in the APS?
• What should Alex’s agency do?

If Alex is an APS5 Finance Officer in a service delivery agency, and the meme depicts the Australian Prime Minister, the post might raise questions about Alex’s judgement, but is unlikely to raise serious concerns about their capacity to behave impartially and professionally in their work. It is important that APS employees in all roles exercise good judgement—but the more junior the employee, the more likely it is that their judgement in their work will be tempered or influenced by that of more senior colleagues and managers, and the less likely it is to adversely affect the ability of their agency or the APS to serve an elected government.

The tone of the meme is not so extreme as to cause a reasonable member of the community to conclude that Alex is incapable of behaving impartially and professionally, and this, combined with their role in an enabling area of their agency and their relatively junior status, suggests that there is overall a low risk to public confidence.

In this case, it may be reasonable for Alex’s manager to take no formal action, but to have a conversation with Alex about how personal behaviour on social media may reflect on the way employees and the APS are perceived—and to consider ways to help Alex hone their judgement as part of their professional development.

That said, if Alex has a history of posting or engaging with similar content, the cumulative effect may pose a greater risk to public trust. In this case, Alex’s manager should check Alex’s understanding of the impact their personal behaviour can have on confidence in the agency and the APS, discuss the risks of their online activity to date, emphasise the importance of exercising sound judgement as an APS employee, and encourage them to discuss and assess the risks of future posts of a similar nature.

While the post in itself does not necessarily indicate a position so extreme as to be incompatible with APS employees’ requirement to behave impartially, there are some factors that might increase the risk. For example, if the meme depicted the Australian Prime Minister and Alex was an EL2 policy adviser in a central department that directly supports the Prime Minister, it may be reasonable to question their professionalism—in particular, their capacity to understand and meet the obligations of APS employment—and their ability to serve the elected government in a professional and apolitical way.

In these circumstances, Alex’s engagement would pose at least a moderate risk of undermining public confidence in the APS. It would be reasonable for Alex’s manager to discuss the matter with Alex in the first instance and check their understanding of their obligations as a senior APS employee. Having regard to all the circumstances, Alex’s manager should assess the extent to which the post is likely to undermine public confidence, and take proportionate action, which may include considering the matter as a potential breach of the Code of Conduct. If Alex is found to have breached the Code of Conduct, Alex’s agency should consider the range of sanctions available to ensure that any sanction is proportionate to the breach. Any response by the agency must be reasonable having regard to the particular circumstances.

132 Social Media Case Studies – Successes and Failures

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That is such a short-sighted and limiting point of view.

Social Media Marketing is not sales – but it can help to sell things. And personally, I have to admit that I have several times bought something, booked an event or took part in something because I saw people (friends and acquaintances OR strangers) talking about it on social media. At the same time, I have never bought anything a salesperson tried to sell me on the phone. So yes, you actually can sell me things on Social Media. And I am not the only person.

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Before you read on - we have various resources that show you exactly how to use social networks to gain massive traffic and leads. For instance, check out the following:

But limiting Social Media Marketing success or failure to the statement: For sales, you need to pick up the phone is simply b%llshi$t. You can use social media for lead generation to fill your sales funnel – but you can also use Social Media for totally different aspects of business like customer management, brand awareness, reputation management, audience building, website traffic and many other things your business can profit from.

Many people do it. I do it and have done so for other projects in the past. The honest answer to “Social Media is not working” is: It is obviously not working the way you are doing it. Try different tactics, learn, adjust, measure, optimize, try something else, try harder, and never stop at “You cannot sell on Social Media!”

So the answer is, yes you can make money with Social Media, but it is not working the same way for each and every business or situation.

Most of the time, if you do not have success with getting ROI out of your Social Media activities, it is not Social Media, which is not working, it is you who are doing something wrong or have the wrong social media strategy.

Social Media cannot simply be done by following a recipe step by step.

That can only get you so far.

In Social Media often the best approaches are already cold coffee when they become common knowledge, and everyone tries to hop on the train. You need to make assumptions, test your assumption, measure success and adjust your marketing strategy according to your results.

Hey, before you read on - we have in various FREE in-depth guides on similar topics that you can download. For this post, check out:

Social media cannot be learned by the book.

But one thing is certain: To shout out sales messages in Social Media is most likely going to fail to give you any return.

What people want and expect from their Social Media activity is so diverse, and there are many Social Media case studies in multiple situations.

Join our  free Email Course  to learn how to start your social media marketing journey:

All the basics in 4 Days, 4 Emails

Instead of selecting a handful of case studies for this article, I decided to provide you with a list of resources with multiple case studies about how businesses are successfully using social media for their business success.

1.  15 B2B Case Studies for Proving Social Media ROI

Rob Petersen looks at the special situation of using social media platforms to market to businesses instead of consumers. He provides 15 examples ranging from CISCO and Demand Base to LinkedIn and SAP.

2.  50 Social Media Case Studies you Should Bookmark

SimplyZesty looks at a variety of use cases for the different social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, Instagram and more.

3.  IBM Turns its Sales Staff Social Media Savvy

I love this example as it shows how sales and Social Media Marketing can work hand in hand. Contrary to the above-mentioned comment on our blog, IBM realized that even sales can profit from Social Media with cost-effective leads.

4.  11 Examples of Killer B2B Content Marketing Campaigns Including ROI

Lee Odden of TopRank Marketing focuses more on the Content Marketing side and provides 11 B2B Content Marketing case studies.

5.  B2B Social Media Case Study: How I made $47 million from my B2B blog

This is a personal success story from AT&T’s experience and success with a content strategy.

6.  How ASOS Use Social Media [CASE STUDY]

The story of how the fashion and beauty store ASOS has become Britain’s largest online retailer with the aid of Social Media for ecommerce and online marketing.

7.  5 Outstanding Social Media Campaigns

The examples include the story from a hairdresser who increased sales by 400% without spending a penny. It is not only the big companies who can profit from Social Media.

8.  3 Small Businesses That Found Social Media Success

The examples range from customer service, brand perception to social engagement.

9.  The Best Social Media Campaigns of 2014

These marketing campaigns are more about creating more engagement, generate more fans and increase loyalty amongst audience members for the brand and not so much about direct ROI. Still, they explain how to get it right.

It is not only the social media success stories you can learn from. Sometimes you can learn from other peoples’ failures at least as much as from their successes. Here are some social media case studies on failed social media activities. The failures tend to be on a smaller scale, resulting from bad communication and reactions turning the Social Media conversation in an unwanted direction. It is rare that a company admits to a complete campaign and a ton of money gone down the drain. Still, even from these smaller examples, we all can learn our lessons for our behavior in Social Media:

1.  Social Media Fails: The Worst Case Studies of 2012

The examples are campaign focused and include examples from McDonald’s and Toyota.

2.  19 horrific social media fails from the first half of 2014

These are examples of how you should not communicate in Social Media and showcase some ways you should not copy on how to jump onto trending hashtags and events in Social Media.

3.  5 Big Social Media Fails of 2013 (and What We Learned)

4.  Top 12 Social Media Marketing Mishaps

These are examples of what can happen to you and how a social media Sh$tstorm can brew up. It makes sense to read some of these and talk about possible reactions before any of this kind happens to you. Simply be prepared.

Final Words

I hope you find some useful marketing tips in my little collection of Social Media case studies – or at least, have some fun browsing through these examples. I find them encouraging as they show the variety of cases where Social Media can help your business. And they show how many humans are in Social Media, making it a place where things can go wrong and go well. It is up to you to leverage the full power of social networks and turn the tide.

If you are looking for even more case studies here you go:

Digital Marketing Case Studies

Content Marketing Case Studies

Instagram Marketing Case Studies

Twitter Marketing Case Studies

Forget Failure. Get the simple process to success:

We show you the exact steps we took to grow our first business from 0 to 500k page views per month with social media and how we got 50k visitors per month from social media to this blog after 6 months. We show you the exact steps you need to take to see traffic success.

You get easy-to-follow step-by-step action plans and you will see the first results after a couple of days. Check out “ The Social Traffic Code ” – there is a special offer for you!

“The Social Ms blog and books have shown us great possibilities of growing on Twitter and via online media. In addition, they actually respond to email reactions. Practicing what they preach gives them the credibility edge.” Guy Pardon, Atomikos

Don’t miss out – make a decision for success! 

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Social media: 3 noteworthy employment law case studies

You only have to look at President Trump’s Twitter postings to understand what a powerful – and thorny – tool social media and employment can be. By its nature, it can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection. For employers, this can be worrying as disgruntled employees sometimes take to sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to vent their frustrations.

This article highlights the legal cases which demonstrate that there is some hope for employers.

Weeks v Everything Everywhere Ltd

In Weeks v Everything Everywhere Ltd, Mr Weeks published a number of posts on his Facebook page that compared his workplace to “Dante’s Inferno”.  His comments included: “No Dante’s Inferno for this happy fatty today” and “Another day at Dantes [sic], fat lad living the dream, hope you all have a better day than I’m going to have”. When confronted by his line manager, he refused to refrain from making these type of posts in the future. He subsequently made similar comments online and was dismissed for breaching the company’s social media policy. Mr Weeks claimed unfair dismissal. The tribunal concluded that the comments, which had been made over a long period of time, were “likely” to cause reputational damage if they continued and that the employer’s response had been reasonable.

Game Retail Ltd v Laws

In Game Retail Ltd v Laws, the employee had created a private Twitter account and followed 100 Game retail stores; 65 of the stores had followed him in return. He had set his privacy setting to public so that his posts could be viewed by anyone. He subsequently made a number of tweets relating to Newcastle supporters, A&E workers, dentists and “t**** in caravans” which his employer regarded as obscene and threatening. He was dismissed for gross misconduct. A claim for unfair dismissal was not upheld by the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) . The ruling noted that the fact the employee had used his private Twitter account to follow other Game stores, and allowed them to follow him in return, compromised the argument that his tweets were entirely private and did not impact on his employer.

Creighton v Together Housing Association Ltd

The Creighton v Together Housing Association Ltd case highlights the potential permanency of comments made on social media. Mr Creighton was a line manager who had a grievance raised against him by an employee he managed. Part of the complaint was that Mr Creighton had made derogatory comments towards other employees on his open Twitter account. The investigation found tweets posted two or three years previously and Mr Creighton, who had almost 30 years’ service, was dismissed as a result. The tribunal rejected his claim that he had been unfairly dismissed.

Managing social media and employment

Whilst these cases found in favour of the employer, companies shouldn’t become complacent. There are a number of steps that you can take to bolster your position and help to justify any action you take following a negative social media posting by an employee.

One of the key measures you should introduce is a clearly worded social media policy which sets out the standards of conduct expected from staff in relation to this form of communication. It should be made clear that any breach could warrant disciplinary action, up to and including dismissal.

As soon as you’re aware of a negative social media post by an employee, take steps to capture any evidence that can be subsequently referred to should disciplinary action be necessary. This could include taking screen shots of the offending post, recording details of any complaints received from other employees or customers, and documenting any evidence of loss or damage suffered by the company as a result of the posting. Details should also be taken of how widely the post has been read, together with a note of the number of “followers” or “friends” the employee has.

You will then want to take steps to try and remove the material. The easiest and most effective way of achieving this is to simply ask the employee to delete the offending post/tweet. You can then determine whether disciplinary action is appropriate.

Social media is now a popular and frequently used communication tool. The cases detailed above have shown that simply because a negative work-related comment is made on a personal Facebook or Twitter account, it doesn’t prevent you from taking appropriate steps against the employee concerned, particularly when it’s likely that the content could cause reputational damage to the business.

If you would like advice on your company’s social media policy or any other HR issues, please contact Fitzgerald HR on 01271 859 267 or email [email protected]

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Unit4 – Turning in-active employees into Social Media Influencers with DSMN8

Turning in-active employees into social media influencers with over $109,378 of impact, an roi of 8x plus increased brand awareness, website traffic and conversions., all while driving a positive change in company culture, it was all possible by leveraging unit4's greatest asset… their employees, most of unit4’s employees have a social media account on linkedin and/or twitter. we also knew they were connected to the people most critical to the organization; customers, prospects, partners and potential employees., the challenge, get inactive employees active on social media and stay active., with dsmn8, unit4 managed to encourage employees to start social sharing and build personal brands, while also promoting the organization., ensuring a win-win for both parties., headquarters, utrecht, netherlands, company size, 2,600 employees, the challenge.

As communication, networking and business moves to an ever more digital and remote working world, Unit4 knew its employees would be central to helping navigate these changes and ensure business success.

Building a personal brand enables employees to showcase industry knowledge and expertise, leveraging social-selling and one-to-one relationships across social media. In turn, this helps increase organization awareness, sales opportunities and showcase company culture.

It’s an approach that would drive efficiency and impact like no other.

Yet there was a problem…

Many employees were currently inactive across social media.

Unit4 needed to engage leadership, sales, marketing and recruitment teams to share company-related content. Yet when they listened, they heard “I’m too busy” , “I don’t know what to post” and “I don’t feel motivated to post company content” .

Key Fact: Organizations typically see just 2% of employees sharing and creating company-related content. Introducing an employee advocacy program can see this increase to over 30%.

” We can’t underestimate the impact of this initiative and technology on our business. It has fundamentally changed our culture and attitude. Employees are now empowered and enthusiastic, seeing their networks grow and having more conversations than ever before. All for the mutual benefit of their professional reputation and that of Unit4. Emma Keates Global Head of Communications

The solution

To solve this, while maximizing scale and impact would require a whole new approach and technology solution.

After a thorough review of employee advocacy solutions , Unit4 selected DSMN8 – for its advanced features and passionate team. Confident that the partnership could take results to the next level.

The evaluation focused on four essential requirements; relevancy, ease, motivation and analytics.

DSMN8 allows you to target content to each employee based on interests, department, location or language. Ensuring a highly relevant, custom content feed that refreshes for each individual and their specific tastes. Meaning there would always be something new and exciting for users to share with their networks.

We learned that time had been a barrier to employees building personal brands and being active. So we needed to make sharing easy. This is where DSMN8’s powerful automation feature came in!

Employees can opt-in to ‘automatic posting’ based on set criteria they choose – alerting the DSMN8 system to the content they want posting on their behalf, eliminating time-poor employees excuse of being ‘too-busy’ to post, as they were now able to maintain an active social profile on ‘autopilot’ .

To help increase adoption further, the DSMN8 platform features leaderboards and a points-based gamification engine. Showcasing top-sharing individuals and the most popular content. This helps motivate individuals to increase activity, grow their network and improve their impact even further.

Tracking employees’ influence requires DSMN8’s central analytics dashboard. This allowed the team at Unit4 to monitor, learn and understand the true results of employees efforts. Metrics including active users, shares, clicks and content published were now visible with performance data such as reach, cost per click, clicks per share and comparative media spend.

Unit4 could now compare employee activity against paid advertising or email campaigns, attributing an ROI directly to this program.

Onboarding and rollout were also critical to the initiative’s adoption and success. Unit4 initially leveraged 100 employees from the extended leadership team. Getting them to lead by example as advocates and promoters within their teams.

After this initial one week period, the program was opened to all 2,600 employees. A tutorial video was created for employees logging into the tool, and a Q&A session organized to answer employee feedback and questions.

After two months, employees were reminded again about DMSN8 and the program via a company-wide presentation at their Sales Kick-Off, titled “say goodbye to ineffective social selling” .

Key Fact: 64% of Unit4 users are using DSMN8’s automation functionality.

The impact?

In just four months, 1,252 employees (48% of the organization) joined the program and started using DSMN8 regularly, sharing 17,124 pieces of company-related content; a 171% increase prior to the initiative!

Over this time, employee activity generated the equivalent impact of $109,378 in media spend. That is how Unit4 would have had to pay to get the same results through paid advertising! Resulting in 30,041 clicks on employee shares, 4,321 website visits and 41 website conversions at just $0.44 per click.

That’s 92.7% less per click than what Unit4 typically pay to advertise on LinkedIn!

The initiative worked.

Educating employees about social selling and the importance of building a personal brand increased employee confidence on social, inspiring previously inactive employees to become ‘social media influencers’ .

Unit4 employees fully embraced the program, its impact and choice of technology partner, with 64% even choosing to have content shared to their networks automatically through DSMN8.

Collectively, we successfully engaged the target audience of global leadership, extended leadership, sales, marketing and recruitment, plus interest from outside these areas within Unit4 also wanting to participate.

“The platform is easy to use and pick up, enabling me to build my network, have more conversations and identify more sales opportunities.” – Neil Georgeson, Global Head of Business Development – Unit4.

Senior stakeholders at Unit4 were so impressed with the program’s impact that they also invited over 200 external partners to join. With the goal to further improve the communication and knowledge of Unit4 amongst vendors & consultants.

Additionally, the program now forms part of the organization’s DNA and onboarding process for all new starters.

Key Fact: Engaging new joiners as part of the broader company onboarding program increased active users by over 55%.

By using DSMN8, the organization also benefited from employees seeing the latest company-related content available, improving internal communications and enabling Unit4 to disseminate information in a way employees find easy to access and digest.

In summary, this initiative and DSMN8’s innovative technology enabled Unit4 to reach and communicate with audiences more effectively and measure impact like never before, all through the people who know the business best: their employees.

Content shared

The average number of pieces of content shared by an employee.

Content clicks

The average number of clicks received on each employees’ posts.

Comparative

Cost per click.

The cost for each click generated by employees activity.

On Investment

The return on investment just 4 months into the programme.

” This initiative has given employees who didn’t know-how, the knowledge, confidence and inspiration to become active social influencers. Savana ter Burg Communications Manager

We help brands empower their employees to Curate , Create and Share on-brand content. Your employees will have access to both a desktop and mobile application where they can effortlessly share your content across social, messenger, email and SMS, boosting your organic reach while keeping them up to date with company news and industry trends.

Interested to see how you could turn your employees into motivated social influencers like Unit4 and super-charge your content efforts with DSMN8’s employee advocacy solution?

Previous Project Greyp Bikes: Empowering Employees to Become Thought Leaders on Social

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Top 3 Social Media Case Studies to Inspire You in 2024

Discover three successful social media case studies from top brands and learn how to create one. Benefit from their strategies and mistakes to ensure the success of your next campaign.

Social media is every marketer’s safe haven for branding and marketing.

And why not?

More than 50% of the population is active on social media, and more are signing up with every passing second.

In a recent poll by HubSpot, 79% of the respondents have made a purchase after seeing a paid advertisement on social media .

This isn’t just a happenstance.

It’s the constant efforts that these brands put behind their dynamic presence on social media, that counts.

But how do they captivate their customers’ attention for this long despite the budding competitors?

Well, that’s something that we’ll reveal in this blog.

We shall assess 3 different social media case studies by top brands who are best in their niches. Their game is simple yet effective.

How effective? Let’s take a look.

Social Media Case Study 1: Starbucks

Starbucks and social media are a match made in heaven. Being one of the sensational brands online, they are stirring the social media world with their strong presence.

They brew the right content to elevate the experiences of their coffee lovers. But how do they nail marketing with perfection every single time? Let’s find out.

Starbucks in Numbers

Starbucks mastered the advertising transition from offline fame to online undertaking. They use each social media with a varied goal to target pitch-perfect reach. Drawing in more customers than ever before, they strike the right balance in content across multiple platforms.

Key Takeaways

Though not every company has a Starbucks budget to promote and spend lavishly on social media marketing, here are some quick takeaways that will undoubtedly help.

1. Chasing Trends

Be it any event, brands must take the advantage to showcase their viewpoints and opinions. Successful brands like Starbucks jump into the bandwagon and leave no stone unturned to make their voice count in the trending list.

Here’s one such social media campaign example from Starbucks.

Starbucks is a firm believer in LGBTQ+ rights. When the pride wave surged, Starbucks came forward and reinstated its belief through the #ExtraShotOfPride campaign.

Starbucks joined hands with the Born This Way Foundation to raise $250K to support the LGBTQ+ community. Throughout the social media campaign, they shared quotes and stories of various Starbucks employees cherishing the pride spirit.

2. Less is More

Social media is not about quantity but quality. Starbucks follows the “less is more” principle to maintain the quality standards, even in the caption. Spamming followers’ feeds with constant posting is a big no-no. Starbucks shares 5-6 posts per week on Instagram and 3-4 weekly posts on Facebook .

Creative and crisp! That’s what defines a Starbucks caption. This post with 111+k likes is no exception. Nothing is better than a minimalist post with a strong caption.

3. User Generated Content is the King

Ditch the worry of creating content every day when you can make use of user generated content. Starbucks makes sure to retweet or post its loyal customers’ content. User generated content postings starkly improve brand credibility.

Look at this Facebook post made out of customers’ tweets. The new Oatmilk drink got the appreciation shower by some, and Starbucks couldn’t resist but share it with others. It saved them efforts on content brainstorming, plus they got free PR.

4. Building Rapport

Building rapport with the audience is an unsaid rule to brand fame. Social media has now taken the onus of dispensing quality service by aiding brands in prompting faster replies .

Starbucks is always on its toe to respond to customers actively solving concerns, expressing gratitude, or reposting. That kind of proactive service definitely deserves love and adoration.

5. Loads of campaigns

Starbucks is known for its innovative social media campaigns. Be it a new product launch or any festivity around the corner, Starbucks always turns up with a rewarding campaign.

In this social media campaign example, Starbucks introduced #RedCupContest with prizes worth $4500 during Christmas of 2016. A new entry came every 14 seconds.

The grand total of entries was a whopping 40,000 in just two days. Indeed Starbucks knows how to get the most out of the festive fever.

6. Content mix

Last but not least, the content mix of Starbucks is inspiring. They create tailored content for every platform.

The official youtube channel of Starbucks comprises content in varied hues. From recipes to even series, Starbucks is the ultimate pioneer of experimenting.

Even on Instagram, they use all the features like Guides, Reels, and IGTV without affecting their eye-popping feed. Starbucks also follows the design consistency for its aesthetic content mix.

Starbucks has proved time and again to be a customer-centric brand with their unrelenting efforts.

Social Media Case Study 2: Ogilvy & Mather

Ogilvy & Mather needs no introduction. Founded by David Ogilvy, the ‘Father of Advertising’ in 1948, the agency continues the legacy of revolutionizing marketing long before the advent of social media.

The iconic agency helps several Fortune 500 companies and more make a massive impact on their audiences worldwide.

Ogilvy & Mather knows its game too well and never fails to astonish. Not just high-profile clients, Ogilvy nails its marketing with perfection every single time.

Keep on reading.

Ogilvy & Mather in Numbers

They use social media to target pitch-perfect reach. Drawing in more hype than ever before, they know how to strike the right balance and bring out emotions with their heart-warming campaigns.

Not every company has David Ogilvy’s legacy or even affluent clients to boast of, but here are some quick takeaways that will undoubtedly help you become a pro marketer.

1. Integrating Values

Ogilvy stands apart from the crowd, creating trends. They leave no stone unturned to communicate values.

Proud Whopper is one such social media campaign by Ogilvy that was an instant hit on the internet. People were offered whoppers in rainbow-colored wrappers, with a note that said, “Everyone’s the same on the inside.” This was to reinstate the importance of LGTQ+ rights.

The campaign got 1.1 billion impressions, $21 million of earned media, 450,000 blog mentions, 7 million views, and became the #1 trending topic on Facebook and Twitter.

Ogilvy made a remarkable #Tbt video to honor this momentous event showcasing their supremacy in creating impactful campaigns.

2. Quality over Quantity

Ogilvy believes in the “ Quality supremacy ” to maintain their high standards, even in post captions.

Arbitrary posting isn’t a part of their agenda. They share 5-7 posts on Instagram and Facebook weekly.

Direct and very precise. That’s what defines an Ogilvy caption. This post is no exception. They have exhibited the success of their client work by describing the motive behind the campaign and sharing the ad they created for raising awareness.

3. Adding Credibility

Won awards? It’s time to boast! Because that’s the most authentic way of establishing trust among your clients. It bears proof of your excellence.

Look at this pinned Twitter post. Ogilvy won the Global Network of the Year by the very prestigious London International Awards. It also earned Regional Network of the year for Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Europe.

What better than this to give its audience an idea about Ogilvy’s roaring success and undoubted potential?

4. Being Innovative

Building rapport with the audience is an unsaid rule to brand fame. And that’s why you need to tell stories. Social media has become an indispensable medium to spread your stories far and wide.

Ogilvy shares its historical tale of existence and how it has adapted to the challenges of the changing world. The team extensively talks about their adaptation to the latest trends to stay on top always.

5. Brainstorming Uniqueness

Being unique is what propels you on social media. People are always looking for brands that do something different from the herd. So your task each day is undeniably brainstorming unique content.

KFC wanted more of its customers to use its app. Well, Ogilvy and KFC decided to hide a secret menu in the app, which was a mass invitation for the download without being salesy at all. Results? Downloads up by 111% at launch!

6. Inspire Your Peeps

Inspiration is everywhere. But how do you channelize and mold it as per your brand guidelines? The renowned brands move their audience, filling them with a sense of realization. Who doesn’t seek validation? We all need quotes and inspiration to live by.

Ogilvy has dedicated its entire Pinterest profile to inspiration. The profile has numerous insightful infographics that encourage you to pursue marketing when your spirits run low. And that’s how it brings out the very essence of being the marketing leader: by inspiring its followers.

Got some good ideas for your branding? We have created templates and tools to help you execute them hassle-free. Tread on further and download the Trending Hashtag Kit for 2024 to get into action.

Social Media Case Study 3: PewDiePie

YouTube king with 111 Million subscribers on PewDiePie Channel, Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, has defied all norms. One of the most prolific content creators of the decade, Felix was on the list of World’s 100 Most Influential People by Time Magazine in 2016.

Needless to say, he is still relevant to this day and has a massive following on social media. Not just for branding, the Swedish YouTuber leveraged social media to give himself a new identity and opened doors to fame and a successful career.

What was the cause of this extraordinary trajectory?

Let’s find out.

PewDiePie in Numbers

PewDiePie likes to keep his social media raw and unfiltered. That’s why subscribers love to have a glimpse of his everyday life and follow him on other social media platforms as well. Here’s a quick snapshot of that.

Felix took the early bird advantage and started creating content when it wasn’t even popular practice. We can’t go back in time, but we can definitely learn a lot from his social media success.

1. Start Now

If you are still skeptical about making the first move, then don’t. Stop waiting and experiment. It’s better late than never.

Social media is in favor of those who start early because then you create surplus content to hold your audience . You quench their thirst for more quality content.

PewDiePie started creating videos in 2011 and live-streamed his gaming sessions with commentaries. It was something new and completely original. Ever since, he has continued to make thousands of videos that entertain his audience.

2. Gather Your Tribe

Being a content creator, PewDiePie knows his act of engaging his audience very well. He strives to build lasting connections and encourages two-way communication. As a result, his followers like to jump onto his exciting challenges.

Felix treasures his gaming community. He frequently asks his followers to take screenshots and turn them into funny memes . He gives them tasks to keep them engaged and amused .

3. Collaboration and Fundraising

Once you reach the stage and gain popularity, people want to see more of you with their favorite personalities. That’s what Felix does.

He collaborates with multiple YouTubers and brands and puts out exclusive content for his followers. He also goes for multiple fundraising campaigns to support vital causes and social wellbeing.

Here’s one such social media campaign example. PewDiePie supported the CRY foundation and raised $239000 in just one day to bring a positive impact for children in India. He thanked all for their contribution and taking active participation towards a noble cause.

4. Keep it Real

Felix likes to keep his content fluff-free. You get to witness raw emotions from an unfiltered life. This instantly appeals to the audience and makes the posts more relatable .

Apart from that, he also uses storytelling techniques to narrate his experiences, adding a very personalized touch to each of the videos.

Here’s a video of Felix where he and Ken from CinnamonToastKen discuss what can be possibly done with a million dollars around the world. The topic is quite intriguing.

More than 3.8M people have watched it and 216K of them liked it as well, proving that you need not always sweat to create complex content. Even the simplest ones can make the cut.

How to Write a Social Media Marketing Case Study

Many small businesses struggle when it comes to social media marketing. But guess what? Small businesses can slay the competition with a powerful tool: the social media case study.

These social media case studies are success stories that prove your hustle is paying off. Here’s how to weave a case study that showcases your small business wins:

Building Your Brag Book

• Pick Your Perfect Project:  Did a specific social media campaign drive a surge in sales? Highlight a product launch that went viral. Choose a project with impressive results you can showcase.
• DIY Interview:  Don’t have a fancy marketing team? No worries! Record yourself talking about your challenges, goals, and the strategies that made a difference.
• Data Dive:  Track down social media analytics! Look for growth in followers, website traffic driven by social media, or engagement metrics that show your efforts are working.

Now that you have all the ingredients, it’s time to cook a brilliant case study

Crafting Your Case Study

• Headline Hunt:  Grab attention with a clear and concise headline. Mention your business name and a key achievement (e.g., “From 100 to 10,000 Followers: How We Grew Our Bakery’s Social Buzz”).
• Subheading Scoop:  Briefly summarize your success story in a subheading, piquing the reader’s interest and highlighting key takeaways.
• The Business Struggle:  Be honest about the challenges you faced before tackling social media. This will build trust and allow other small businesses to connect.
• DIY Social Strategies:  Share the social media tactics you used, such as engaging content formats, community-building strategies, or influencer collaborations.
• Numbers Don’t Lie:  Integrate data and visuals to support your story. Include charts showcasing follower growth or screenshots of top-performing posts.
• Simple & Straightforward:  Use clear, concise language that’s easy to understand. Bullet points and short paragraphs make your case study digestible and showcase your professionalism.

Remember: Your social media case study is a chance to celebrate your achievements and build businesses. So, tell your story with pride, showcase your data-driven results, and watch your brand recognition soar

Social media campaigns are winning hearts on every platform. However, their success rates largely depend on your year-round presence. That’s why being consistent really does the trick.

We’re sure you must have learned a few things from the above-mentioned social media case studies .

To excel further at your social media marketing, use our FREE Trending Hashtag Kit and fill your calendar with everyday content ideas.

On downloading, you get 3000+ hashtags based on each day’s theme or occasion. You also get editable design templates for hassle-free social media posting.

What are you waiting for? Download now.

Frequently Asked Questions

🌟 How do I start a social media campaign idea?

Here’s how you can start a social media campaign:

• Finalize your campaign goals
• Brainstorm personas
• Pick a social media channel
• Research your competitors and audience
• Finalize an idea that’s in trend
• Promote the campaign
• Start the campaign
• Track the performance

🌟 What are the different types of social media campaigns?

Different types of social media campaigns are:

• Influencer Campaigns
• Hashtag Challenges

🌟 Why is social media campaign important?

Social media campaigns have various benefits:

• Boost traffic
• Better Conversions
• Cost-effective Marketing
• Lead Generation
• PR & Branding
• Loyal Followers

🌟 What are some of the best social media campaign tools?

Some of the best social media campaign tools are:

• SocialPilot

🌟 What are the top social media sites?

The top social media sites are:

About the Author

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7 Employees That Got it Wrong On Social Media. Or Did Their Employer?

When it comes to social media , there’s never any shortage of celebrities being ‘cancelled’ due to tweets or social posts that went too far. But sometimes its regular employees’ social media antics that make for much more shocking stories.

As these examples show, sometimes the lines between right vs wrong aren’t clear-cut when it comes to social media behaviour. They serve lessons for employers and employees alike on avoiding the fallouts from a social media post gone wrong.

1. An Unhappy Ending To A Happy Event

The story of Rachel Burns stands as a cautionary tale for employees and employers alike. Rachel was a care home manager whose innocent celebration of a regular Friday night music event led to her being dismissed for gross misconduct.

Rachel was fired because she’d contravened Surrey County Council’s social media policy in four ways – one by posting a photo identifying one of the residents, a man with Down’s Syndrome who had jumped into the photo.

She eventually won her case for unfair dismissal. But, at what cost?

The resident’s sister and her husband didn’t believe that Rachel should have been fired despite it being defined as gross misconduct.

As his brother-in-law, Graham told the BBC :

"After 21 years is it appropriate to sack the manageress who's created a culture and environment at this special home in the way that they have?" asks Graham. "The answer is no, it's not."

Lessons Learned

Staff should always understand your social media policy and why it is in place. But remember not to act too hastily with disproportionate discipline measures - consider what your actions say to your customers and the public too.

2. Sharing Confidential Information

The Financial Diet told the cautionary tale of Ally, an assistant account executive who was fired for posting an Instagram photo after landing a new client. Her post was in direct violation of their company media policy and could have ruined the public announcement of their new client.

The head of the pitch team had even sent around emails for three days reminding people not to share anything on social media, which was especially important because reporters often follow creatives accounts. Ally admitted that the excitement got to her and,

“I figured, what’s the harm in posting a picture — and not even mentioning the new client in the caption — to my 200 followers? I figured a few people at the agency would see my humblebrag, but no one of note would. And furthermore, the clients didn’t follow me on Instagram.”

Lesson Learned:

It’s hard to say whether her employer did enough to warn their employees that even posts from those with a small social media presence can post big repercussions - for the employer and employee, Ally’s final words serve could well be a social media policy line:

“If you’re not sure whether to post, or not to post, choose the latter”.

3. A Question Of Interpretation

"Conquering the world, one well-dressed fat lady at a time."

Connie Levitsky was a sales associate at Edmonton plus-size women's retailer Addition Elle, who was fired when her employer saw her Facebook job title. They told her they preferred to use the words “curvy or shapely”.

As she told CBC ,

"I don't see fat as being a negative thing anymore". She felt that by taking offence to the term it reinforces “this perpetuation that fat people should be and are ashamed of themselves.”

Addition Elle admitted on Facebook that they’d made a mistake and that it "took the word 'fat' out of its context," worried it might offend customers and employees. They said,

"We believe that anyone should use whatever words they are comfortable with when describing themselves and whatever makes them feel empowered."

Lesson Learned

Ensure you understand your target market when creating your social media policy and involve your workers too – they can bring fresh perspectives you may have missed.

4. A Taboo Joke Without The Funny Side

Comedians have a habit of saying controversial tongue-in-cheek jokes and getting away with it. But on social media , the joke is often lost in translation when it’s a taboo topic.

Justine Sacco is the infamous PR Executive at IAC who shared this tweet before boarding her flight to South Africa back in 2013:

“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

Justine Sacco later explained that her tweet was not intended to be racist - that living in America puts people in a bubble and she was making fun of that bubble. Sadly, there was no going back from her misguided tweet.

As Jon Ronson says in his Ted Talk: “Twitter got hold of her life and dismantled it piece by piece”. There is always a baying mob on Twitter that delight in bringing people to ‘justice’, with little care for the long-term repercussions their actions cause the ‘perpetrator’ long after the Twitter storm has calmed.

This video will certainly provide food for thought to employees .

Jon Ronson's TED Talk: When online shaming goes too far

5. Naming And Shaming

Our fifth example is a real ‘red mist’ moment. Talia Jane left Yelp’s Eat24 in San Fransico, in her own words, “in a blaze…” after writing an inflammatory open letter to her CEO about her poor pay rate.

Despite the company declining to comment officially, Yelp ’s CEO felt compelled to issue not one but five tweets rebuffing Talia’s accusations. However, two months after she was spectacularly fired, Yelp made several improvements to its working conditions – including pay rises, 15 days of paid time off (up from five) and 1 paid holidays (up from zero).

Talia Jane’s story also has a happy ending. She’s now a writer and labour activist and in 2016 was named as one of Business Insider's 100 most amazing and inspiring people in tech right now.

Remind your employees that social media is not the place to air grievances and of the consequences if they do. However, consider how you treat your staff. Social media means whistleblowing is now much easier and far-reaching. If there are any issues, is it best to address these issues before your reputation is called into repute?

6. When The Past Comes Back To Bite You

Alex McCammond had just been hired as editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue in 2019 when a series of racist tweets against Asians she posted back in 2011 resurfaced. Although she deleted them and issued a public apology – and had worked on campaigns for marginalised voices - she was fired.

As The Independent reported , her posts included:

• “Outdone by Asian. #Whatsnew.”
• “Now Googling how to not wake up with swollen, Asian eyes…”
• “Give me a 2/10 on my chem problem, cross out all of my work and don’t explain what I did wrong… thanks a lot stupid Asian TA [teaching assistant]. You’re great,”

As Alex herself admitted: “My past tweets have overshadowed the work I’ve done to highlight the people and issues that I care about – issues that Teen Vogue has worked tirelessly to share with the world – and so Condé Nast and I have decided to part ways,” McCammond wrote.

You can’t escape your social media footprint – something employees should always be aware of. Tweets can be reshared long after they’ve been deleted and the risks of someone keeping evidence is more likely with senior executives. It’s therefore important that employers have a plan for what to do if they are embroiled in a social media storm.

7. A Missed Influencer Opportunity

“It’s like watching paint dry” is a go-to phrase for boring activities. So, if an employee can create viral videos about mixing paint – his employer’s product and accumulate an influencer status with 1.4million followers on TikTok you’d think he’d be fast-tracked to promotion. Not so for college student Tony Piloseno.

Sherwin Williams fired an employee who shared videos on how to mix paint, which had gone viral on TikTok . He’d even prepared a pitch deck on how they could reach a younger audience on social media.

As Buzzfeed News reported, the paint manufacturer fired him on the grounds of "gross misconduct" that included "wasting properties [and] facilities," and "seriously embarrass[ing] the company or its products”. One of these was mixing blueberries into the paint.

As Marketing Dive reports, the employee has now gone to work for a competitor, Florida Paints, who will supply the viral TikTok creator with materials to use in videos and work with him on developing a line of custom products.

Not every instance of gross misconduct is a bad thing – especially when an opportunity is there for the taking. If something goes viral you should stop and ask yourself why. What lessons can your marketing team learn?

Getting into a damaging situation means everybody loses in some way and there is no doubt that prevention is infinitely preferable to cure. Employees – and management, for that matter – need to be reminded that passion is good, but anger is not. You wouldn’t shout and scream at someone in the office, so don’t do it on social media. Things can get lost in translation on social media – which can all-too-easily go viral for all the wrong reasons.

A clear social media policy backed with solid training is the best way to avoid situations, such as these, from ever occurring in the first place. Your employees need to know your firm boundaries and they need guidance and real-life scenario training to ensure they fully understand the greyer areas – where social media etiquette and risks are less clear-cut. This way, they’re making an informed choice when they choose to post.

About Tribal Impact

Tribal Impact is a B2B Social Selling and Employee Branding Agency.

We're a team of social media strategists, trainers, coaches, content creators and data analysts who are passionate about helping our B2B customers develop and scale their social selling and employee advocacy programs.

Learn more about us here .

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