The employee-led content playbook that actually works 🔋

How we made 1,200 Wiz employees extremely active on socials (no tools needed)

Jun 28, 2024

Welcome to Marketing Ideas! 👋 I’m Tom Orbach, Head of Growth Marketing at Wiz. I share 1 powerful idea every week. Join 30,000+ marketing leaders by subscribing here:

We’ve finally cracked the code on employee advocacy at Wiz. Our 1,200 employees have successfully become a powerful buzz-generation engine.

Here is our playbook.

🌈 Why Employee Advocacy is Powerful

Wiz employees have always been a HUGE opportunity for marketing:

With 1,200 team members and an average of 2,000 LinkedIn connections each, we have the potential to reach 2.4 million people—far exceeding our company page’s 190K followers.

Also, content shared by employees often reaches a more receptive audience. People on LinkedIn want to connect with people—not faceless company pages. When our employees share Wiz-related content, we benefit from the credibility and personal connections they have built over the years.

🦄 Wiz’s Step-by-Step Activation Playbook

If there is one non-negotiable rule for employee advocacy, it’s this:

1. 🍼 Spoon-feed all employees

Your colleagues are busy.

Don’t expect them to spend time on your marketing goals.

🏋🏻 Do the heavy lifting for them: Write the posts, create personalized images, give them crystal-clear instructions. Proactively contact employees in a 1:1 chat when there’s any excuse to post something:

Developed a feature? → Here’s an image + post options ✅
Contributed to a project? → Here’s an image + post options ✅
Attending an event? → Here’s an image + post options ✅

⭐️ A famous example at Wiz is our conference images: Before each big conference, we create personalized graphics for each employee attending, complete with multiple post options. All they have to do is copy, paste, and post.

Here is the Slack message we send (50 times!) before each conference:

🧑‍💻 We even started a ‘Treasure Hunt’ game: Before some events, we hide a secret item in 5 employee images. The LinkedIn community is then invited to find the 5 employees with the hidden easter egg to collect a prize.

In the example below - we hid this cute little Wiz Sensor icon in 5 posts:

Lastly, we automated the celebration.

🎉 Our HR system sends employees a custom GIF on their Wizversary - their 1-year, 2-year, 3-year mark and so on. They absolutely love sharing these milestones:

This approach is truly a 🏅 win-win:

Employees save time
Employees get love on social
We get more brand exposure
We ensure brand consistency
We leverage our marketing expertise properly

Feed employees with a spoon. You won’t regret it!

2. 🏓 Run internal contests

Occasionally, we organize limited-time contests that challenge employees to create specific content for LinkedIn. For example, we might ask them to post photos and videos wearing Wiz swag.

Here’s how we structure these contests:

Set a clear timeframe (e.g., 2 weeks)
Offer a really cool prize (like a Playstation 5) for the highest engagement
Ask employees to include “Follow @Wiz” in the post to boost our company page

Setting up the contest is a matter of one #general message on Slack:

3. 🎟️ Create a club for super-advocates

Every company has its social media superstars. We have created a private Slack channel where these “Wizfluencers” get exclusive access to:

Weekly LinkedIn growth tips from our team
Early access to Wiz social media updates
Contests with prizes for highest-impact employees on LinkedIn
A place to share their posts links with each other for engagement (like a pod)

They even got an exclusive profile picture frame

We make these VIPs feel valued with special perks:

Priority engagement from Wiz’s main page (190K followers)
Wiz swag and gifts
Shareable certificates highlighting their club membership (see below)

And yeah, employees are invited to APPLY to the club — they can’t simply join!

4. ☀️ Spotlight employees in official posts

You know what employees love even more than public recognition? Public recognition from the mothership.

When we write posts for Wiz’s main LinkedIn page (190K followers), we make a point to always include and tag our own people:

Authored a blog post? → We tag you.
Led a research study? → We credit you.
New podcast episode? → We feature the hosts.
Company award? → We post a photo of you holding the prize.

History shows that when employees are directly mentioned, they’re pretty much guaranteed to share the post with their network.

5. 🎓 Host LinkedIn workshops

For over a year, I've been running 15-minute “10 Rules for Going Viral on LinkedIn” sessions for various internal teams. Team leaders can ‘book’ me for their next weekly sync meeting, and I then join it for a quick workshop. After the session, team members can send me their drafted posts for 1:1 feedback anytime.

It’s become so popular that I even took the stage at our 1,000-person company kickoff to present “The Wizard's Playbook for Going Viral on LinkedIn.” Workshops are 🔥!

6. ✍️ Write custom posts for VIPs

Sometimes, high-impact employees like hiring managers need extra-special support for crucial posts — like job openings that need ASAP attention.

These VIP posts are the only time we’ll ghostwrite fully custom content.

To streamline the process, I created a request form where hiring managers can submit job details and get a custom-written LinkedIn post from yours truly to share. The questions in the form are:

1) Link to job post

2) Where is the role located?

3) What language should the LinkedIn post be in?

4) What are the top 3 reasons this role is more exciting than similar roles at other companies?

5) What’s the coolest project the new hire will work on in their first 6 months?

6) What’s the most impressive thing your team has done recently?

7) How big is your team, and how does this role fit in?

8) Do you have any wild stories or fun facts about your team that show off your awesome culture?

9) Put a link to your favorite joke/meme/sketch about your profession — we’ll use it as a reference to the kind of humor that flies in your field.

7. 🟢 Equip the team with AI

As much as I’d love to personally pen every post, we needed a more scalable option for our growing team.

Following the success of my Viral Post Generator, I have also created the Wizard Post Generator: an internal AI-powered tool I built for employees to auto-create personalized LinkedIn content.

But when ChatGPT burst onto the scene, it felt silly to compete. So I pivoted us to a new approach: a company-wide ChatGPT prompt library.

*Example:* The “Webinars” section of our prompt library

Now, employees can grab pre-formatted prompts to generate their own LinkedIn posts with ChatGPT. My recommendation for you is to do the same.

8. 💎 Always engage

Here’s a little tactic that goes a LONG way: Whenever an employee posts about Wiz, we always comment from the company page.

I’m talking every. single. post.

And you know what? They absolutely love it. The perceived value of that big-profile response is through the roof. Mothership recognition is effective.

9. 🌳 Foster the right culture

At the end of the day, even with ALL these systems in place, employee advocacy simply won’t happen without the right company culture.

At Wiz, we’re lucky to have a team of talented and engaged individuals who consistently support our employee advocacy program. Their willingness to participate and share our content with their networks has been a key factor in our success. I truly appreciate their efforts and the collaborative environment they create at work every single day.

💫 Our north star? Make employees feel valued and excited to share.

That means publicly celebrating our most engaged advocates and positioning LinkedIn activity as a core part of succeeding at Wiz.

The best trick to embedding this mindset: Connect new hires with as many Wiz employees as possible during their first month. We have a dedicated #newwizards Slack channel where managers introduce new team members alongside their LinkedIn profiles, sparking a boom of connection requests. By immediately exposing new hires to the huge rates of employee sharing, they catch the bug too. It’s contagious in the best way.

We also make the why crystal clear: “When you post about Wiz, it bumps our content in the LinkedIn algorithm. More eyes on Wiz = more leads for you to close!”

And of course, we regularly share the results: “Our latest employee takeover campaign drove _____ more MQLs than an average day, plus over _____ candidates who cited specific team member posts…”

🌀 Wrapping it all up! Download this cheat sheet:

Recommended Tools ❌

One question I’m often asked is what tools we use for employee activation.

Honestly? We don’t. No LinkedIn features, no advocacy automation, no gamification platforms, nothing.

Our most effective strategy by a long shot has been personal, 1:1 outreach to employees. Mostly via Slack, sometimes via email. I can’t stress enough how much that human touch matters. An inbox ping with “Hey, I made this for you!” beats any bot, every time.

💙 Huge thanks to the incredible Wiz marketing crew (especially Maya, Omer, Amit, and the entire team) for making this a reality. Employee advocacy has become our not-so-secret weapon for explosive growth, and we’re just getting started :)

See you next week ✌️

Tom

P.S. No employees yet? Start with founder marketing 🌠

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