Salesforce turns 25,000 employees into social brand ambassadors in 21 months

Partnering with Haiilo has brought countless benefits to Salesforce since its social media team saw an opportunity to leverage Haiilo’s offering to revamp their Social Ambassador Program.

In less than two years since introducing Haiilo, Salesforce has developed an inspirational and successful program to benefit its brand and global workforce.

Employees’ roles in building the Salesforce brand

From broad messaging around brand announcements and company values to niche content around a specific industry or field, Salesforce has seen quantifiable results with its employee advocacy program. By putting content in front of the right people using Haiilo, they’ve seen individual shares providing a wider reach than Salesforce’s official social media accounts.

“The reality is that all employees working at Salesforce are experts in their particular fields,” says Jesse Sacks-Hoppenfeld, Manager, Social Media Operations, Analytics, and Influencers at Salesforce. “We wanted to highlight that credibility and provide employees with the resources and the content enabling them to showcase that credibility and turn it into a personal and professional brand on social media.”

Committed advocates grow their networks at a rapid pace

Salesforce has found that those involved in its employee advocacy efforts grow their networks by up to three times the rate than they were before joining the program. That growth includes at least six times the profile views.

“The more you share, the more likely you are to see engagement,” says Jesse. “Plus, you’ll be reaching more people, building up your professional network and getting your profile in front of more people.”

Making relevant content available to engage a global workforce

As of November 2022, Salesforce is closing in on 25,000 employees participating in the Salesforce employee social media ambassador program. This includes an average of 1,200 new users each month.

“We don’t have all of our 73,000 employees using the tool yet, but it’s a start that we’re proud of,” says Jesse. “The nearly 25,000 employees we do have as advocates span 44 countries worldwide. We’ve worked to build a global governance and local empowerment framework for how we can support users who want to share non-English language content.“

A democratic approach to involving employees

This fully global participation model is just part of what goes into ensuring Salesforce has enough employees involved in content moderation.

“We want to democratize the responsibility as much as possible,” says Jesse. “Often, we’ll have a handful of folks with channel manager access to alleviate any added stress in helping us run this program.” This approach allows timely management of all the channels in different languages.

There are also times when nearly 100% of platform users will subscribe for a particular Haiilo channel. For example, around 95% of Salesforce advocates are a part of the brand’s ‘Business as a Platform For Change’ channel, which includes dozens of channel managers checking in to approve content related to Salesforce’s role in social and community initiatives.

“Salesforce’s Social Ambassador Program also allows a glimpse into what exciting things are happening in other parts of the business that you may not come across otherwise,” adds Mikaely Quaranta, Senior Manager, Social Community Management and Employee Enablement. “You are auto-subscribed to a set of channels based on your business unit, role, location, etc. but there is the option to subscribe to other channels of interest to you as well.”

Producing creative internal content boosts platform engagement

The employee advocacy team realized that while employees were genuinely interested in the advocacy program, availability for training at any given moment wasn’t realistic. This is why they’ve made all of the training material available to be consumed at the convenience of their colleagues.

“We put all employee advocacy training resources into every medium possible because we know people aren’t able to attend all training,” says Jesse. “The entire training content library is ready for employees to access in our Resource Center within the Haiilo platform.”

They’re also using the training program as a gamification opportunity, trialing a badge system.

“At Salesforce, we have an education platform called Trailhead, where employees receive points and badges for completing different modules. We’ve now begun introducing this to our employee advocacy program, creating a Haiilo trail about using the platform most efficiently and helping improve our employees’ experiences,” says Nathalie Lobato De Faria, Marketing Coordinator at Salesforce.

A perfect balance between individuality and brand authenticity

For an employee advocacy program to be successful with any brand in any industry, authentic content is essential.

“We’ve all seen friends sharing generic content on LinkedIn,” says Jesse. “A friend shares something where you can’t ever imagine those words coming out of their mouth, and it becomes clear that the person received a Slack message from a colleague to share it. Everyone sees right through it, and it defeats the authenticity and purpose of the program.”

Salesforce has taken an approach to educating employee advocates about the value of adding their insight. But what about those employees who don’t have time or simply don’t feel comfortable sharing their individual views on their social channels?

Part of the responsibility of Salesforce channel managers is to offer several copy options so employees are served varying social sharing messages that they can then personalize to be what’s most authentic to them, while also guarding the authenticity of the brand.

Salesforce has reached outstanding results with Haiilo: by engaging 25,000 social ambassadors, the team was able to achieve a potential reach of 27,6 M people with their Dreamforce content and over 2,000% ROI on their advocacy program. “As we prepare for another successful year with Haiilo, we are ready to dive even deeper into the platform features available, like newsletters and featured posts to expand our reach and allow us to scale as we bring on our Salesforce owned and operated companies – Mulesoft, Tableau, and Slack. The newsletter feature allows us to expand our global audience through our employees’ personal networks while also keeping our messaging alignment intact,“ says Mikaely.