How to Create Employee Brand Ambassadors with Social Media

Your employees are your most authentic storytellers, and a strong employee branding strategy turns that natural voice into scalable advocacy efforts aligned with your corporate brand. With the right tools and a little encouragement, they can help amplify your brand online, from LinkedIn to the breakroom. In this post, we explore how to turn your team into employee brand ambassadors using social media, digital signage, and a few simple tactics powered by Walls.io and ScreenCloud.

Social media and the workplace haven’t always seen eye to eye. Many business owners and executives are uncomfortable with the idea of employees using social media at work, having the perception that it hurts productivity and increases the risk of the company being misrepresented externally. 

Businesses often spend a fortune trying to improve their brand identity on social media, hiring influencers and professional content managers. But what if there was a way to build increased brand awareness with a resource that your business already has access to?

Your employees.

More than ever, employees feel like they are part of a business and that they have an impact both on their workplace and the wider world. So how can you leverage the power of your employees and turn them into brand ambassadors?

What is an employee brand ambassador?

An employee brand ambassador is someone who shares positive, authentic stories about their company. This kind of brand ambassadorship reinforces your brand values and keeps your company’s mission visible across social media platforms. Unlike paid influencers, employee advocates have firsthand experience, and that makes their content far more trustworthy.

These brand ambassadors can use a mixture of methods to spread the good word about how great a business service or product is through a mixture of content such as:

• Online reviews
• Social media content
• Personal brand based content (such as blogs or YouTube channels)
• Word of mouth

These brand advocates create user- content, also known as UGC, which the brand itself can repurpose for its own marketing purposes.

What are the benefits of employee brand ambassadors?

Encouraging and creating an employee brand ambassador program has numerous benefits, including, perhaps most importantly, its low cost.

Extend your reach organically

People trust people more than logos. When your team posts about your brand, their networks pay attention without you spending a dime on ads.

Running a business brand ambassador program usually means guiding existing employees with simple steps for content sharing and aligning posts with your brand guidelines. These advocacy efforts strengthen employee satisfaction and showcase your company’s mission to external audiences. This might simply be:

• Asking people to share what they love about work on social media
• Reviewing a new product
• Entering a competition by sharing a hashtag

And as you can see, all of these cost the company close to nothing but can reap great returns.

Strengthen employer branding

Social media can be an effective way of engaging with employees and can help create a sense of community. It’s not only appealing due to ease of use and accessibility, but it can also stimulate creativity. 

When you embrace social media at the workplace, you give your employees a simple and natural way to interact with the company and with each other. This also provides them with an authentic overview of what is happening and lets them know that their work is valued.

Leverage authentic content

Who is a better advocate for your brand than your workers? If they genuinely share their love of their workplace, then this obviously reflects well on the brand and can snowball into positive feedback among their peers and network.

Many of us have seen friends or colleagues share their pride on social media platforms. These authentic posts reflect strong employee engagement and highlight a workplace culture built on brand values and company values. 

While these people might not have been official employee brand ambassadors, chances are they left an impression on you. And if so, they probably left you with a positive impression of their workplace.

How to activate employee brand ambassadors

1. Start with culture

Great advocacy starts with a workplace people genuinely enjoy. If your internal vibe isn’t right, you’ll struggle to get authentic participation.

Use pulse surveys and feedback loops to understand what people value, then celebrate those moments visibly, on digital signage or your intranet.

2. Make sharing easy and safe

Not everyone’s a content creator. Providing guidelines, example posts,and optional social media training ensures consistent posts that reflect brand values. Even better: make it easy to contribute without needing an Instagram or LinkedIn account. 

3. Centralize content with a social wall

Walls.io aggregates content from across your employees’ social media, or lets them post directly. Use hashtags like #LifeAtYourBrand or create department-specific campaigns.

Then display your social wall:

• In the lobby on a large format display
• On digital signage in breakrooms and cafés
• At hiring events and trade shows
• On your careers or about page

4. Use Direct Posts for internal contributions

Not every employee wants to post on LinkedIn. With Walls.io Direct Posts, employees can scan a QR code and upload content (even short videos) directly to your wall.

This is ideal for:

• Celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, and team wins
• Holiday photo competitions
• Employee spotlights that feel inclusive

5. Bring it all to life with digital displays

Screens in your office are more than information tools, they're cultural surfaces. By displaying your Walls.io feed on ScreenCloud-powered signage, you:

• Boost visibility of employee-generated content
• Encourage spontaneous participation
• Build a sense of shared community

From HQ to remote outposts, everyone gets a window into what makes your culture tick.

Examples of successful employee brand ambassador programs

When it comes to running a successful employee advocacy program, it helps to know what has worked before. We've picked out some great examples of how brands have used a brand ambassador program to great effect...

Employee advocacy program

German insurance provider LV 1871 leveraged social media to turn their employees into brand ambassadors. 

They chose 30 (volunteer) employees to post on social media using the #TeamLV1871 hashtag. This UGC, posts from the official LV1871 accounts, and by the general public, were collected and displayed together on a social wall.

The dashboard that displayed both corporate news and user-generated content was received positively by employees. The wall has become even busier and driven more attention during bigger events. 

As the LV 1871 example shows, running a corporate influencer campaign is a bright and innovative way to keep an eye on what people are saying about the company. It can also help continually improve and evolve the company image presented to the outside world. Their brand advocacy efforts encouraged existing employees to post, while also attracting new hires.

An internal campaign turned public

Employee-focused hashtag campaigns can also turn into a public campaign. The #ownie campaign by METRO Cash & Carry, designed for their worldwide event Own Business Day, is a great example. 

In the first stage, the campaign focused on the company’s own employees in all 25 of the countries METRO operates in. They were invited to take pictures with their favorite independent business owners shopping at METRO stores. Social media posts with the #ownies hashtag were then posted on internal channels, and METRO employees could win both rewards and glory for their engagement. Remarkably, some of them posted well over 100 #ownies with their accounts! 

The second phase took the campaign public and engaged more than 19k business owners from 13 countries. It gave both METRO employees and METRO customers a chance to demonstrate pride in what they do, connect with other people, and share the joy of a long-term partnership. METRO reached its primary goal of engaging both employees and customers and turning them into brand ambassadors.

Social recruiting

Hashtag campaigns don’t just target current employees, but can also be an essential part of social recruiting.

Scout24, Germany’s leading digital marketplace, uses social walls to attract talent and win them over before they even submit their application. They use the recruiting hashtag #WorkingAtScout24 for all careers-related content and showcase it on a social wall within their offices and at events.

A social wall helps Scout24 spread their core values, showcase additional benefits, and encourage current employees to speak about their experience. Their employees can also share how much they enjoy working at the company. Positive employee content can therefore help  attract new talent and help manage expectations for applicants. 

Are you ready to embrace employee brand ambassadors?

As you can see, happy employees are the best advertisement for your company. When you turn employees into brand ambassadors, you reinforce brand advocacy, support recruiting for new hires, and increase employee referrals while projecting a strong employer brand to top talent.

If you’re only starting to use social media as a workplace engagement tool and are not yet ready for an entire campaign, make sure to follow a few basic rules to succeed:

1. Don’t make posting about the company on social media compulsory. Instead, think about how your employees would identify with the company’s content and try to make it relatable, honest, and shareable.
2. Show employees what kind of posts you would like them to share by briefing managers and setting examples. 
3. Make employee advocacy fun and give something back. 

But most importantly, invest in the positive and inclusive company culture, one that’s worth being an ambassador for.

Using Walls.io and ScreenCloud

Using Walls.io for your own employee advocacy program is simple and is a really neat way to highlight some the great mentions from across your socials. What's more, it takes just a few minutes to get set up.

If you have a ScreenCloud digital signage network in action, using Walls.io is available in our app store - although you will also need a subscription to Walls.io.

If you'd like to see Walls.io and ScreenCloud in action, check out our app guide here.

Not used ScreenCloud for your digital signage? Sign up for a free trial, or request a demo today.

Thank you to Daniela Turcanu – Head of Marketing at Walls.io – for writing this guest blog for us.