Empowering Employee Social Engagement through LinkedIn Elevate

Today’s consumers no longer just buy products. They buy into brands, and expect to have a relationship with the brands they patronize. Social media offers a meaningful platform for consumers and brands to connect, but consumers want more than interaction with corporate-branded channels. They want to engage with people they trust.

For the past several years, the Edelman Trust Barometer has shown that the most trusted source of information about a company is the rank and file, not the executives. At Adobe, we put a lot of effort behind our Social Shift program to empower our workforce to have confidence to share content and engage on social media. This not only deepens trust and engagement with our customers, but also creates new business opportunities for us as a brand.

However, a big part of getting our employees to engage on social media is helping them find and share compelling content. Employee social activation solutions such as LinkedIn Elevate are giving brands a resource to tap into the trust of their employee base.

LinkedIn Elevate: The Next Step in the Employee Activation Ecosystem

Last fall, we started talking with LinkedIn about Elevate—a new product being developed to help companies and employees curate high-quality content, share easily to social networks, and measure impact. As one of just a few companies chosen to pilot the product, we thought it would make a nice complement to Social Shift—an easy way for employees to connect with their networks and become part of conversation about both Adobe and the industries we serve. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The Adobe employees that are piloting Elevate appreciate having quality content curated for them to both read and share with their peers about Adobe life, jobs, product news, partnerships, and insights from third parties about the industries we serve.

Since using Elevate, we’ve seen a spike in engagement with our content, and the employees using the program are driving net-new product downloads and trials that we may not have had otherwise. In February alone, we had an average of four new downloads per participant in the Elevate program.

We know our employees are a highly trusted source of information about Adobe and our solutions. We’ve hypothesized that content shared by these employees has greater engagement rates than content shared by our branded Adobe channels. During the LinkedIn Elevate pilot, the overall conversation about Adobe on the LinkedIn platform has increased dramatically, and job listings shared through the program have nearly twice the traffic.

Why It Works for Us

Often, a company’s employees are nervous about sharing content for fear of some swift retribution—getting a hand slapped for saying the wrong thing on their social channels. But training is liberating, and empowering employees to go out and share content and talk about your brand makes sense. They want to share, yet they don’t always know what they can share. Employee social activation solutions like LinkedIn Elevate help to squarely address these questions through approved content curators who serve up appropriate content.

As we look at the value that social media brings to business, we must be willing to recognize that corporate-sanctioned channels aren’t the only value proposition for the brand. Positioning employees as trusted advisors in their own networks by empowering them to share content in those networks makes sense and it works. We’re certainly finding that to be the case at Adobe, which is why we’ll continue to invest in our employees as part of our corporate social strategy.