In case you were not aware, there’s a pandemic happening around the world, and it could be over a lot quicker if we’d all just stay home (I’m looking at you, Florida). Quarantining has forced much of the world’s office-dwelling workforce into makeshift offices around the house as we ride this thing out. And while there are many benefits of telecommuting, for both employees and employers, losing the social aspect of office life is not one of them. In the wake of all this, employee advocacy platforms take on a greater importance.
Or, at least, they take on a greater importance if they’re as thoughtfully designed as EveryoneSocial. The platform’s been around since 2013, when employee advocacy wasn’t really a thing that businesses were thinking about. Developers weren’t really thinking too much about it, either, but the core functions of a good EA program could be found in EveryoneSocial’s initial release. In the time since their first version of the software, the idea of employee advocacy has gained more traction with businesses, with more and more companies setting up EA programs every day—and they’re turning to software to do it.
EveryoneSocial Review:
As EA has evolved, so has EveryoneSocial—which at this point isn’t really designed to facilitate a program. A program is a thing you mix into an existing culture to achieve small changes. For the creators of EveryoneSocial, employee advocacy—and social media—is the culture. The platform looks beyond simply incentivising employees to post and advocate on social media on behalf of their employer. Instead, it facilitates the creation of a business’s own private social network, kind of like a LinkedIn where the only people who have profiles are co-workers.
And that’s why, in this age of social distancing and remote working, an employee advocacy platform like EveryoneSocial takes on greater importance. A study done in 2018 found that 74% of employees felt they were missing out on important company information at their places of work. That was the general feeling two years ago, when people were still congregating in offices and interacting with one another five days a week. Sending everyone home and having all face to face conversations over Zoom can’t have helped that perception much.
In their marketing material, EveryoneSocial trumpets their philosophy that what’s good for employees is good for the company. It’s one thing to ask employees to turn their own social accounts into sounding boards for your business. It’s quite another thing when they want to do it on their own. Whether companies succeed in doing this is really up to them and how they integrate social media with their company culture. But, as you’ll read in the review ahead, EveryoneSocial certainly does a good job of providing businesses with the tools they need.
Pricing
EveryoneSocial’s pricing is entirely customised. While it is SaaS, they don’t offer predefined plans or tiers of functionality. Pricing is primarily determined by the size of your organisation—i.e. how many licenses/seats you need—though it’s possible to customise available features, as well.
Their customers tend to be on the medium to large side, though that may say more about what the software does rather than how much it costs. Meaning: a small local business probably doesn’t need an employee advocacy program to market themselves. Companies like Dell, Adobe, American Family Insurance, ADP, Mattress Firm and Electronic Arts, on the other hand, very much rely on EveryoneSocial to keep their employees engaged.
The Details
We have a ton of platform reviews on this site, and at this point—the opening sentence to The Details—we generally talk about ease of use and how intuitive (or not) a platform is when you first log in. This isn’t really necessary here: logging into EveryoneSocial is like logging into a social network. Onboarding your employees is as easy as them signing up for an account through the web or on a mobile device. If they know how to use Facebook or LinkedIn, they know how to use EveryoneSocial. Posting content, sharing content, engaging with content—it will all feel very familiar.
Of course, there’s a little more to posting and sharing within this more corporate context. Content should be relevant and professional, and maybe not the photos from when you were peaking at Burning Man. EveryoneSocial can use machine logic to help you curate content according to criteria, or you and your employees can post your own. An approval process ensures that everything falls within the bounds of company policies. Creating groups for your employees, and then posting content tailored for those groups, helps to make sure that people are seeing things that resonate with them—it makes it that much more likely they’ll share things with the outside world through their own personal social accounts. Integrated gamification provides the mechanism by which employees are rewarded for participating. Points are awarded based on engagement activities, and employees can follow the leaderboard to see where they stand.
All of this is standard fare for an employee advocacy platform, though this one aims to go past that. Many companies interested in implementing EA—and the developers who create the tools to do so—tend to view the whole thing as an exercise in marketing. Building awareness and increasing brand authority/trust has been shown to be very effective when it’s your employees who are spreading the word. EveryoneSocial sees that as a foundation for something larger. Yes, it’s a marketing tool. But it’s also:
- A sales tool: The best salespeople are the ones who know how to wield the power of social selling. That’s true regardless of the culture of their workplace. It’s also true that the power of social selling can make the best sales people. EveryoneSocial makes it possible for sales teams to easily tailor their strategies around social media. It goes a step further, though, with a Salesforce integration. EveryoneSocial can exist entirely inside Salesforce for a one-stop social selling experience.
- An HR tool: People use social media just as much to find new jobs as they do to find old friends. Especially now during the pandemic, while conferences and seminars and other networking events are all cancelled, social media is more important than ever for job seekers and hirers alike. A job posted on the internal social network can easily be shared by employees out to their extended network, leaving hiring managers to sift through applicants who all come as a personal referral.
- A communications tool: A big cause for employee dissatisfaction is a lack of communication. When people aren’t aware of what’s going on in their company—policy changes, new initiatives, announcements, or opportunities—they feel disconnected and devalued. EveryoneSocial’s algorithms and advanced sharing capabilities can ensure that no one misses any news they needed to see. It almost functions as a social intranet, with its advanced search capability making it possible for people to easily refer back to past documents or memos. In larger companies, where offices may be spread out over large distances, an internal social network facilitates easy communication and familiarity between colleagues, regardless of where they might be located.
While the creators of EveryoneSocial are pushing a social-centric culture for all businesses, they don’t forget that the platform is still, you know….for businesses. Toward that end, they’ve made sure to integrate with a number of the most common professional and productivity software suites. Apart from the Salesforce integration mentioned above, some of the most notable integrations allow users to:
- Automate marketing campaigns with Oracle Eloqua
- Push content to Microsoft Teams and Slack
- Pull content from cloud storage like Google Drive and Dropbox
- Share vanity links and monitor clicks with Bit.ly
- Pass data over to Google Analytics to measure the impact of your social efforts
Conclusion
EveryoneSocial refers to itself as the “leading employee advocacy” platform. Of course, most companies make claims like this; but here, there’s a lot of history and data to back up the claim.
Over its lifetime EveryoneSocial has developed an excellent reputation for what it does. As an employee advocacy platform that’s been around since before people were using the phrase “employee advocacy,” they’ve had quite a bit of time to grow and adapt to the market and to the needs of the business landscape. They’ve used that time wisely. Their very first client in 2013 was Dell, and they’ve continued to attract large, multinational customers to manage their social efforts over that time, as they added more and more features.
This past spring, the company launched what they called EveryoneSocial 2.0—effectively a redesign of the site along with many new and/or improved features. If they weren’t the leading platform before then, they definitely are now.
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