We’ve written many posts about how you can partner with influential people online to help promote your activities. But, if you think about it, who knows the most about a company and its products? For many businesses, the honest answer is its employees. They toil day in and day out, making selling, servicing, and providing additional services for the firms’ products. Few people, if anybody, will understand the ins and outs of those products better.
Many of your employees will also have a robust social presence. They may only think of themselves as “ordinary people." But they will all have friends and family with whom they communicate on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and the rest, often daily. They may already refer to the work they've done in their social posts.
Many businesses have discovered the benefits of formalizing this process. They've found the secret: employees make excellent advocates for their business. They are often ideal influencers, with ready-made audiences, just needing a nudge to encourage them to make social posts on behalf of their employers.
As with influencer marketing, there are now tools available to help simplify this process. These tools streamline the employees' advocacy activity, making the whole process more manageable for both the company and its employees.
8 Top Employee Advocacy Tools:
Ambassify is more than just a mere employee advocacy platform. It is an entire brand advocacy solution. Everything that Ambassify offers for employees is also available for customers who wish to promote a business they love.
Ambassify treats advocacy like a dialogue. Many of the same processes that manage one-way campaigns can also be used to get feedback or suggestions. Some campaigns are internal, and the CTA is to get employees to participate in polls and surveys.
There’s all you would expect from an advocacy program. This includes a content feed, campaign creation with templates, messaging, rewards, and advocate portals. There’s a Community Portal, where people log in, see available campaigns, a leaderboard, a feed showing posts made by the community, and a way to redeem points for rewards.
Ambassify offers 20+ campaign templates, each for different purposes. After inviting people to join the community, Ambassify recommends the first campaign you run is a poll, the results of which let the software calculate who your most active advocates are. Ambassify creates individualized Net Promoter Scores. You can use these scores to segment members.
Ambassify has created a mobile app for the community members to receive push notifications on new campaigns and to participate in
them.
Oktopost began life in 2013 as a social media management tool aimed primarily at the B2B space. As the social marketing landscape has expanded, so has Oktopost. It is now a suite of tools that allow for full management of a brand’s social presences—including scheduling, social listening, engagement tools, content curation, and now employee advocacy.
Implementing the employee advocacy module is seamless. The employee advocacy tools slot in with all the rest of the Oktopost tools and all components interact. A side-effect of this is that Oktopost’s employee advocacy platform isn't a standalone module. To use it, you'll also have to use their social media management software, as well.
Oktopost pricing is customized to a client’s specific needs, including the number of users, advocates, social accounts, and teams.
The admin console as a single place where marketers can manage their social and content marketing, with seamless integration into employee advocacy. The Content Curation feature is the starting point for an advocacy campaign.
Oktopost uses the posts you make as “inspiration” for curating content on your behalf. The more you post, the more the platform learns what’s relevant to your business, the more accurate the content suggestions will be.
When you post or schedule content through the admin console, you assign it to a “board.” One such board is the Employee Advocacy board, which is how your in-house ambassadors will be able to see and share your content.
Oktopost integrates with Salesforce, the world’s leading CRM platform. Your sales team can use the Oktopost advocacy engine directly inside Salesforce, never having to leave switch between windows or copy and pasting URLs to get quality content to their network.
Employees participate in a mobile app. They sign in and are greeted by a dashboard with a variety of content from which to choose. Employees can easily share content that they find interesting with a few clicks, and these posts can be immediate or scheduled, either manually or automatically. Anyone can suggest specific pieces of content they've found and think would be valuable to share. They can send a link, along with a little note of elaboration, from within their mobile app.
With advocacy being the goal, Sociabble has baked in several functions that don't just reward engagement; it encourages it. Sociabble is effectively a social network for companies. It integrates with a company’s computing resources and puts a social network-style front end to them—completely customized to reflect the brand.
If there's a document on a network drive that you want to share with your colleagues, you can post it to Sociabble, and they'll see it on their feeds. It is only one step from there to providing documents for employees to share to their personal social networks.
When employees create their Sociabble accounts, they opt into channels that interest them, and their feeds will show content relevant to their interests. These can be things that the marketers in your company want to push out to the employees, or they can be posts from other employees themselves. Users can like and share content internally or share the content out on their own accounts.
All of this activity can be organized into campaigns, and user performance can be tracked at the individual level.
Sociabble includes extensive gamification features to motivate employees who share content from their feeds. The gamification also includes challenges, which are ideal for getting employees to act more quickly with time-sensitive initiatives. Sociabble also has quizzes and polls that employers can use to test their employees on new initiatives or solicit their feedback.
SocialReacher comes across as a simple platform to use. On the first login, you're guided through setting up the interface itself. Next, you add collaborators, either by posting a custom signup link to share on internal networks or by emailing invites to those you want to join. Finally, you connect your branded social media accounts, which will serve as the primary sources of content you'll want your collaborators to share. Once you've gone through this, Social Reacher takes you to your dashboard to get started with campaigns.
From your dashboard, you can select content from any of your social feeds for sharing. You can choose the teams that you want to participate, and each member will be notified. You can define everything about the posts ahead of time.
There’s a built-in module for an incentives program. Rewards can be anything you want—gift cards, movie tickets, even extra vacation days. A collaborator is given a point for each message he or she publishes, and he/she can redeem these points for rewards based on criteria you define.
PostBeyond allows firms to create, distribute, and share content with employee advocacy. It has a dedicated platform for all the content you want your team to share: blogs, webinars, product releases, and job postings. You can curate your approved posts in one central library.
Anyone on your team can easily share content to their social channels in seconds. Employees can amplify your brand while saving time and effort. They can curate content, interact with their peers, and see how their social influence stacks up on the company leaderboard.
PostBeyond provides in-depth dashboards and analytics. You can monitor sharing and engagement, optimize your strategy, and make the right decisions that drive results.
It integrates well with many of the other tools you use in your business, including Bitly, Salesforce, Microsoft Office, MailChimp, Google Analytics, Marketo, and Slack.
EveryoneSocial focuses on employee engagement. It includes features such as a personal feed section that allows employees to add news sites and blogs they are interested in reading and sharing.
You can use EveryoneSocial to provide your employees with highly relevant content and information from marketing and external sources such as field marketing materials, company announcements, and news on prospects, customers, and competitors. It includes easy-to-use tools to connect and engage with buyers across social and other digital channels, including email, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Xing, Wechat, and Slack.
EveryoneSocial integrates with major marketing automation, CRM, social, analytics, single sign-on, content management, and communications platforms. You can pass data from your EveryoneSocial usage directly into your Google Analytics dashboard for easy reporting and monitoring of social results. You can even push content directly from Social Studio into EveryoneSocial. Likewise, you can push content into apps like Microsoft Teams, Salesforce Chatter, and Slack. You can pull content directly from Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box.
LinkedIn Elevate makes it easy to discover and share content curated by experts at your company. You'll feel confident that you're sharing the kind of valuable, relevant articles and insights that your network will appreciate.
As its name indicates, this product has the gravity that goes with the LinkedIn handle. It s particularly useful for large companies of 2,000 or more employees.
LinkedIn Elevate can identify your most socially active employees. These are the ones you will want to lead your employee advocacy program.
You should begin your campaign by setting up objectives for your employee advocacy. At the same time, decide the types of content you want your employees to share. It can be a mix of curated content and company-only content.
LinkedIn Elevate pulls in content, based on your objectives and choices. You can choose to broadcast any content you want your employees to share. Employees can also recommend content to you to broadcast on the company's feed.
LinkedIn Elevate offers a wide range of analytics to highlight how effective the employees' shares have been. Much of this appears in your visual dashboard. These include reach and engagement data, earned media, the most engaging topics, and the employees sharing and suggesting most content.
Bambu gives your employees a simple way to amplify your brand’s reach by sharing curated content across their social networks. You can gain exposure to new, qualified audiences by connecting your brand with the social networks of your employees.
Bambu streamlines all of the important messages and content relevant to your company through a single platform for your employees to read and share on social media. You can pre-approve social messaging and post text suggestions, helping ensure that content shared through employees is on-brand and authentic.
It gives insight into brand amplification so you can understand which pieces of content resonate with your employees and their networks. You can identify top sharers and create targeted teams for scalable amplification.
