Marketing today means using as many viable channels as possible. It’s all about reach and communicating strong, persuasive and useful messages to grow your business. Which is why employee advocacy has become such a strong tool for brands.
What does employee advocacy look like?
According to Hootsuite, 33% of your employees are already posting and sharing content about you on their personal social media accounts, without any prompting. Formal employee advocacy program offers a content strategy to guide the efforts of your employees, thus allowing you to keep track with the ROI of their efforts. They share curated content with their social networks and answer questions about your brand and products/services. More web traffic. Greater brand recognition. Increased content downloads. Shortened sales cycles. The list goes on.
Source: blog.hootsuite.com
The Key to Employee Advocacy Success
It’s a simple idea, employee advocacy. While simple enough, it takes more than just social media participation by your team to make it work. You need a strategic approach and the right tools.
In this blog post, we’re sharing 9 of the top employee advocacy tools you should consider.
1. Sociabble
Sociabble has aptly dubbed their solution as a tool that “allows you to strike the perfect balance of brand, third-party, and user-generated content (UGC), as well as combine internal and external communication.” And we think they’re onto something.
Like Social Reacher, Sociabble includes gamification as a key element of their platform. And we think it’s a smart idea. Incentives drive behaviour.
Sociabble takes things a little further, though. They’ve introduced social selling as a feature. Teams are able to lean into true social selling by making recommendations and demonstrating expertise. But what we’re pleasantly surprised by is your ability to track lead generation and that originates from social selling.
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2. Oktopost
OKtopost, while also an employee advocacy tool, it offers a little more. Oktopost also includes social content publishing, listening, analytics, governance and integrations with marketing automation tools and CRMs.
This makes the tool all the more valuable, especially if you’ve been looking for a way to bundle all of the above.
Features
Easy Content Sharing
Employees are able to discover, filter and share your pre-approved content with their networks via desktop or mobile app.
Gamification
Oktopost provides a leaderboard where employees can track their performance and you can identify top promoters.
Reporting
Like Sociabble, Oktopost also includes social selling functionality. You’re able to gather stats on leads generated, clicks track the impact each employee has on your social media goals.
3. Ambassify
Ambassify has done a smart job of highlighting the three most important aspects of brand advocacy. Their solution is designed to help brands identify, interact and activate, measure and reward.
As a solution, Ambassify isn’t just an employee advocacy tool, it can also be used as a customer advocacy solution.
Features
Identify and Recruit
You’re able to identify top promoters and invite them to join your community. Once a part of your community, brand advocates can then be segmented into groups.
Participation and Gamification
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4. Hootsuite Amplify
Hootsuite has been around for a while and so it made sense that they would introduce an employee advocacy solution of their own. If you’re familiar with Hootsuite, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to use Amplify.
Features
Creating, Curating and Sharing Content
Amplify can be added directly to your existing Hootsuite dashboard. This makes managing brand advocates, the content they have access to and other features straightforward. Creating content takes place in the same way as in Hootsuite’s original social platform with a few added features for curators.
Read More5. Smarp
Smarp is an employee advocacy, communication and experience solution. It allows businesses to address all three business needs through a clean and well-designed interface.
As an employee advocacy solution, it packs all the features you’ll need to share your brand’s messaging, and a few more.
Features
Integrations
Integrations go a long way when it comes to employee advocacy tool. Smarp gives brands the ability to link their Active Directory databases to simplify user management, use Zapier to connect with thousands for other apps, and embed Smarp news feeds within their intranet or CRM.
Content Discovery and Sharing
Read More6. Bambu (by Sprout Social)
Sprout Social’s known for their social media management application. As a tool, it’s one of the most robust out there, and Bambu makes for a well-placed addition. Bambu includes both amplification and social selling, both rolled into a clean and intuitive interface.
Features
Content Curation and Sharing
Bambu allows administrators to curate content for staff to share. It also gives employees the ability to propose content using the Suggest a Story feature. Users simply enter the URL of the content they’d like to propose along with a note about why they think their audiences will find the content interesting.
Resource Database
Read MoreFrequently Asked Questions
What are the benefits of employee advocacy?
Employee advocacy can help you to boost your web traffic and brand recognition. It can also help you to get more content downloads and shorten the sales cycles. Other ways that firms have benefitted from employee advocacy include: improved brand loyalty, better search engine rankings, improved customer service and higher conversion rates. What’s more, it can also help you to reduce your marketing costs. In a study completed by Hinge Marketing, only 3.5% of firms indicated that they have not enjoyed any of these benefits.
How can employee advocacy be improved?
It requires more than social media participation by your employees to improve employee advocacy. You will also need to use employee advocacy tools for brand growth. Some of the top tools that you can check out to improve your employee advocacy include: EveryoneSocial, PostBeyond, Bambu (by Sprout Social) and Hootsuite Amplify.
Can I use Hootsuite for employee advocacy?
Hootsuite has also introduced an employee advocacy solution – Hootsuite Amplify. It can be added directly to your existing Hootsuite dashboard. If you want to create content, you will use the same way as in the original social platform of Hootsuite (but with a couple of extra features for curators). An admin user can create topics for types of content that is suitable for different employees, update live content and schedule posts for later.
How can I encourage my employees to advocate my brand?
Gamification and incentives can help you to encourage your employee advocates. You can for example use a leaderboard that advocates can use to track (and compare) their performance. This way you can quickly reward an employee with an extra day off or concert tickets for sharing content consistently. Badges can also work well. There are many employee advocacy tools like Bambu (by Sprout Social), Ambassify, and Smarp that offer gamification as a feature.
