Employee advocacy is a critical aspect that is often ignored by many brands. Employee advocacy tools can help you grow your brand value and reach. They also help employees push their professional growth as well.
In fact, according to a survey, about 87.2% of respondents said that employee advocacy contributes to growing their professional network. In addition, 76% of them feel that it helps them keep up with industry trends.
To leverage employee advocacy to its fullest, you can use one of the best employee advocacy platforms. These platforms can help you implement employee advocacy programs with ease.
However, before we get to our list of the top employee advocacy tools, let’s understand employee advocacy.
What is Employee Advocacy?
Did you know that people rate a regular employee as being a more credible voice (53%) than a CEO (47%)?
Isn’t that surprising?
Employee advocacy takes advantage of this trust and allows employees to contribute to a brand’s marketing efforts on social media and elsewhere. In a nutshell, employees can become brand advocates.
They can contribute to promotion in several ways, including recommending company products to their family and friends on social media and in person. They can also represent company interests externally and internally. In some cases, employees who are experts on a product or service can become the company spokesperson on social media.
But how do you encourage employees to take part in the brand advocacy program?
Let’s take a look.
How Do You Improve Employee Advocacy?
If you’ve started an employee advocacy program without success, here are ways you can improve it:
Be Transparent
Tell your employees why you want them to take part in the program. Do not just set it as a rule and expect everyone to follow it blindly. Instead, provide your employees with a logical explanation for why engaging with company content is crucial.
Position Your Employees as Experts
Let your employees try out your products and feature their reviews on your social media accounts. Nordstrom, for example, lets their employees showcase their taste in fashion on their social media channels.
When the featured employee shares this content, it could trigger a viral post as their friends and family may also share and engage with the content on their social media timelines.
Make it Easy to Share Your Posts
Don’t assume everyone on your team knows what to share about your company. Instead, help them create social media content related to your brand.
Alternatively, you can also offer suggestions on what they can share on their social media accounts. Pre-written content or direct links can make the brand advocacy process easier for them.
Offer Rewards and Incentives
Reward engaged and active employees and show appreciation for the help they’ve offered. You can also provide incentives to encourage others to join the program using contests or competitions.
Customize Content
Don’t assume every employee will share the social media content you provide. Instead, customize the social media content to fit the taste of individual employees. Find out what every employee cares about the most and provide social media content that may resonate with them.
Send Reminders
Send reminders to employees to share and encourage them to be active on the various social networks. Sometimes they may just forget to share company social media content.
Don’t Force It
Do not force your employees to post social media content that they may not want to share. Your job is to only provide them with suggestions and encouragement. If you come across as pushy, you may lose their respect.
Show Behind-the-Scenes Footage
Share employee milestones, office celebrations, company outings, and videos showing a day in the office. Employees featured in the footage may want to share the social media content with their social networks, leading to increased engagement.
Now, that you have a better understanding of what employee advocacy is, let’s dive into the top employee advocacy tools:
Wondering what these employee advocacy tools are and which one will be the best for your business?
Here are some of the top employee advocacy tools you can use.
Which are the Best Employee Advocacy Tools?
Increase and track your employee advocacy using these employee advocacy platforms.
1. Buyapowa
First up on our list of employee advocacy tools, Buyapowa allows you to activate your most passionate brand advocates — your employees — via its employee advocacy referral toolkit.
The feature-rich Buyapowa employee advocacy platform delivers a digital-first employee advocacy program that gives employees exclusive rewards for referring in their friends and colleagues and turning them into customers.
The platform also offers performance analytics, advanced configuration for fraud prevention, dynamic reward support, and a fully white-labeled front-end interface.
What sets it apart from the other employee advocacy tools?
Unlike simple, low-cost, plug-and-play employee advocacy tools, the Buyapowa platform is an enterprise-level product.
One of its unique selling points is the ability to integrate with the back-end processes of its clients. For example, it helps you ensure that your employees get rewards only for genuine referrals. You can also set different rewards instructions for different actions taken by the referred client.
Buyapowa's employee advocacy solution offers powerful referral solutions for enterprises all over the world, especially those in the telecom, finance, and retail sectors.
2. LinkedIn Elevate
LinkedIn Elevate is one of the finest employee advocacy tools that can help you leverage LinkedIn.
Want to know what makes it one of the best? Read about its features, mentioned below to find out:
You can curate the finest content on the platform and suggest it to your employees using this platform. It also shows you analytics, such as the most engaged employees and has features that help you give updates and reminders to them.
It’s a great employee advocacy software service for all those whose advocates are active on LinkedIn as the platform only lets you grow your reach on it. As the tool comes from LinkedIn, you also get direct access to trending content, which can make it a very useful source for curating content.
If your company uses LinkedIn for recruitment, this platform can be extremely helpful for you. This is because it can position your brand as an authority figure in your industry on LinkedIn.
3. Sprout Social
Sprout Social allows you to amplify your reach on social media through its employee advocacy tool.
Bambu, its platform, enables you to curate some of the finest content on social networks and is thus one of the top employee advocacy tools. It also offers premium features like virtual event marketing and tradeshow event marketing.
However, it’s not possible to directly integrate this employee advocacy software solution with Sprout Social. You can, however, connect it using Zapier. Additionally, it offers a social selling solution that can help you measure B2C metrics like impressions, shares, and clicks.
4. Dynamic Signal
Using Dynamic Signal, you can drive the growth of your brand by leveraging the influence of your employees. Using this employee advocacy tool, you can empower your employees by sharing high-quality company-approved social media content with them.
What makes it one of the best employee advocacy tools is the fact that it allows you to track, analyze, and optimize employee advocacy too.
Want to know the best part?
It offers integrations with some of the biggest tools, such as Slack, Facebook Messenger, and Oracle.
Additionally, you can not only track social engagement data but also data from internal channels to understand your overall content engagement. This makes it the perfect platform for all those looking to improve internal communications and drive employee advocacy too.
5. Oktopost
Oktopost enables you to streamline all of your social media and advocacy activities through its platform. One of the top employee advocacy tools, Oktopost includes operations like pulling content from social media, sharing it with your employees, and then tracking business metrics.
The depth of the data that you get to analyze makes it one of the best employee advocacy tools for your brand.
It works well for B2B companies that are looking to generate business results and not just build brand awareness.
In addition, it allows integrations with some of the most major marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot, Eloqua, and Marketo. This employee advocacy software service also offers integration with Salesforce, which helps you drive social selling without leaving the platform.
6. EveryoneSocial
Next on our list of the top employee advocacy tools, EveryoneSocial is trusted by large and enterprise organizations for employee advocacy, social selling, employer branding, and internal communications.
Your employees can not only share content on social media, but they also boost engagement by liking or tagging other colleagues. This is to ensure that everyone sees important social media information.
EveryoneSocial is one of the first employee advocacy platforms to have a native built-in application for Salesforce. Some additional features include a Chrome extension for easy content suggestions, push notifications, and in-depth reporting.
One of the top employee advocacy tools, EveryoneSocial enables your employees to create their own personal streams of content too, and it boasts numerous integrations with major platforms.
7. DrumUp
Using this employee advocacy tool, you can turn your employees into your brand’s social media ambassadors. It provides an easy method of broadcasting content to your employees.
The reason why it’s one of the best employee advocacy programs is that you can schedule posts on various social networks with one click from its dashboard.
8. Smarp
Smarp has an internal content hub through which employees can discover the latest content and share it. You can easily populate this newsfeed with the latest company news and updates. (This makes it one of the best employee advocacy tools out there.)
It’s one of the best employee advocacy platforms because it also allows you to track employee engagement metrics. You can also see the earned media score through this platform.
What’s more, you ask?
In addition to the relevant metrics, it also helps you measure vanity metrics such as shares, likes, and followers. The platform also features a content hub that consists of an internal resources database.
9. LumApps
LumApps shows the way ahead with its stellar employee advocacy tool. You can maximize your social reach and build your brand image by empowering your employees to share your content. The ease with which you can share content with your employees makes this one of the best employee advocacy programs out there.
One of the top employee advocacy tools, it also simplifies the entire process of sharing the posts for your employees by giving them a single platform to manage both social media and internal communication.
10. Sociabble
Sociabble is one of the best employee advocacy tools not only for promoting employee advocacy but also for managing influencer marketing, internal communications, and more.
You can create personalized push notifications and share them with your employees. It’s possible for your employees to develop their own content as well and share it in their groups. It also allows you to gather content from social media, RSS feeds, and URLs.
11. Connecteam
Also one of the top employee advocacy tools, Connecteam is a great employee communication and engagement tool that serves as an employee advocacy platform too.
It’s possible to chat and communicate within your groups through this employee advocacy software service, and you can also have a contact directory on it. Through your communications, you can drive employee advocacy programs and motivate your employees to share your brand updates on social media.
12. SocioSquares
SocioSquares has an employee advocacy tool, SocioAdvocacy, that helps you leverage the influence of your employees.
It’s possible to share content on multiple platforms through a single click using this employee advocacy software solution. You can also get real-time reports of your progress through the platform, and it’s got cross-platform accessibility too.
13. DSMN8
DSMN8 is one of the best all-in-one employee advocacy tools that can help you increase your reach and engagement.
Want to know what makes it so good?
It’s one of the best employee advocacy platforms because it also helps you empower your employees to develop their networks to increase your brand visibility. You can create brand advocates from your staff and showcase your company culture, products, and services to others on social media through them.
14. Hootsuite Amplify
Hootsuite Amplify is a great add-on to Hootsuite’s already stellar social media management solutions. This employee advocacy tool allows you to send out email notifications about your latest content and updates to your employees.
It’s also possible to share pre-approved content with your employees and enables them to post it through their mobile app. It’s one of the best employee advocacy software services for those brands that are already using Hootsuite.
15. Influitive
Influitive is an interactive employee advocacy tool. You can seamlessly share some of your most up-to-date content with your employees and motivate them to share it with their circles on social media.
You can also nurture your relationships with them and capture the feedback in real-time to push your engagement and reach even further.
Bouns Tool #1: PostBeyond
Honorable mention on our list of the top employee advocacy tools, PostBeyond helps you take your marketing to the next level with employee engagement. It makes the entire process of sharing approved content with your employees simple and short.
In addition, you get access to detailed analytics and insights that can help you understand the impact of employee advocacy programs on your brand visibility.
This employee advocacy platform also brings all of your content under one roof to ensure that your employees can share it easily.
FAQ
Q1. What are the top employment advocacy programs?
These are the top employment advocacy programs today:
– LinkedIn Elevate
– Sprout Social
– Dynamic Signal
– Oktopost
– EveryoneSocial
– DrumUp
– Smarp
– LumApps
– Sociabble
Q2. What does employee advocacy mean? What is brand advocacy?
Employee advocacy means the promotion of a company and its products/services by the said company’s employees through social media or word-of-mouth marketing.
Q3. How can employee advocacy be improved?
Employee advocacy can be improved with these strategies:
– Make your content shareable.
– Put your employees in the spotlight.
– Educate your employees about your brand, products, and processes.
– Offer rewards and incentives to employee advocates.
– Share the results of your employee advocacy programs with your employees.
Q4. What is an employee advocate?
An employee advocate is an employee who generates positive sentiment for their brand through promotional activities.
Q5. What are advocacy tools?
Employee advocacy tools help you automate and optimize all aspects of your employee advocacy programs. They offer services in areas such as content curation, employee tracking, reminders, social selling, and even event marketing.
Q6. What is an example of employee advocacy?
Employees flaunting their company swag (branded t-shirts, lanyards, etc.) through social media images is an example of employees acting as company billboards. By portraying the company as a great place to work, such images can play a big role in attracting talent.
Q7. How do I create an employee advocacy program?
A. Here are the basic steps to create an employee advocacy program:
– Set your program goals.
– Define policies and guidelines.
– Entice employees to participate.
– Craft a program hashtag.
– Measure the performance of employee advocates.
– Reward good performers.
Q8. How do I implement employee advocacy tools effectively in an organization?
A. To implement employee advocacy tools in your organization, keep these points in mind:
– Consider employee advocacy only if your employee engagement rates are high.
– Don’t use employee advocacy as a marketing ploy. Think about how your employees will benefit from it.
– Be clear about your advocacy goals and define the metrics to track.
Q9. What brands come to mind when you think of employee advocacy and how do they work to keep their employees engaged?
A. Many top brands have nailed employee advocacy. They include:
Starbucks: They refer to their employees as “partners” on their websites and social media pages, building a sense of proprietorship and community feeling in employees.
Citrix: The brand leverages their 9K+ employee force to expand their reach on social media.
Genesys: They have incorporated social selling into their marketing strategy by using employees as their mouth pieces on social media.
Ready to Start Your Employee Advocacy Program?
Employee advocates can help you take your brand to the next level by influencing their close circles.
They can boost your engagement rates and reach by sharing your latest content and company news on social media. However, you must ensure that they notice and have easy access to that content.
For that, you should consider using employee advocacy programs that can help you share your updates with them. In addition, these platforms can also make it simpler for your employees to share these posts on social media.
Are there other prominent employee advocacy software services that you know of? Let me know in the comments.
Great point Shane! These kinds of tools would be pretty powerful!