Today’s online businesses of every size live and die by the strength of their digital marketing initiatives. While the vast world of social media offers maximal reach to potential customers, ensuring your advertising lands in front of relevant audiences is another matter entirely. Organically growing and nurturing an effective online presence for your brand is a time-consuming and painstaking process that requires constant upkeep in terms of content production and audience engagement.
Employee Advocacy programs are the ideal vehicle for amplifying brand awareness in digital space. According to the Nielsen Report for Global Trust in Advertising, 83% of people surveyed find the recommendations of friends and family the most credible form of advertising. As such, employee advocates are the front line in building faith in your brand, enabling you to grow an organic following while ensuring that brand messages are transmitted to those who already feel associated with your brand via your employees.
Employee Advocacy programs are only as successful as their management; efficacy is highest when brand messages are centralized and easy to share and track. Luckily, there are a host of Employee Advocacy Platforms on the market to help you facilitate EA processes and make the most of your employees’ involvement in your marketing initiatives.
What Are Employee Advocacy Platforms?
Employee Advocacy platforms are online tools that work across a variety of social media platforms to help companies coordinate, share, and monitor the effectiveness of their branded content. These platforms enable marketing teams to build pre-approved content libraries that their employees can share swiftly and easily via mobile, social media channels, or email.
Each Employee Advocacy platform offers unique features, making some platforms more useful for your specific business than others. Because of the expense and time investment required for effective employee advocacy, it’s important to land the right Employee Advocacy platform the first time around.
We’ve drilled down to the main features of the leading platforms to help you understand which one is likely to suit your company’s needs and let you hit the bullseye with your Employee Advocacy program from day one.
Employee Advocacy Platform | Description | Pros | Cons |
---|---|---|---|
Oktopost | This platform is designed for large and enterprise B2B companies looking to achieve large-scale distribution through multiple social media platforms and profiles. The program tracks the ROI of each post and each employee advocate’s activity. | - Helps you identify which posts generate the most leads - Helps you identify star employee advocates and create motivation around EA efforts -Employees can easily customize posts for a personal touch -Content can be tagged by topic and employees can subscribe to topics of interest | -Employees can schedule posts but they can’t engage with other content on company pages -Sometimes there are reporting issues |
Hootsuite Amplify | This EA-centered application for enterprises is an extension for Hootsuite that keeps employees connected and informed about new marketing content while enabling them to share it and monitor their posts’ engagement. | -Easy set-up for advocates -Tracks social data like shares, likes, comments, and overall reach -Advocates can track and compare their results with other advocates | -If you’re not already using Hootsuite, you will need to in order to access Amplify -Advocacy analytics are limited |
GaggleAmp | This multifaceted platform allows employee advocates to engage in many ways, allowing employees to share, like, and comment on pre-approved content. This system is suitable for any size company. | -Advocates have a rich variety of ways to engage - by sharing, interacting with the company content, supporting sales initiatives, or developing their personal brand -Integrates easily with coworking platforms like Slack. -The system is highly customizable, with a variety of sharing and notification options | -Advocates must opt-in to the leaderboard in order to track their progress -Advocates’ sharing data can’t be easily captured by admins according to specific timeframes |
Dynamic Signal | This platform is an all-in-one solution for internal marketing and social advocacy. This system is ideal for keeping employees abreast of changes and helping them stay on top of the company’s messaging while enabling them to share and interact with company content on multiple levels. | -Content and communication can be easily sorted so that employees get only what they need -Detailed user analytics track both internal and social engagement -Employees can help to generate content | -You’ll need to dig pretty deep to access and interpret the user analytics -Reviews indicate that customers have commented on technical difficulties with downtimes, the program’s backend, and integrations |
Everyone Social | This platform is suited to midsize to large businesses looking to combine EA and company communication for better synergy in marketing and social selling. | -Advocates have increased access to content and can search according to topic or people -Post across multiple social media channels simultaneously -Leaderboard encourages healthy competition | -Analytics extraction is rather dependent on the account manager’s fluency with the system and ability to manipulate the system’s many filtering options -The system doesn’t support posts including new media such as GIFs |
Post Beyond | This dedicated platform for social selling and brand awareness uses gamified content to boost employee activity with its partner brands. | -Helps you create content by suggesting articles related to your industry -The Gamification aspect encourages employee advocates to be as active as possible -Chrome plugin enables advocates to socially sell on the go, from their mobile phone | -The scoring system for the leader board isn’t clear -Limited search options; advocates can’t search for past posts and data can’t be filtered by timeframe |
Bambu by Sprout Social | Bambu is an EA platform designed for large enterprises. | -Gamification features and a leaderboard promotes increased engagement among employees -Companies can curate an internal feed to keep employees up-to-date and drive sharing -Comfortable, intuitive interface that requires little training | -Platform lacks a way to share native video or GIFs -Tracking features for Facebook are limited |
Sociabble | This enterprise-centered employee communications platform offers advocacy capabilities with a platform that can be purchased separately, making it an ideal solution for large businesses looking to tackle internal communications and EA in one fell swoop. The platform utilizes gamification to increase advocacy activity and allows various groups within the organization to create and share content, as well as curate focused content streams. | -Users can create dedicated content streams from a variety of sources including social media, RSS feeds, and URLs. -Wide variety of gamification features and a clear scoring process for increasing advocacy -Integrates well with CRMs and offers in-depth tracking and reporting options | -Company pages can’t be tagged in LinkedIn -Some features are paid add-ons |
Smarp | This enterprise employee communications and advocacy system enables companies to effectively transmit their messages to every employee and beyond through a variety of advocacy features. | -A user-friendly system enables quick creation and sharing of content from top-down and bottom-up. -Messages can be sorted by market segment, ensuring employees interact with relevant content -Leaderboard posts monthly advocacy stats, encouraging involvement and healthy competition | -It’s not possible to include some images or videos in posts -Advocacy scoring system favors post frequency over engagement -Reporting options could be more in-depth |
Have a general idea of how to implement your employee advocacy program, but still unsure which platform will suit you best? An expert from our team can help you select the right tool, and make and execute an action plan to achieve your goals. Get in touch to learn more about making your employee advocacy a success!