You shouldn’t ignore the value people place on an organization’s’ employees. An Edelman Research 2016 report shows that consumers trust employees of an organization far more than they do the CEO. “In several areas, employees are viewed as the most trusted sources of information, particularly when it comes to communicating on financial earnings and operational performance, a business’ practices or handling of a crisis, and how it treats employees and customers.” More recent editions of the Edelman Report have seen some changes, mainly due to the effects of the COVID pandemic. In particular, overall faith in all organizations has decreased, particularly belief in governments and NGOs. According to the Edelman Report 2021, businesses are now more trusted than the government in 18 of the 27 countries surveyed. In addition, unlike government, NGOs, and media, only businesses are seen as both ethical and competent. However, faith in nearly all levels of company spokespeople has fallen. Even faith in company technical experts is only at 59%, a drop of 10% from 2020. Overall, faith in CEOs has declined, although 63% of people still have faith in their employer / CEO. In addition, 56% of the respondents believe business leaders purposely mislead people by saying things they know are false or a gross exaggeration. Even faith in regular employees dropped by 14% in 2021, going against a long-standing trend. However, despite this recent blip in faith in employees, it is clear that employee advocacy has its place in a balanced marketing campaign. People may be cynical at the moment, but they would rather hear positive statements from a firm’s employees than platitudes from the CEO, board of directors, or other levels of management. We have already looked at some employee advocacy tools in Top 10 Employee Advocacy Programs to Increase Your Brand Reach. Here are an additional 13 tools that will simplify the tasks of employee advocacy, both for a brand and its employees.
13 Employee Advocacy Social Media Tools:
1. PostBeyond
PostBeyond stands as the most popular employee advocacy platform on G2’s website. They offer a “white glove” service as most of their clients are of enterprise size. However, they also cater to small and medium-sized businesses. They give customized pricing based on the number of users (in tiers). As the tiers go up, the price per user goes down. However, every company that signs on with PostBeyond gets the full slate of features and services, the same onboarding, training and support, and a dedicated success manager. PostBeyond focuses on gamified content sharing. Employees rack up points for completing specific tasks that you, their employer, can configure to encourage them to share content most beneficial for the company. You can segment users/employees in any sensible way—by geography, department, line of business, indeed anything you can define, and by any combination. Likewise, you can categorize in any way the content you feed out to your employees to share. When users log into PostBeyond, they view a feed of stories and links. These are topped by Featured stories, which are those the admins determine are most important/timely/relevant to share. The admins can exert as much control as they wish over any item of content. They can even create custom lists of words that employees cannot use when sharing on behalf of their employers.
2. EveryoneSocial
EveryoneSocial looks beyond simply incentivizing employees to post and advocate on social media on behalf of their employer. Instead, it facilitates a business to create a private social network, where the people with profiles are co-workers. Most of EveryoneSocial’s customers tend to be medium to large businesses. Therefore, its pricing is entirely customized, and they don’t offer predefined plans or tiers of functionality. Their clients include Dell, Adobe, American Family Insurance, ADP, Mattress Firm, and Electronic Arts. Logging into EveryoneSocial is like logging into a social network. Your employees can sign up for an account through the web or on a mobile device, just like they would for Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. In some ways, EveryoneSocial most aligns with LinkedIn. Employees need to share relevant and professional content, not their holiday snaps or videos of their weekend fun. It includes an approval process to ensure that everything falls within the bounds of company policies. You can reward employees for sharing content with instant gamification features. In addition, they can gain points based on engagement activities. EveryoneSocial also integrates with Salesforce for a one-stop social selling experience.
3. SocialReacher
SocialReacher offers three pricing tiers based on user numbers. It includes a freemium plan where you can have 25 collaborators (active employees). You begin by customizing your interface and then adding your collaborators. You then add your branded social media accounts, which will serve as the primary sources of content for your collaborators to share. You can then get started with your campaigns. You can use your dashboard to select content from any of your social feeds for sharing. You can choose the teams you want to share each content item, and SocialReacher notifies each member. There is a built-in module for an incentives program. Rewards can be anything you want—gift cards, movie tickets, even extra vacation days. A collaborator receives a point for each message they publish, and they can redeem these points for rewards based on the criteria you define.
4. Sociabble
Sociabble leans heavily into the idea that social is the primary way we all communicate now and that it can be a valuable asset in the workplace. As a result, they created a social networking platform for company intranets. Their clients have included Toshiba, Microsoft, L’Oréal, and Mazars Group. They currently serve 200 clients in 80 countries Employees can share documents with their co-workers via Sociabble, and the documents show up in their feeds. If you want your employees to share content to their personal social networks, they can do that easily. Sociabble also integrates with Office365, Yammer, Slack, and Workplace for Facebook, along with Scoop.it and Feedly for a steady stream of curated content. Sociabble gives employees access to a mobile app to access all these company documents, and they show up just like a social feed. Employees can like and share content internally and share relevant content, whether curated or user-generated, via their social accounts, intending to promote your business. It also incorporates gamification features to encourage employee participation. For example, it includes leaderboards to instill a bit of healthy competition in your employees. Employees can also unlock badges through various tasks and activities. Companies can award badges for any activity, even those in the real world outside Sociabble participation, and these badges show on an employee’s profile. You can also give employees challenges to encourage them to act more quickly with time-sensitive initiatives.
5. Ambassify
The team at Ambassify has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about how much you can do with an employee advocacy platform. Indeed, it covers more than just employee advocacy; it helps with brand advocacy, working with all a company’s stakeholders. Ambassify includes everything you’d expect from an advocacy platform, including a content feed, campaign creation with templates, messaging, rewards, and advocate portals. In addition, it features a Community portal, allowing your advocates to log in, see available campaigns, a leaderboard, a feed showing posts made by the community, and a way to redeem points for rewards. The platform offers 20+ campaign templates, each for different purposes. While many of these are straightforward, e.g., a Facebook share, a tweet, or an Instagram post, others are more targeted, such as soliciting suggestions for new posts, A/B testing campaign ideas, or sending out polls. The software recommends that the first campaign you run is Poll, the results of which let the software calculate your strongest advocates. You would ask your employees questions like, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend working here?” Those who score the best marks here are likely to be your strongest advocates. Ambassify creates individualized Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and you can use these scores to segment your employees and other advocates.
6. CommandPost
CommandPost is a complete social media monitoring, measurement, insight, and compliance solution, aimed at Fortune 100 financial services, automotive and consumer packaged goods companies, as well as leading advertising, social and PR agencies. Therefore, it encompasses much more than just employee advocacy, although that is a useful component of it. Although only a small proportion of the entire CommandPost package, there is a scalable, measurable tool to assist with the management of a business’ advocate channels. This includes both employee advocacy and influencer marketing solutions. A firm can use CommandPost to evaluate its best performing advocates and analyze their best performing content and platforms. It helps them efficiently manage advocates & influencers. The tool is also heavily geared towards ensuring employees comply with applicable rules and regulations when posting on the company’s behalf. This can be invaluable if the firm operates in a highly regulated sector. CommandPost features built-in tools for documenting and managing compliance by both advocates and influencers.
7. GaggleAMP
GaggleAMP aims to make employee advocacy easy. It activates employees to drive digital engagement. GaggleAMP tries to make it fun for employees to participate in their employer’s digital marketing efforts. GaggleAMP’s focus revolves around a straightforward idea: helping firms leverage the power of their employees’ passions to bolster company marketing strategy. It provides users with customized mobile and desktop versions to make their experience as intuitive and effective as possible. This helps increase employee participation. With GaggleAMP, businesses can segment the content their employees want to see by tagging them. By tagging and grouping employees, companies can deliver the most relevant content to them and their respective audiences. GaggleAMP has put together more than 40 different actions your employees can take online, making engagement simple and convenient across the web – all from one place. GaggleAMP also provides in-depth analytics to track, measure, and continually improve a business’ content marketing and social media engagements. It covers a vast array of supported social networks – all of the common ones, along with a variety of niche and specialist networks.
8. Oktopost
Oktopost is a social media management platform for B2B enterprise. It provides three distinct social solutions for its business clients:
Social media management Social employee advocacy Social media promotions
In regards to social employee advocacy, Oktopost provides seamless content management for brands. It endeavors to streamline all corporate and employee advocacy activities through a single platform. The tool allows for easy content distribution. Firms can provide their employee advocates with pre-approved, on-brand social content with just a few clicks. They can also segment the content, to ensure that each employee advocate is sharing the most suitable material. At the same time, employees can make suggestions for appropriate content to share. It also ensures social compliance. Businesses can ban inappropriate keywords to prevent employee advocates from misusing them. Oktopost provides a plethora of insights and metrics; both at a high level and at an individual employee advocate level. It also makes the process simple for employees, with an app available, both desktop and mobile.
9. Influitive AdvocateHub
Influitive’s AdvocateHub allows you to build a community and invite advocates to complete challenges: referrals, product reviews, social media posts, and more. As advocates complete these challenges, which can be targeted to groups or individuals, they automatically earn points, badges, and levels to redeem professional perks and privileges. AdvocateHub empowers companies to engage their customers, prospects, developers, and partners, as well as their employees, as advocates. It makes it easy for businesses to report on all activities completed. Firms can integrate it with their CRM and marketing automation platform to incorporate advocacy along every step of the customer journey. Businesses can engage their advocates with targeted, interactive challenges. They can target challenges based on advocate preferences, demographics, or past behavior. Advocates see an interactive activity feed providing curated suggestions for what they can do next. These suggestions are based on real-time activities and conversations happening between other advocates. The more challenges advocates complete, the more badges, levels, and activities they unlock. Firms can give advocates access to exclusive perks, content, contests, rewards, and opportunities-including sneak peeks at new products, branded swag, VIP treatment at a particular event, or the chance to interact with the company’s C-suite. Influitive AdvocateHub provides a campaign content library, with pre-built campaign templates.
10. Staccato Social
Formerly PeopleLinx, Staccato Social is one of a set of Staccato tools from Frontline Selling. In many ways, Staccato Social acts like a virtual sales coach for a company’s reps. All of the Staccato tools use the Staccato Process - reaching out to multiple people in an organization, consistently aggregating touch points in a particular order to get the attention of the right person. Therefore, you probably wouldn’t select Staccato Social as a stand-alone employee advocacy social media tool. However, if you want to make significant changes to your sales system, it may be of value to you. Although employee advocacy is a central aspect of Staccato Social, it covers more than that. Social selling is at the heart of the Staccato process. It recognizes that employees have the most significant impact on growing a company’s top line. Part of the process includes identifying thought leaders and high-value content. It provides powerful analytics that helps managers understand who and what the company’s most valuable assets are. It recognizes that with strengthened social networks and consistent social activity, sales reps can drive leads with company-owned and approved content.
13. SocialToaster
SocialToaster aims to assist companies by providing a communications solution that makes it easy to activate and engage audiences on social media. This means that it covers more than just employee advocacy – it is designed to be an all-in-one tool to help businesses manage their entire social advocacy. It focuses on word-of-mouth marketing geared towards all ambassadors engaged with your brand - turning customers, employees, and other stakeholders into a community of active advocates and ambassadors. Social Toaster allows you to reach and engage fans through marketing emails, social media campaigns, contests, and social gamification. It is compatible with all of the major social networks. It helps you keep track of your results with advanced, real-time reporting and social analytics. The reporting includes information on share rates, deep data digs, user data, site traffic, and network demographics. It is particularly useful for businesses in those industries where SocialToaster has tailored specific strategies - music, TV, consumer goods, education, sports, and movies.
14. SociaLook
The SociaLook Engagement platform allows businesses to engage their employees in creating and distributing relevant content about their brand. This gives firms an improved social presence. People want to interact with people, not brands. Engaged employees are a company’s best advocates, SociaLook splits its tool into two sections.”
Employee analytics Employee advocacy
The employee analytics tools help a business find their employee’s employee accounts on Twitter. An organization can use it to find its most influential advocates. It can determine the background of its employees, their positions in the company, their location, their influence on others. Firms can also use SociaLook to keep track of the tweets employees share and monitor specific URLs and hashtags. They can also use it to analyze their audience. It helps to understand who is following the employees and find followers who meet specific criteria. In the Employee Engagement section, firms can use SociaLook to push content out to their employees and turn employees into content creators. They can set up time and goalbound rewards to motivate employees.
15. Sprinklr
Sprinklr provides a range of social media marketing tools. Its main suite is the Social Suite for the Enterprise, which has four components:
Social engagement Social advertising Social care Social advocacy
Sprinklr Advocacy Marketing recognizes that both employees and customers can make powerful advocates. It offers a comprehensive solution for advocate identification, activation, and engagement across the social web. It allows you to build everything from the advocacy site experience to content strategy in a single, centralized admin console. The tool makes it easy for advocates to tell a brand’s story with one-click content sharing, a content scheduler, and a content planner. The package encourages engagement. A business can keep its advocates informed by sharing the most targeted, up-to-date announcements and notifications via email and the advocacy site. It includes gamification features, including an advocate leaderboard. As with most of these tools, Sprinklr Advocacy Marketing allows businesses to measure the performance of their advocacy programs with flexible reporting.
