What is an employee advocacy program?
It is an organized effort at encouraging employees to share curated content on social media.
What makes an employee advocacy program powerful?
1. It increases your social media reach by as much as 100-500X
2. When your employees share your content, social media users are more likely to consider it authentic and not blind-sight it as promotional
3. Leads developed by employee advocacy are seven times as likely to convert
4. An advocacy program is an opportunity to project your employees as industry experts (when you curate the best articles in your industry for them to share on social media)
5. An incentivized, non-work related activity is great for employee engagement
6. Brand associated content shared via multiple channels is great for brand building and recall
Moreover, implementing an employee advocacy program isn’t very hard, especially when the program is managed on an employee advocacy platform with functions that simplify the process.
The following is a list of five top employee advocacy programs that you could use to expand your company’s reach on social media.
DrumUp Employee Advocacy Platform
The most striking feature of DrumUp’s employee advocacy platform is the ease with which you can source and manage content for social media.
One of the challenges that most businesses and their marketers face is the lack of time to create excellent content.
With this platform, you could set one or more themes and discover relevant content to curate to your company content stream. You can also attach the RSS feeds of your website’s PR, news coverage or blog sections to the platform and automatically have updates posted to your company content stream (a stream that all employees you invite have access to and can schedule out of).
There’s no point running an employee advocacy program is you can’t track its progress. DrumUp’s platform does that well, and just as much as is required. The analytics section includes data per person and data per post so you can analyze which post your employees shared most and which person shared the most posts. Another important number included is ‘reach’ which tells you exactly how many feeds your post entered on social media.
The leader board also deserves special mention. It is a great way for your employees to measure their progress against their colleagues’ spurring healthy competition. Remember to reward your best player with something exciting, so your employees are motivated to keep up the effort.
Kredible
Known as the online credibility management application, Kredible has a lot to offer to the B2B sector. Focused on LinkedIn marketing, this application provides optimization of both your employees’ personal brand and your company brand.
By scouring through your employees’ online presence, the application assesses your employees’ ‘Kredible score’ considering current and past job titles, job descriptions and LinkedIn summaries.
The Kredible score is associated with an assessment of whether improvements are necessary or not, so the employees who need the edits can accordingly make them and optimize their appearance for profile visits.
After employee profiles are optimized, you can request employees to share content that you curate via their networks. The application also helps you identify relevant content based on your audience type and reports all employee activity so you track your employee advocacy program.
The application not only caters to businesses but individual employees as well. The idea is to support employees in their goals of being recruited.
According to research quoted by Kredible, 62% of HR personnel take decisions about potential hires based on what they dig up about them on social media. Social media profiles and how job candidates represent themselves online has an effect on whether they are offered a job or not.
Circulate.it
This platform was created with one simple and useful application: reaching your content to your colleagues’ inboxes.
Keeping employee advocacy aside for a second, let us consider the importance of employee knowledge updates. Providing your employees with the opportunity to update their know-how will help them make better decisions at work, and appreciate you for putting that effort.
Circulate.it is aptly named because the content you create or curate is conveniently delivered to all your employees through a daily newsletter.
The platform also lets them share content from that newsletter to the social media accounts without having to leave the page.
So Circulate.it covers both functions: employee updating and social employee advocacy. It can be accessed via social accounts as well, making it super simple to use – for management and employees both.
Newzsocial
Newzsocial adds a different perspective and functionality to the concept of employee advocacy. It was created to help businesses optimize their content marketing funnels.
The focus of this application is not simply employees but anyone you want participating in your advocacy program – marketers or influencers even.
The work flow is simple. You connect important content streams to the application (blogs, videos, whitepapers). You set specific posting rules and schedules for your participants to follow.
Rules are essential for a successful advocacy program, regardless of which platform you’re using. Guiding people on what to say and not, when to post and not can also be very beneficial to your business (based on when best to catch your target audience online).
Additionally, Newzsocial also allows you to identify, follow and engage with the most influential people of those who interact with your content – content marketing optimization.
Finally the application monitors all activity and provides an extensive look into your engagement metrics helping you identify your best performer.
The application has yet another interesting integration which is worth exploring – website analytics.
Everyonesocial
Everyonesocial is a platform aimed at creating social media engagement by continuously improving user experience.
Considering that all employees may not be up for sharing, Everyonesocial places more importance on getting employees to actually use the employee advocacy software.
The platform collects engagement data, analysis it and continually makes changes to the interface to keep users engaged.
The content curation module is great for sourcing the relevant content and claims to improve consistently by reading patterns in the types of articles most shared.
Apart from the regular employee advocacy features, this platform pays extra attention to mobile based solutions – for iOS and android both, helping you engage that group of your employees who are more likely to share from their mobile phones.
Finally, the app also offers analytics to monitor and analyze your employee advocacy efforts.
In conclusion, the most important features that you must have on an employee advocacy program: the ability to source industry content and upload original content, easy sharing with employees, easy sharing on social media, a leader board to gamify the activity and analytics to analyze your performance.
Image credit: jcomp via flickr.com
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