Have you jumped on the employee advocacy bandwagon yet? If yes, you should consider employee advocacy tools to help your team spread the word about your company.

However, with so many advocacy software available, figuring out which is right for you can be challenging.

This blog explores social media management tools with advocacy tools and dedicated advocacy platforms. It also provides guidance on executing a successful advocacy plan.

Let’s dive in.

TL;DR—List of Employee Advocacy Tools

Only have a minute to spare?

Here’s a quick rundown of our top employee advocacy tools:

1. Hootsuite Amplify
2. Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social
3. Oktopost
4. Social Horsepower
5. PostBeyond
6. Ambassify
7. Haiilo
8. Sociabble
9. DSMN8

Our list of advocacy tools is excellent for creating, sharing, and monitoring your social media content.

Tip! After you pick your tool, make sure you’re leveraging the robust network of your employees on LinkedIn to boost your organic reach and thought leadership. However, you might still miss your goals if you lack LinkedIn expertise.

But don’t worry!

At Crackerjack Marketing, we are a team of LinkedIn experts with 15+ years of experience helping executives and corporate teams leverage their LinkedIn presence.

Our team creates personalized LinkedIn content that is conversational and resonates with your followers. You will also benefit from our data-driven tactics to ensure your content is impactful whenever you post. 

Get in touch with us and take your first step in unlocking your LinkedIn advocacy value.

What is Employee Advocacy?

Employee advocacy happens when employees share company messages through their social media accounts, word of mouth, and other communication channels.

So, why does an advocacy program matter?

1. It empowers your employees to share content with a broader audience, increasing brand awareness without extra costs.
2. With an advocacy strategy, you can engage prospective customers and attract talent while saving money on advertising.
3. According to Sprout Social, 70% of consumers trust CEO insights more than corporate messages. Thus, your prospects will likely trust and engage more with your employees.
4. When employees showcase their industry expertise by adding their insights to your posts, they can build their thought leadership while increasing their credibility.

Why Do Businesses Need Employee Advocacy Tools?

Employee advocacy platforms are designed to streamline campaigns and make your business life easier.

Here’s why you need these tools:

• Automate Certain Tasks: You can use advocacy tools to automate content creation, schedule posts, and team communication.
• Provides Motivation to Post More: Most advocacy tools allow you to gamify the process by assigning points for comments, likes, and shares. They also offer badges and a reward system to recognize your top advocates. 
• Engage Your Audience from Multiple Platforms: Advocacy platforms allow you to consistently engage your target audience from one centralized location.
• Allows Pre-approval for Content: Platforms like DSMN8 enable you to pre-approve content and reduce the risk of your employees sharing content that doesn’t align with your brand guidelines.
• Streamlines Workflow: An advocacy tool like Hootsuite Amplify automates creating and scheduling team content, allowing you to focus on other tasks.
• Analyze Your Employee Morale: Software like Sociabble allows you to create surveys (with anonymous or team-shared results). You can use these insights to understand your team better and boost productivity.
• Measure the Success of Your Efforts: From a single dashboard, you can monitor the performance of each piece of content across personal social profiles and get detailed analytics, such as engagement, leads, and conversions.

How to Choose the Right Employee Advocacy Platform

It’s no easy task to choose the best employee advocacy tool. You must consider many factors, including features, pricing, and integrations.

Let’s look at the details:

1. Evaluate Your Unique Needs and Goals

The first step in choosing a platform is to:

• Define Your Goals and Objectives: Your employee advocacy platform should align with your company goals whether that is to increase your brand awareness, generate leads, or boost your social selling.
• Size of Your Team: Consider the number of your employees when choosing your advocacy software. For example, if you’ve got a small workforce, opt for a solution with simple features, but if you’re a large enterprise, check if your platform can scale accordingly.

2. Create a List of Your Must-Have Features

The next step is to list the tools’ features that are absolute necessities.

For example:

• Opt for a platform with gamification tools to boost your employees’ spirit.
• Consider an advocacy tool with a mobile app like Oktopost, allowing your employees to share content on the go.

3. Seamless Integration with Your Existing Tools

The best advocacy software should fit seamlessly with your existing tech stack. It should integrate with your:

• CRM systems: Your platform should connect with HubSpot and Veeva to track interactions, traffic sources, and conversions. With this integration, you can monitor the impact of your advocacy efforts on lead generation.
• Communication channels: Your advocacy platform should connect virtual collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams to help you share advocacy achievements and updates directly with your employees without switching apps.
• Marketing tools: Your advocacy tool should integrate with your marketing tools to ensure your advocacy actions align with your marketing campaigns.

With that, you can synchronize data across every department, from HR to IT.

4. Consider the Ease of Use

Choose an easy tool for your employees and admins to shorten the learning curve. 

• Intuitive Interface: Your tool should make creating and sharing posts and monitoring their performance easy.
• Admin Setup and User Permissions: Your advocacy software should let you control the employee advocacy program while delegating duties to other advocacy leaders and employees.

5. Review the Software’s Analytics Suite

Your advocacy platform should provide detailed insights and real-time reporting on internal and external sharing stats. 

For example, you can learn:

• What team is driving the most traffic?
• Which of the employees attracts the best talent?

6. Look for Built-in Compliance and Security

You need a platform with strong compliance features if you operate in the finance, law, or healthcare sectors. The advocacy tool should:

• Streamline the content pre-approval process, ensuring all shared posts meet regulatory standards.
• Meet security measures to protect your company and employee data.

Quick Note: Picking an advocacy tool is just one step. To maximize your advocacy efforts on LinkedIn, consider partnering with a LinkedIn expert.

At Crackerjack Marketing, we will implement data-driven approaches to help position your executives and corporate teams as thought leaders.

Talk to us about your advocacy goals, and let us show you what strategies work best.

Top Employee Advocacy Tools for Businesses

Without further ado, let’s jump right into our advocacy platforms while outlining their standout features.

Social Media Management Platforms that Offer Advocacy Features

Although they are primarily social media management tools, these platforms offer employee advocacy as an extra feature.

Let’s see our top picks in this category:

1. Hootsuite Amplify

Hootsuite Amplify is an excellent employee advocacy tool. It allows you to share social media content quickly and increase brand awareness.

Key Features:

• Social Listening: Hootsuite AI is a great social listening tool for analyzing conversations and brand mentions to understand how people feel about your brand.
• Explore Topics: You can subscribe to specific topics and see what people are posting about.
• Analytics: You can monitor followers, engagement, and impressions and share the reports with team members.
• Auto Publish Content: With Hootsuite, you can schedule your social media posts in bulk and save time.
• AI Captions and Hashtag Generation: You can automatically generate the perfect hashtags and captions to increase your chances of going viral.
• Easy Approvals: Hootsuite allows you to approve all posts, ensuring they are on-brand.

Pricing: From $99 per month (billed annually)

2. Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social

Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social (formerly Bambu Sprout Social) is a marketing tool that simplifies your brand’s social media advocacy efforts.

Key Features:

• Share Pre-approved Messages: You can provide pre-approved content to your team to help your employees stay on-brand.
• Create Targeted Content: You can convert your content ideas into newsletters and share them with specific teams through Slack and Microsoft Teams.
• Gamification: You can boost participation by letting your team see their efforts in their advocacy.
• Measure Your Advocacy Efforts: You can analyze the performance across all social media channels, including engagement and impressions. You can also measure your web traffic and leads.

Pricing: From $199 per seat/month

3. Oktopost

Oktopost is another social media management tool with employee advocacy features designed for B2B businesses.

Key Features:

• Schedule and Publish Posts: Oktopost lets you schedule posts in advance, and your employees can share pre-approved brand messages on their social media accounts, including LinkedIn.
• Allows You to Ban Keywords: You can restrict specific keywords and phrases so they don’t appear in posts.
• Integration Capabilities: Connect Oktopost with your CRM and marketing tools for a seamless workflow.
• Analytics Dashboard: You can track the engagement of your posts, followers, and audience demographics across different channels and the impact on ROI.
• Gamification: This platform lets your team engage in a friendly competition in their advocacy plan.
• Social Listening: With Oktopost, you can monitor brand mentions and sentiments on X, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram. You can also see how your team responds to conversations about your brand.

Pricing: Available on request

4. Social Horsepower

Social Horsepower is best for businesses that want a tool to simplify sharing content on social media.

Key Features:

• One-click Sharing: Your team can share content on multiple social media platforms in just one click.
• Gamify the Reward System: A customizable reward system allows you to assign points to your comments and shares and award the highest performance.
• Team Scheduling: SocialHP provides a drag-and-drop marketing calendar that allows you to schedule posts on behalf of your team members.
• Track Engagement: With SocialHP, you can track how much each team member posts and the interaction on each post.

Pricing: Request for a quote

Dedicated Employee Advocacy Solutions

These tools offer advanced features to promote long-term engagement and scalability:

1. PostBeyond

PostBeyond is an employee advocacy platform by Influitive, a customer engagement solution.

Key Features:

• Enable Social Sharing: With PostBeyond, you can schedule and personalize social posts on behalf of your team.
• Mobile App Experience: Your employees can send posts using the iOS and Android mobile apps.
• Measure Results: You can measure your social data, such as shares and interactions, and the impact of your advocacy on ROI.
• Plenty Integrations: PostBeyond connects with 3rd party tools like Salesforce, LinkedIn, Slack, and Google Analytics.
• Seamless Approval Process: This advocacy platform helps your employees stay on brand by sharing pre-approved messages.

Pricing: Available on request

2. Ambassify

Ambassify is specifically designed to optimize content distribution to major social media platforms.

Key Features:

• Create Content: You can create various types of content, including videos, images, company news, and blog posts.
• Customization Options: You can brand your social media captions, forms and surveys, copy, and images with your company colors, fonts, and URL links.
• Connect with Major Social Media Platforms: You can share your content directly from Ambassify to WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
• Measure Your Advocacy Efforts: This tool provides an overview of your ROI, reach, activation, and conversions, allowing you to compare your growth over time.

Pricing: From €10k (around $10.5k) yearly for 100 employees

3. Haiilo

Haiilo is featured on our list because it’s an excellent software for social intranet, internal communications, and advocacy.

Key Features:

• Create Interactive Content: You can create blog articles, videos, audio content, and embeddable multimedia content in minutes.
• Social Media Integrations: You can connect all your social media channels to deliver consistent brand content.
• Integrations: Connects with 70+ 3rd party apps like Microsoft 365, Trello, and Google Workspace.
• Seamless Company Communications: Instantly communicate with your team through push and chat notifications.

Pricing: Available on request

4. Sociabble

If you’re looking for a tool to connect and empower your employees to be the best advocates, consider Sociabble.

Key Features:

• Create Engaging Posts: You can create surveys, calls to action, videos, images, and even audio content to drive interactions on your content.
• Pin Important Content: As an admin, you can pin critical posts so every team member can see them.
• Create Internal Surveys: You can create surveys and polls and get employee insights.
• Reward and Recognition Systems: With Sociabble, you can launch challenges and offer rewards, such as customized badges and points, to appreciate top employees.

Pricing: Available on request

5. DSMN8

DSMN8 is an employee advocacy software that lets you source content from your employees, review it, and publish it.

Key Features:

• Employee Participation: You can use the gamification feature to offer rewards and leaderboards based on employee points.
• On-brand Content: You can use DSMN8 to customize content by providing pre-approved captions and images.
• Targeted Content: This tool allows you to send your employees the right content based on segments such as their department, region, and seniority.
• AI Content Assistant: Use the DSMN8 AI tool to generate captions and enable auto-scheduling.

Pricing: From $850 per month

How to Implement Social Advocacy in Your Organization

Ready to execute your social advocacy strategy? 

Let’s walk you through the 5 steps:

1. Define Clear Goals and Metrics

The first step is to outline your goals and KPIs. Your advocacy strategy could aim to acquire leads, attract top talent, or build an authoritative voice on your social media. 

With clearly defined goals, you can continuously measure your success through metrics like brand sentiment, organic reach, and engagement.

2. Identify Your Advocacy Leadership Team

You should develop an internal leadership team to create a brand style and social media content guidelines to ensure everyone is on the same page. 

The advocacy leaders can educate the employees on the program’s importance and how they will benefit from it. These team leaders can also facilitate social media training, allowing your employees to share content effectively.

3. Pick an Advocacy Tool

Once you have everything in place, it’s time to choose your advocacy tool to streamline content planning and sharing. 

Consider our list of tools and what they offer to help you pick the right advocacy tool for your needs and team.

4. Curate Shareable Content

You can create advocacy content, including blog posts, user-generated content (UGC), infographics, and product launches. Brainstorm with the advocacy leaders and employee advocates to create pre-approved content that best suits your goals. 

Remember to give your employees the freedom to create content that resonates with their followers.

5. Reward Employees for Participating

Find what encourages your team to participate. It could be gift cards, badges, VIP programs, and prizes. 

Opt for a tool that allows you to turn your social advocacy into a game or contest to make participation exciting.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

All your advocacy platform questions are answered below:

What Are the Key Features of the Best Employee Advocacy Platform?

Check out some key features of the best advocacy platform:

• Integration with content management systems and marketing tools
• Automation of the creation and publishing of  social media posts
• Availability of gamification tools
• Analytics capabilities to track the performance of posts and employee participation

How Can Businesses Measure the Success of Social Advocacy?

Here are ways to measure the success of your social advocacy:

• Track metrics like engagement, clicks, shares, and follower growth across your employees’ profiles.
• Measure the conversion rate of the people who took a desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter.
• Analyze the ROI on the investment cost of the brand advocacy program.

How Can Companies Keep Employees Motivated to Use Advocacy Platforms?

Here are the top ways companies can keep their employees motivated to use advocacy platforms:

1. Provide a robust training and onboarding process to improve your employees’ overall experience with the advocacy tools.
2. Leverage gamification elements to recognize the top employee advocates and offer incentives for participation.

Conclusion

There is no one-size-fits-all regarding advocacy platforms, but hopefully, you can find one that fits your business on our list.

By focusing on the right features, choosing an ideal employee advocacy platform, and following the proper steps to implement your advocacy program, you can set yourself up for success.

In addition to the right advocacy tools, partnering with social media marketing experts would be critical for your success.

Our team of LinkedIn experts will help you design a LinkedIn advocacy plan tailored to your business and audience. Our strategic approach lets your executives and team members be seen as thought leaders and generate connections.

So, what’s holding you back? Connect with us; we can help you develop and execute a successful LinkedIn advocacy strategy.