We’re passionate about helping organizations manage their social media channels efficiently. That’s why we’ve rounded up the top free employee advocacy tools that make it easy to run your social media programs.

What you do outside of your organization can greatly influence how people see your brand, but what if you could make that a good thing? Amplify Employee Advocacy by activating, engaging, and celebrating a global army of employees through social media. In just minutes, you can build or connect to an existing employee advocacy program. We help companies drive the right conversations, measure results and fuel employee passion in the form of contributions to their company’s online profile.

Top Employee Advocacy Tools

 LinkedIn Elevate – (now LinkedIn “My Company”)

LinkedIn Elevate offers an advocacy tool that, unsurprisingly, leverages LinkedIn’s social media platform. Elevate enables program admins to curate content trending on LinkedIn and then suggest it to employees. Other features include a list of most engaged employees, analytics and targeting employees on LinkedIn with updates and reminders.

Elevate is a great fit for companies whose advocates are most active on LinkedIn. Elevate’s direct access to trending content on LinkedIn can also be a useful source of inspiration for marketers who struggle with content curation.

Companies that focus heavily on social recruitment are a natural fit for this tool, seeing as HR teams already spend a significant portion of their time on the social network.

Recently, LinkedIn Elevate was deprecated and instead Linkedin has begun offering basic employee advocacy tools through the company page.

 Oktopost

Oktopost is a social media management and employee advocacy platform for B2B companies. Oktopost enables B2B marketers to streamline all their social media and advocacy activities on one platform, pulling content from corporate channels to share on advocacy channels and vice versa.

With comprehensive capabilities, such as content suggestions, gamification, and social compliance, it allows B2B companies to not only reach marketing goals, but also strengthen employee engagement.

Oktopost’s platform tracks business metrics such as clicks and conversions, as well as engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments. It works well for B2B companies that are looking to not only boost brand awareness, but also generate business results and measure the impact of advocacy on the bottom-line.

Oktopost also allows B2B marketers to get more out of their social media data, through integrations with leading marketing automation platforms, such as Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot, Eloqua and others.

Leveraging these integrations, B2B marketers are able to capitalize on data and enhance lead segmentation, scoring, nurturing, and attribution programs. Oktopost also integrates with Salesforce, enabling social selling for sales reps, without leaving the Salesforce platform.

Hootsuite Amplify

Hootsuite Amplify is an add-on of Hootsuite’s social media management solution. The platform allows marketers to send email notifications about new content, share with advocates pre-approved content and post content via a mobile app.

Amplify is a good fit for your company if your team is already using Hootsuite, which would make onboarding and training easier. It’s a good solution for boosting brand awareness on social media, as it tracks the traditional B2C engagement metrics such as likes, shares, comments and overall reach.

Tools for Getting Employees Involved in Social Media Marketing

Employee advocacy software: Let employees amplify your social media efforts

Employee advocacy software makes it easier for you and your employees to collaborate on social media initiatives. Although most of these tools support multiple social media platforms, some of them specialize only in a specific social media channel. 

What is employee advocacy software?

Employee advocacy software is a system that allows marketers to share branded and third-party content with employees; employees can publish this content on their social media accounts using the tool. Some tools also allow employees to find or create sharable content and suggest it to the tool’s administrators.

Sharing a post in Dynamic Signal (Source)

What are the features of employee advocacy software?

Although employee advocacy tools vary in their features, there are a few standard features that appear in most employee advocacy systems. 

• Content library creation: Create and manage a library of content or information that employees can share on their social media networks. 
• Post scheduling: Allow employees to schedule posts for publishing at a later time on their social media accounts.
• Content and account analytics: Track the performance of posts employees share on their network and see engagement rates. 
• Mobile and desktop apps: Allow employees to access information and share posts via their desktop or mobile devices.
• Integration with social media management tools: Connect the application with your social media marketing software to see its impact on your social media campaigns.

How does employee advocacy software help involve employees in social media?

Employee advocacy tools can help provide employees with approved information ripe for sharing. By connecting the tool with your CRM system, intranet, and marketing software, you can feed relevant business information directly into the tool, which employees can easily post on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. You can then use in-built analytics to see how employees’ social efforts have fared.

The tool also allows scheduling posts for sharing at a later time. Some of the tools offer a list of the top 10 or 20 posts that employees can choose from to share on social media channels. Further, with some employee advocacy tools, employees may set up auto-sharing to propagate new posts from your brand.

Gamification software: Make participation fun and engaging for employees

Gamification is a great means of getting employees involved in social media. While sharing content strategically is certainly the end-goal, gamification ensures maximum engagement and increases participation in the process. 

What is gamification software?

Gamification software is a tool that helps apply game mechanics to non-gaming environments. It helps increase user engagement and the likelihood of successful outcomes. Some common scenarios of the tool’s application include employee engagement, social media marketing, and eLearning.

Active challenges dashboard in Bravon (Source)

What are the features of gamification software?

Some common features of gamification software include:

• Customization: Customize the gaming environment to suit the process (marketing, eLearning, sales, etc.).
• Rewards: Add in-game rewards (such as points and badges) or real-world rewards (such as gift-coupons and cash vouchers) to incentivize employee participation.
• Competitions: Create in-app competitions to drive employees to achieve more.
• Leaderboards: Further the competitive spirit with leaderboards that rank employees on their performance.
• Analytics: Get a drilled-down view of employee contribution and its overall impact on your goals.

How does gamification software help involve employees in social media?

The key impact of gamification software is the increased participation of employees in social media initiatives. The tool helps to make the process fun and engaging by incentivizing activities such as sharing social media posts or liking posts to increase their visibility. 

This is done in two ways: leaderboards and reward points. Based on your social media strategy, you can present key tasks or activity options to employees (individuals or groups). For each task they complete, they earn a certain reward. They can accrue these rewards and later encash them via online or offline gift vouchers. 

Similarly, you can use leaderboards to drive friendly competition and increase employee participation in your social media initiatives. You can also create competitions between departments for various campaigns and let the leaderboard highlight the progress of each department to boost competitiveness. The competitive spirit will eventually impact your social media engagement and brand visibility.

TIPS TO HELP YOU IMPROVE EMPLOYEE SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT 

So, you get it. Employee social media engagement is important. But, how do you actually get employees to engage in a way that is truly beneficial to your business? It all starts with a social media engagement strategy. The following tips will help you ensure that your plan is effective so your company can start reaping the benefits of better engagement in no time. 

1. Hire a Professional

If your company doesn’t already have a dedicated team to carry out your social media strategy, hire a professional to assist you. Some companies don’t have the in-house resources required to maintain your social media strategy. In that case, hire a digital agency (like Konstruct Digital, wink wink) to do it for you!

2. Develop a Comprehensive Communications Plan

Creating a communications plan will benefit your company in many ways. To create an effective plan, make sure that it is easy to comprehend. It should highlight the tools and guidelines for communicating to the external public and internal audiences, like employees. Creating this plan will ensure that your employees play a part in implementing these standards and maintain a consistent brand voice. 

3. Establish an Employee Protocol For Your Online Brand

Create a plan that will empower all employees to make good decisions online. Developing a social media strategy and policy for your employees to follow is fundamental to enhance and promote your brand. The overarching corporate culture should be to represent the company professionally and consistently. 

4. Keep Employees Up-to-Date

Create a method for employees to keep up to date on company social media posts. Include how employees can support these activities by engaging online through their personal social media accounts. 

Conclusion

We’ve compiled resources for your company that will help you effectively engage your employees through social media and aid them in becoming advocates for your business.