Employee Advocacy
Updated: February 2, 2024
Published: December 13, 2023
Leveraging your employees' social networks can 10x, 20x, or even 100x your content's reach, but if you've ever tried to execute an employee advocacy program, you've probably found that getting employees to engage is tricky.
Often, managers start their employee advocacy strategy without a firm grip on what is employee advocacy. They'll add social post links to Slack channels and asking employees to engage with those posts. While it might work at first, most employees eventually become disengaged because:
So while employee advocacy has the potential to significantly increase your brand's total reach, most programs only reach a fraction of the success they could obtain.
Fortunately for you, there's a simple solution that makes employee advocacy easier for both managers and employees; an employee advocacy tool.
The benefits of employee advocacy tools are plentiful and solves the problems above by:
Below, we'll discuss our own employee advocacy tool, GaggleAMP, as well as a handful of other popular employee advocacy tools.
For a (perhaps overly) simplified look at GaggleAMP, here's how its core system works:
Managers select an engagement activity of their choice (like, comment, share), add a link to the post, and then cherry-pick which employees (or groups of employees) should engage with it… all in about two minutes.
GaggleAMP also makes it super easy for employees to engage. When they log into the platform, they'll see a handful of posts that have been assigned specifically to them (with a specific engagement activity – such as like, share, comment). They complete the engagement activity and schedule all of their posts for the coming week or month… in about two minutes.
Finally, GaggleAMP also offers a detailed analytics dashboard where managers can see:
By awarding points towards every completed activity, you can award employees that are actively engaging with activities and nudge those that didn’t engage.
However, that’s only scratching the surface of all GaggleAMP has to offer.
You can learn more by scheduling a demo, or keep reading and we’ll discuss the nuanced details that make GaggleAMP the preferred employee advocacy tool for marketing and social media managers.
Here is a detailed overview of how GaggleAMP works and the key differences between it and other employee advocacy tools.
Rather than posting to a silent Slack channel and hoping employees complete the tasks, GaggleAMP enables you to create posts and then assign them to specific employees (or a group of employees) with just the click of a button.
To create an engagement activity, select one of the cards (share, like, comment, etc.) for your desired platform (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.). You can add specific instructions to the engagement activity card and paste the link to the social post you want them to engage with.
You can even write a draft of exactly what the employee should say for comment and share activities. This way, all the employee has to do is enter their Gaggle, approve or edit the pre-written text, and schedule it.
This takes the burden off the employee to think of something to write, which drastically improves engagement (and thus, the success) of your employee advocacy program.
Think about it – the employees that have the most social connections (and impact) are typically executives. However, they are also the busiest and therefore least likely to engage with an employee advocacy program.
By pre-writing the text for executives and sending it to their Gaggle, they only need a few seconds (and minimal brain power) to participate in your advocacy program.
Managers can also create deadlines for each engagement activity. Once that deadline passes, the post disappears from each employee's Gaggle (even if the action wasn't completed).
This is useful as it ensures that the employees aren't overwhelmed by a huge feed of uncompleted posts.
Once you're ready to assign the posts, click "Post to Gaggle" and the activity will be made available to your selected Members. You'll see that the Gaggle offers a detailed overview of the social posts. Now you can better determine how each post has performed and the reach, engagement, shares, etc. were achieved both by platform and individual post.
This helps you better optimize the campaign by curating content that resonates best with your employees and their audiences. For example, if you notice post A has high engagement on Twitter and lower engagement activity on LinkedIn, you can adjust your Twitter content to have more of this format and try a different approach or angle on LinkedIn.
The success of your employee advocacy program depends entirely on how much employees engage.
In our experience, the biggest reason employees don't engage is that it requires too much time and effort, so we built GaggleAMP specifically to reduce friction and improve efficiency for your employees.
So let's jump into how GaggleAMP is engineered to remove friction for employees.
First, each employee has a personalized Gaggle with posts assigned specifically to them. This way, they don't have to scroll through an endless feed and choose which post to engage with and what action to take (like, comment, or share).
While that may seem like a trivial task, we've noticed that removing this friction can drastically improve employee engagement.
So once they enter their Gaggle, all an employee has to do is:
That's it!
As you can see, it only takes about two minutes of the employee's time per week.
The posts will go live on their social accounts throughout the week, and they never even had to log in to their social media accounts to copy and paste activity requests.
See how easy this makes it for your employees to engage and why GaggleAMP customers have such a high success rate with their employee advocacy programs?
Finally, employees are notified once per week through their preferred channel (Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, etc.).
This way, employees aren't bombarded with noisy messages (that they will eventually ignore) as the marketing manager can schedule messages to only be sent once per week.
GaggleAMP users have access to all of these analytics:
This makes it easy for you to see the exact ROI of each campaign, which channels performed the best, and the top-performing employees to better optimize future campaigns.
In addition, GaggleAMP offers a Leaderboard that shows which employees are most engaged. This is visible across the company and is designed to create friendly competition to encourage future engagement. At the end of the month, you can award the most engaged employees.
Here’s how the Leaderboard works:
As you can see from the screenshots above, GaggleAMP is very intuitive. We realized that the success of your employee advocacy program depends largely on how easy it is for employees to use, so we built the platform to be as simple and personalized as possible.
Logging into the platform, each employee sees a personalized feed of only a handful of posts as older posts will disappear as the deadline passes. So unlike most employee advocacy platforms, your employees never have to search through an endless feed of posts and choose one.
In addition, it only takes one or two clicks to schedule each post, making it difficult to get lost.
The platform is equally simple from the manager's perspective. It only takes three steps to create and assign the engagement activity, and the analytics dashboard is clear and easy to understand.
GaggleAMP makes it easy to send employees notifications through your preferred platform. Specifically, it integrates with Slack, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, and other platforms to ensure employees see the messages wherever they are most active.
You can also set GaggleAMP to send email notifications.
This way, you no longer have to send individual emails or messages, begging employees to engage. However, from the employee's perspective, they receive personalized notifications with their engagement assignments.
If you're pressed for time or just want to repurpose some of your existing content, GaggleAMP enables you to connect with your existing content channels.
For example, you can connect directly with your blog, and then simply select the blog post you want to repurpose – without ever leaving the Gaggle.
This way, you'll never have to wade through endless content, and you can be sure to post consistently, even if you don't have time to create new content.
#1: GaggleAMP isn't a feed of endless posts that employees have to pick from and decide how to engage – managers can assign employees a personalized list of just a few posts with specific engagement actions (like, comment, share, etc.).
#2: Detailed engagement data makes it easy to see your employee earned media value (EEMV), total reach, and other KPIs. You can also see which employees are most active, least active, and which ones obtained the most reach.
#3: GaggleAMP offers a variety of integrations, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, and more. This way, employees can see messages and take action through their preferred channel.
#4: GaggleAMP makes it easy to get busy employees, especially executives, to engage as you can pre-write messages for them to approve and publish.
#5: Employees can schedule posts ahead of time so that they only have to spend about two minutes per week in the Gaggle (the entire process to schedule posts only requires one or two clicks).
If you're struggling with content amplification and want to leverage your employees' network to the maximum capacity, schedule a demo of GaggleAMP.
Sprinklr is a CXM platform that offers an employee advocacy tool for marketing managers. To get started, you can pull content from various social channels into the main feed. Then, choose the platform you want it shared on and the approval path and type. This way, every post is appropriately approved and scheduled.
It also offers an analytics dashboard that shows participation rates, content engagement metrics, and more.
To add friendly competition, Sprinklr also enables you to award points and badges to the most engaged employees.
Sprinklr is usually the best solution for people already using the platform for their other social media efforts – otherwise, it might be too expensive to justify the investment.
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Oktopost calls itself a B2B social engagement platform and offers an employee advocacy tool as one of its features. Like most employee advocacy tools, the content is available in a feed, which employees have to scroll through to select the post they want to share. They can filter this feed by date, popularity, or channel.
Employees can also make content recommendations to ensure future posts resonate with their audience.
Managers also have access to detailed performance data with impressions, likes, and click data for each employee.
They also offer a mobile app and integrate with Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other solutions.
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Sociabble offers social selling, internal communications, and employee advocacy solutions. From the employee's perspective, they log into the platform and are greeted by a feed of all the company's social media feeds. These feeds can be organized by channels or topics to make it easier to digest. After scrolling through the feed, employees can select a post they want to engage with, complete the activity, and post directly inside the platform.
Sociabble also offers contests and rewards for the most engaged employees.
To see how well your employees are performing, you can track traffic and conversions from employee sharing.
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PostBeyond is an employee advocacy feature inside the Influitive platform. It organizes all social media posts into a single feed, and managers can suggest copy and branded hashtags to reduce the effort employees have to put forth to engage. They can also highlight critical posts to help employees select the most important content to share.
PostBeyond offers an analytics dashboard that shows EEMV, impressions, clicks, and more to see how employees are performing. It also offers Slack and Microsoft Teams integrations to meet employees at their desired channel.
Embed Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C4VR-0TU20&feature=emb_logo
EveryoneSocial enables managers to share relevant social posts, text, links, GIFs, and more with employees to engage with. It also integrates with Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other solutions.
To track employee engagement and gamify the process, EveryoneSocial offers a leaderboard that shows which employees are most active. This way, managers can reward high engagement and reach out to those that are disengaged.
It also has an analytics dashboard that shows reach, clicks, and engagement.
Hootsuite Amplify's employee engagement tool offers a feed of your brand's content for employees to select and share.
To use the platform, program managers first add posts to the feed and then send notifications to employees to jump in and engage. Once the employee receives the email notification, they can scroll through the feed, select a post they want to engage with, and then share it on their social media feed. Managers can also choose to vet engagement actions before they go live to ensure everything being shared is marketing-approved messaging.
Hootsuite also has an app to make it easy for employees to share their content on the go.
It offers an analytics dashboard that shows posts published, shared, and the estimated earned media value. You can also drill down for detailed analytics of each post's performance, team performance, and performance by channel (Twitter, Linkedin, etc.).
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Bambu is Sprout Social's employee advocacy platform. All of your social content is available in a feed that employees can skim through and select a post relevant to their interests to share with their network.
Bambu also offers a curated email digest that reminds employees to engage and serves them content-sharing suggestions.
For managers, it offers basic analytics like shares, top-performing employees, and the total stories shared across various platforms.
Haiilo is a social intranet platform designed to improve employee engagement. Its employee advocacy feature enables employees to select posts to share and then schedule them to go live throughout the week.
It also offers keyword blocking to ensure employees avoid using words that aren't brand-approved.
It works on both desktop and mobile devices, and employees can share the content to the platform of their choice.
Managers can also create automated reports, track the most active contributors, and set alerts for critical developments.
Finally, LumApps is an employee experience platform designed to improve communication throughout the organization. So, in addition to offering managers a host of internal tools, it also offers an employee advocacy feature.
Within the LumApps Social Intranet, branded posts show up in employee feeds. From there, employees can select the most relevant posts to share with their network.
Managers can also offer suggested text and guidelines to ensure all content is on-brand.
It also offers a simple analytics suite with basic data on clicks, impressions, and total reach.
Now that you've had a chance to compare the best employee advocacy tools, it's time to make a decision.
We're proud of GaggleAMP because it:
To see for yourself how the platform works, sign up (for free) today!
Employee Advocacy
Employee Advocacy
Employee Advocacy
