Social Media Marketing
Updated: July 11, 2024
Published: March 5, 2020
A Note from our CEO, Glenn Gaudet.
In early 2020, LinkedIn announced that it’s merging its LinkedIn Elevate employee advocacy platform with LinkedIn Pages. In this migration, LinkedIn decided it will sunset many of its enterprise-class capabilities and will no longer charge for its employee advocacy solution. The standalone advocacy platform customers have come to know will no longer be offered come the spring of 2021.
So, now what? It just means this is a free solution, and that’s a good thing, right? Well, not so fast.
Many companies, both large and small, who used LinkedIn Elevate are left scrambling to find a replacement. While each company will have its own reasons to seek out an alternative vendor, here are the top three reasons I have heard:
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of LinkedIn. In fact, before it introduced LinkedIn Elevate, LinkedIn was a customer of ours and used GaggleAMP. I can’t say that we inspired LinkedIn to enter the employee advocacy space, but I like to think we may have been part of its internal conversations.
See what Rackspace Technology had to say about their transition from LinkedIn Elevate to GaggleAMP.
LinkedIn is a great social media platform - it’s a big part of any credible employee advocacy program. That said, its focus has always been geared toward business content and recruiting efforts. If all your employee advocacy program is doing is pumping out content to your employees’ LinkedIn feeds, your program is missing the boat.
Employees want content. Content is the ante to the game, but it’s not the entire game. Content is the starting point. Employees want content that not only resonates with them and their network, but content that is relevant to them.
When employees share great content, it is perceived the same way word-of-mouth marketing is received. In fact, 76% of people say they trust content shared by their peers more than brands which helps your content go further, faster.
Employee advocacy is best done when participants have skin in the game. Being able to contribute content, thought leadership, and perspectives highlight employees’ contributions to the company. User-generated content or employee-suggested content must be a large part of your strategy. Often times this content generates excitement, which increases reach, clicks, engagement, and overall sentiment towards both the employee and the company.
Engagement is where the magic happens. Engagement creates relationships. Relationships create leads, customers, and long-time advocates. Your employees are more than just content amplifiers – they are relationship makers!
The best employee advocacy programs understand this and provide guardrails and engagement activities to support the widespread relationship-making capability of your employee base. These actions and activities can help support your internal campaigns, talent pool development, social selling capabilities, and so much more.
As W. Edwards Deming once said, "In God we trust, all others must bring data."
As you explore alternatives to LinkedIn Elevate, consider how metrics affect the objectives of your business. Your employee advocacy provider should be able to tell you what program resources provide the most success to your business. Its customer success team should also work as an advocate of your business, helping you with a strategy to enhance your program or best practices that work well in similar industries.
Ten years ago when GaggleAMP pioneered the employee advocacy space, we recognized the value of the employee voice, and we have stayed true to advocating for the employee voice. We’re proud to say that our highest referral business comes from past users. Our customers take us with them when they transition to different companies because of the ease of use, the success of their Gaggle program, and the overall experience they had as Gaggle Managers and Gaggle Members over the years.
That is why GaggleAMP is still doing what we do. With GaggleAMP as your employee advocacy platform, companies leverage over 50 different activities that help marketing, sales, internal communication teams, and more, align the digital activities of employees to complement the digital efforts of their branded activities.
If you are doing employee advocacy on LinkedIn, let’s talk. We have helped many customers over the years transition from LinkedIn Elevate, and other competitive solutions, and can give you some pointers on things to consider during the transition. We love talking to folks who have already managed employee advocacy programs. They share our excitement over how we can help take it to new heights.
GaggleAMP can not only support your current employee advocacy program, but we can also help you increase its impact on your brand, sales, and customer retention. If you have questions about how to transition your LinkedIn Elevate program to GaggleAMP, contact our team or request a demo. If we’re the right fit for you, we have special programs in place to alleviate the financial tension and employee confusion that often happens when transitioning to a new platform.
If we’re not the right fit for you, that’s okay, too. We’ll be the first to tell you. Ten years in the employee advocacy space means we have worked with our amazing customers to develop best practices, data, and program recommendations that we can share, including who may be the best fit for your needs.
I look forward to chatting with you and wish you all the success in your employee advocacy program!
Cheers,
Glenn Gaudet, CEO
GaggleAMP
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing
