What is Employee Advocacy Software?

Introduction

Employee advocacy software can be used by businesses to enable their employees to share branded information and content through social channels. The platform allows brands to create content libraries that can be accessed and shared by their workforce via social media, email or mobile. Companies can use these tools to broaden their social presence with the help of their staff members.

Further, social media managers can exercise more control over their business’ messaging and voice on social platforms. Companies can use employee advocacy software to boost their social selling tactics by allowing sales agents to communicate with customers and prospects on social networks. Many of these solutions provide gamification capabilities to help employees share more.

In short, employee advocacy software offers features for social media or marketing teams to share a content database with their workforce. It provides social integrations to enable the firm’s staff members to share content and messaging directly from the system.

Features of Employee Advocacy Software

Email Updates

Many users check email but may not access the employee advocacy platform. Therefore, the software should deliver personalized content to their inbox with the ability to easily share icons. The application should offer admins and users a range of methods to access, share and engage with content.

Personalized Content Types

It’s important to give your employees interesting and engaging content topics to sustain their interest. You should have one content repository to ensure ease of use and to enable employees to access the latest versions. The software should allow you to group content based on topic, department or geography that is pertinent to each user to improve platform preference and sharing ease. As each firm and staff member is unique, the employee advocacy software should allow you to customize your own content categories.

Gamification

A good employee advocacy solution offers game-based motivation features to improve engagement among employees. It allows you to conduct contests and permits personnel to view their performance on the firm’s leaderboard. This inspires healthy competition and offers staff members a compelling reason to participate and share.

Mobile Functions

The software should be mobile optimized to cater to the needs of younger as well as dispersed employees. This is important because more people today are accessing the internet on their mobile devices compared to desktops. Employee advocacy apps should offer a robust user interface and experience to allow personnel to effortlessly access, see and share company content on the go. The capability to suggest, create and approve content on the go on mobile devices can be especially useful while attending events.

Analytics

Employee advocacy software should also offer analytics tools to help you gain insights on what is working and not. You can learn about things like which users are still sharing, what content types are performing well for which teams and more. Further, you can use these insights to enhance your staff advocacy program and to showcase ROI.

The capability to view best-performing content and power users and departments can help you make informed decisions and invest more smartly in the right type of content. It can also aid you to allocate budgets to competitions and to showcase the platform’s ROI. 

Benefits of Employee Advocacy Software

Reach More Applicants for Difficult-to-Fill Roles

Employee advocacy software can reduce the cost per hire and cost per application. In addition, it can assist the HR team to reach applicants for difficult-to-fill positions. Word-of-mouth marketing and peer-to-peer influence can play an important role in helping the HR team to reach relevant aspirants.

Helps Attract Promising Talent

Your employees can assist to make your brand more attractive to job seekers and encourage them to consider applying to your company. Staff referrals can improve the quality, cost and time spent of candidate to help make your business more competitive and fill the skills gap. In addition, an employee advocacy program can help your firm to develop diversity in the workforce. This is important because research affirms that diverse teams are able to solve problems more quickly compared to teams with cognitively similar members.

Can Increase New Business Leads

An IBM study indicates that a lead generated through employee advocacy or socially selling is 7x likelier to close compare to other lead creation strategies. Staff members enable brands to develop relationships built on knowledge and trust. Warm referrals via employee advocacy considerably raise the rate of good-quality business leads.

Improves Customer Communication

Only 20% of consumers agree that businesses are communicating effectively with them on social platforms. Employee advocacy enables brands to connect more closely with people, develop more meaningful relationships and enhance person-to-person conversations. In addition, employee advocacy can bridge the gap between offline and online to attract more people to stores. Consumers are more likely to act on recommendations from their contacts.

A study indicates that brand messages get shared 24x more when done by staff members compared to the brand itself. LinkedIn research reveals that a company personnel’s social networks are 10 times bigger than that of the firm.

Keeps Customers Top of Mind

Another LinkedIn study states that when the workforce shares content they are able achieve double the effect of brand marketing and the click-through rate is also twice that of their company. Employee advocacy software allows brands to be relevant to users, drive sales and footfall, and increase brand affinity and awareness.

Employee advocacy presents a transparent and fresh alternative to less effective and more expensive methods like email marketing and paid advertising. The best employee advocacy tools can enable intelligent content targeting, and help to create personalized messaging and more authentic storytelling to bring staff members and consumers closer together.