5 top employee advocacy tools and platforms to drive growth

Most businesses know their employees are their biggest asset, but did you know they’re also your strongest marketers?

Employee advocacy empowers employees to share smart, quality content with their social networks. But, getting there takes more than a well-crafted email encouraging your team to share branded content on their social networks. Employee advocacy tools streamline the process of transforming your employees into brand ambassadors.

These tools don’t just make it convenient to organize posts—the best ones elevate your overall employee advocacy strategy so you produce and promote content that your workforce will be proud to share with their connections. And get results that fuel your brand awareness and social strategy.

In this list, we break down even best employee advocacy platforms (including our own, of course) and how they’re different from the standard tools you might come across.

1. Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social

Sprout Social offers one of the top employee advocacy tools (previously called Bambu) that helps you amplify employees’ voices to drive real business results.

From enabling employees to quickly share posts to equipping them with industry-leading content, Sprout helps brands turn employees into thought leaders and expand the reach of your brand story.

With our social media management platform, your team executes seamlessly across tactics to maximize your reach and engagement. Plus, social media integration with Salesforce enables your sales team with the functionality to share content with prospects and build a profile that attracts key customers.

Together these solutions offer three distinct benefits that will help scale your strategy and expand your social presence:

Identify and distribute content that resonates most

Employee advocacy is more than just curation—you need to know what content is resonating with employees and how their connections are engaging with it.

Our analytics features help you uncover which content is driving the most engagement and, in turn, inform future content strategy. For example, Medallia, an enterprise customer experience platform, used Sprout to hone in on relevant metrics that informed them how to use content more effectively to better engage their customers in different industries. Plus our automated content distribution enabled their internal team to curate and deliver relevant content to employees across the globe to share within their networks. The result was a 48.6% year-over-year (YoY) increase in engagements with Sprout.

Increase employee participation with curated, personalized content

According to Sprout’s Employee Advocacy Report, 72% of engaged users post about their company if the content is written for them. Sprout’s pre-approved message ideas give your employees a starting point that helps them stay on-brand, while having the freedom to edit their voice and choose their preferred social network.

Employees can also customize their feeds by following topics relevant to their roles and suggest content for others to share. This encourages adoption by creating a tailored experience for employees.

West Monroe, a digital services firm, was able to use these features alongside executive support to scale their employee advocacy program to 400 active users and 10,863 shares in the first six months.

Increase social ROI

Per The Sprout Social Index™, more than 1,000 marketers revealed employee advocacy helped them drive more qualified leads, establish thought leadership and create new networking opportunities.

Advertising success platform Simpli.fi used Sprout to leverage employee networks for these very reasons. “Our potential reach from the sales department alone is at almost a million unique users because everyone has such large networks online,” noted Spencer Traverm, Director of Content at Simplifi.

With Sprout’s employee advocacy program, the company was able to align its brand transformation with a new social media strategy and overcome resource limitations, earning them almost $90,000 in estimated earned media value.

Sprout is suitable for businesses of all sizes—enterprises and small to medium-sized businesses—that have built a social presence and are continuing to invest in social media marketing. It’s also great for all industries including regulated industries like healthcare.

If you’ve just started building your social presence, alternative all-in-one platforms include:

• Sociabble
• ClearView Social
• Hootsuite Amplify
• PostBeyond
• Oktopost

2. EveryoneSocial

EveryoneSocial is a social media employee advocacy tool that solely focuses on employee advocacy. Its freemium model makes it one of the best employee advocacy platforms for businesses looking for a low-cost or even no-cost introduction to employee advocacy.

The freemium model also opens doors for small businesses or startups that want to test advocacy without making a substantial initial investment.

A central feature of EveryoneSocial is its content hub. This digital space aggregates all the content your company wishes to disseminate through its employees. From the latest blog post to an important company announcement, everything is organized and accessible in one place, so it’s easy for employees to find shareable content.

EveryoneSocial also has social selling features. The tool integrates with sales tools like Salesforce and HubSpot to empower sales teams to build their personal brands and track leads at the same time.

3. Haiilo

Haiilo is an employee communications platform that includes advocacy features but primarily focuses on creating an internal community.

The platform offers a centralized space for employees to share experiences and achievements and connect their social media channels, which simplifies content sharing.

What makes Haillo’s features different from other platforms is its comms and advocacy analytics. The tool analyzes comms across any employee segment and notifies you about critical developments.

These insights give you data to calculate your advocacy ROI.

Find your most influential employees with this analysis and push them toward the forefront. Plus, set up automated reports to ensure you’re up-to-date with the latest trends and insights in your internal community.

Haillo’s gamification features help employees see how well they’re driving engagement and traffic compared to their colleagues. Make employee advocacy fun with leaderboards and offer perks to encourage active participation.

4. Firstup

Previously known as Dynamic Signal, Firstup, amplifies your brand’s voice through advocacy and offers internal collaboration and communication with a robust employee experience ecosystem.

Firstup specifically uses the platform to connect with job candidates. Employees can get in touch with candidates, promote relevant listings and maintain brand consistency at the same time.

What really makes Firstup different, though, is how it’s available in 30 different languages. This makes it a perfect fit for global teams that want to position their employees as ambassadors in different regions.

Firstup also lets site administrators draft multiple versions of a social post and randomly distribute them among employees for sharing. You can tailor these posts to globally distribute your brand’s message and make sure it’s locally relevant and sensitive to cultural nuances.

Firstup is a good choice for companies that want to encourage their global teams to promote their brand’s message. This is a great way to get everyone talking about your company’s mission and values, all while connecting with potential customers and candidates on a local level.

5. GaggleAMP

GaggleAMP is an employee advocacy platform designed to engage employees in promoting their company’s content across social media channels. It offers flexibility by allowing administrators to create various “engagements” beyond simple sharing, like liking, commenting or participating in discussions on social media, aiding companies to achieve diverse advocacy goals.

GaggleAMP helps build a structured approach to employee advocacy that encourages active participation and makes it simpler to track effectiveness. With GaggleAMP, administrators can provide employees with a library of pre-approved content and clear prompts on how to engage with it. This makes it easier for employees to support the brand without having to do extra work.

The tool also provides detailed analytics, enabling companies to measure the reach and impact of these engagements and identify which activities resonate most with their audience.

6. Sociabble

Sociabble is a tool that helps employees support and engage with their company’s employee advocacy program. Its content calendar helps organize posts, ensuring that timely and relevant content is available, which encourages consistent participation without overloading employees.

Sociabble is best known for supporting a data-driven approach to understanding the impact of employee advocacy on brand awareness and reach. Detailed analytics provide insights into engagement metrics, showing companies how often content is shared, which platforms drive the most reach, and which employees are the most active advocates.

The platform also integrates well with communication tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack and Yammer, allowing employees to share content without leaving their familiar workflows. Sociabble’s features, such as leaderboards and point systems, help incentivize engagement and make advocacy more engaging.

7. DSMN8

DSMN8 is an employee advocacy tool that focuses on making it easy for employees to share company content to enhance brand visibility and engagement through employees’ networks.

Companies can choose and share a variety of content types, from articles to videos, in a content library format directly to employees. This library simplifies the sharing process, giving employees access to a ready-made collection of relevant, on-brand material. The tool also offers a mobile-friendly interface, which is convenient for employees on the go and encourages broader engagement.

DSMN8’s analytics features enable companies to track the reach and impact of shared content, providing insights into engagement levels and identifying top advocates within the organization.

With gamification elements like leaderboards and recognition, DSMN8 helps foster a culture of advocacy by motivating employees to participate. Also, the tool can be changed to match a company’s brand and communication goals, helping make advocacy efforts more cohesive and measurable.

Amplify your social presence with employee advocacy

People trust other people more than they do companies. It’s a natural tendency for us to trust our peers, friends and people we admire more so than faceless corporate entities.

This makes employees your most valuable brand ambassadors. Employee advocacy platforms empower employees to share your brand’s message in their unique, authentic voice. They make it effortless for employees to share content and extend your brand’s reach far beyond what you could achieve alone.

Amplify your brand presence while staying connected to your overall social strategy with Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social. With its robust analytics, you’re never in the dark about your program’s performance and your team is always equipped with the insights they need to iterate and improve.

Ready to turn your employees into your biggest supporters? Learn more how Sprout’s advocacy features will help you.