How to Choose an Employee Advocacy Platform for Your Organization?
Your employees can be your biggest brand advocates. They may already be promoting your organization through offline word-of-mouth publicity. An employee advocacy platform can generate tons of positive exposure for your brand via social media.
For advocacy efforts to take off and deliver the desired results, your employees must be empowered with the right platform. Here are the top five features you should look for in an employee advocacy platform.
#1 Does the platform support the Big 3 social networks?
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn dominate the social networking space. Your employees may already be accessing these sites on their desktops and mobile phones – at office and outside it. Needless to say, your employee advocacy platform must offer employees a way to schedule branded content – your company’s blog posts, events, product announcements – on their personal social networks.
A good platform enables one-click scheduling of social media content. Employees shouldn’t have to tweet every hour from their workstations; it can be distracting and affect productivity. The ability to schedule content will save them time whilst allowing them to easily share multiple posts of their liking to their fans and followers. You can also seek out a platform that enables employees to personalize the posts and improve their visibility by adding comments and hashtags.
#2 Is the onboarding experience simple enough?
A complicated platform requiring days or weeks of training for your admin team and employees is a big no-no. It should take a few minutes of training to get employees comfortable about the platform and encourage interaction from day one.
To understand the likelihood of employees wholeheartedly embracing the platform, analyze their response during the software’s trial period. If you’re bombarded by too many questions and many employees share similar confusions about one or more aspects of the platform, it’s quite possible that usage and adoption may be affected in the future.
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#3 What kind of cross-device compatibility does the platform offer?
The employee advocacy platform must be available in mobile app form. The reason is simple : apps offer the flexibility to share social media posts on-the-go. Push notifications can notify employees when posts are published, and spur immediate action from mobile devices. Here again, ease of use – such as one-click sharing – can be crucial in motivating employees to view and share posts.
#4 Is there always a stream of fresh content to consume and share?
The platform should connect to your company’s content feeds to broadcast the latest news and posts to employees. This is a basic feature that will expand the reach of branded content while also improving employee engagement with your sales and marketing campaigns.
68% of marketers struggle to consistently publish enough content to satisfy their audiences. Content curation apps solve this problem by providing relevant third-party content to share with fans and followers. A golden rule of social media marketing is to entertain and educate audiences with useful content from authoritative sources. If you cannot find time to write long-form posts every week, reposition existing quality content that your audiences will appreciate.
Here’s where an employee advocacy platform with built-in content discovery and curation capabilities can be valuable. By providing a fresh stream of relevant industry news and articles, the platform can boost your SMM efforts while also enabling employees to enhance their social media presence to attract new followers.
#5 Does it offer gamification?
Rewarding advocates within your company serves as a huge morale booster. A platform with a rewards system will incentivize sharing and create a win-win situation. Look for an application that offers some sort of gamification where employees participate to win prizes each month.
To improve your employee advocacy initiatives, you need to understand what is working and what isn’t. In this regard, a platform with a social media analytics module measuring the performance of each post can be useful in fine-tuning your advocacy program.
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DrumUp offers all the features discussed above and some more to resonate with employees, engage them effectively, and convert them into brand ambassadors. Thousands of businesses are already using the platform to enhance their social media marketing, lead generation, recruiting and employee engagement efforts.
Image credit : Dave Winer via Flickr
