4 Best Social Selling Tools in 2024

TL;DR:

• Employee advocacy is incredibly effective at distributing content directly to prospects. If you want it to work, you have to take manual effort off your team's hands.
• Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Sociabble have great advocacy features but still require your team to log in and manage yet another app and take manual action.
• Letterdrop automates employee engagement including likes, comments, reposts, either directly or with permission. No need for employees to login to another platform.

Employees are the natural ambassadors of your brand. In fact, qualified leads generated through social selling are 7x more likely to convert. Your GTM team, in particular, is a goldmine of opportunity for your company.

But your messages on the #social-boost Slack channel are regularly ignored. Why?

Your employees are busy: they're on sales calls, answering customer support tickets, running campaigns—you name it. They see engaging with company posts as extra work. And if they're not engaging, you're missing out on the full potential of a highly profitable (and free) distribution channel.

Fortunately, there are platforms out there that can do some of the legwork for you—some more so than others. 

Letterdrop

Founded in 2021, Letterdrop completely automates social selling and sales enablement, enabling you to show up consistently as a credible thought leader in your industry and improve your LinkedIn reply rate.

(It can help your sales team take care of prospecting on LinkedIn, too.)

Social Selling Features and Benefits

All your team has to do is connect their social media accounts to Letterdrop once, and you can take care of the rest from the software.

Used by companies like SignalFire and Warmly, Letterdrop's employee advocacy feature can generate +115% increase in impressions and +105% increase in clicks.

You can:

• Automate Employee Engagement: Letterdrop can automate likes, comments, and reposts from your team through an approval system to help amplify posts. This can be done natively in LinkedIn or in Letterdrop
• Automate Posts from Sales Calls and URLs: It can generate defensible LinkedIn posts based on real customer questions during sales calls or key information from video and blog URLs. You can set up templates, too.
• Feel Secure: Letterdrop is SOC-2 compliant and works through LinkedIn's APIs
• Ghostwrite With Templates: You can write from team accounts using customizable templates to help you sound more like them

Limitations

• Employee advocacy features only work for LinkedIn as of the time of writing.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a feature-rich social media management platform that's been around since 2008.

It offers social selling features, and it's largely manual. Your team must log in to Hootsuite Amplify and engage with all your content themselves.

Social Selling Features and Benefits

Hootsuite Amplify allows employees to share pre-approved company content to their networks directly from the dashboard, both on desktop and mobile. Permissions and content requests go through assigned admins.

With Amplify, you can:

• Organize shareable content by topic. This includes business goals like increasing conversion rates, or specific marketing campaigns such as hiring for a new role
• Set up push notifications for specific posts so that team members are always engaging
• Track the effectiveness of your advocacy program with in-depth analytics
• Write tone-specific captions using a built-in AI content writer, which your team can share in one click

Limitations

• Your employees still have to engage with your posts manually, which defeats the whole purpose of an employee advocacy platform.
• The features can make for a steep learning curve for non-marketers.
• There isn't a feature that supports tagging other people in LinkedIn posts.
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Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media management, publishing, and analytics tool founded in 2010.

Social Selling Features and Benefits

Their Employee Advocacy platform lets you put all your shareable content in one place, making it easy for your team to redistribute to their networks. From there, you can:

• Draft pre-approved message ideas. This can keep your team on-brand and on-track
• Provide engaging, industry-specific content to your team to share on any social network
• Get a report on advocacy results to monitor and improve your program

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Limitations

• Your employees still have to engage with your posts manually, which defeats the whole purpose of an employee advocacy platform.
• Sprout has difficulty with natively supporting social networks like Instagram, so users often have to switch to native use.
• There isn't a feature that supports tagging other people in LinkedIn posts.

EveryoneSocial

Founded in 2013, EveryoneSocial is an employee advocacy platform that mimics a company social network. It encourages employees to engage and share content to their personal networks with gamification features.

Disclaimer: Social selling is all manual.

Social Selling Features and Benefits

Once you and your team are set up on EveryoneSocial, you can:

• Fill your workspace with content that your team would want to share. This includes job listings, third-party content, blogs, memes, user-generated pieces, and more.
• Encourage engagement with multiple integrations. Take advantage of connections with email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other places where your employees are active to encourage engagement.
• Encourage participation with friendly competition using the Leaderboard as an incentive.
• Access simple analytics to monitor employee engagement rates and their impact on your business goals.

Limitations

• This platform relies heavily on employees taking time out of their day to engage with your posts manually, which defeats the whole purpose of an employee advocacy platform.
• There are no automations
• There isn't a feature that supports tagging other people in LinkedIn posts.

A Side-By-Side Comparison

We believe that a good employee advocacy platform checks four main boxes:

• It takes advocacy completely off your employees' plates
• Multiple integrations to avoid the need for endless open apps
• An easy-to-use UI that makes it a pleasure for your team to use
• Automation capabilities to make it easy for your employees to engage with company content

To simplify the comparison of the four employee advocacy platforms above, we rate these capabilities and more according to the following grades:

• Absent — The tool completely lacks this feature
• Basic — The tool meets basic requirements
• Average — The tool meets requirements satisfactorily
• Robust — The tool exceeds requirements

Choose a Platform That Takes Employee Advocacy Off Your Hands

You and your team have a lot of important tasks to juggle. Don't miss out on the benefits of social selling because of inefficient and manual amplification workflows.

While all of these platforms have great features, most of them still require your team to consistently log in to yet another app — this puts them off and leaves you with the issue of poor engagement. But Letterdrop takes employee advocacy completely off the hands of your team after one log-in, leaving them to focus on high-level tasks instead.

If you want to get maximum reach from your employees, feel free to talk to us about streamlining and automating your content ops today.