4 Best Employee Advocacy Platforms

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 from employee posts are 7x more likely to convert. Your GTM team, in particular, is a goldmine of opportunity for your company, which is why you've set up an employee advocacy program.

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

Your GTM 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 not getting the most out of a very profitable (and free) distribution channel.

Luckily, there are platforms out there that can do some of the legwork for you — some more so than others. In this guide, we'll show you four great employee advocacy platforms and how their capabilities compare:

• Letterdrop
• Hootsuite
• Sprout Social
• Sociabble

Hopefully, we can help you choose a platform best suited to operating a well-oiled employee advocacy machine.

Letterdrop

Founded in 2021, Letterdrop is a Content Management Platform that brings all your content ops under one roof, from ideation through to publishing.

Advocacy Features and Benefits

Letterdrop directly connects to a variety of social media platforms and can take employee advocacy completely off your hands. All your team has to do is connect their 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 likes from your team on any post. The likes drop in over 30-minute intervals.
• Automate comments. You can write comments for your team or draft a comment and notify them to edit/approve it via email or Slack. Letterdrop supports tagging company accounts and select individuals on LinkedIn.
• Ghostwrite for your team. You can write from team accounts and get their approval.
• Use AI to generate realistic first drafts for you. The AI can mimic the person's writing style based on writing samples you give to the platform to analyze.

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You can keep track of, edit, and delete all social posts using Letterdrop's Content Calendar, which syncs with your cross-channel content in real-time.

Limitations

• Employee advocacy features only work for LinkedIn.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a feature-rich social media management platform that's been around since 2008. It offers employee advocacy features, but it's manual. Your team must log in to Hootsuite Amplify and engage with all your content themselves.

Advocacy 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.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media management, publishing, and analytics tool founded in 2010. Employee advocacy is once again all manual.

Advocacy 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: Employee advocacy is all manual.

Advocacy 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 employee advocacy 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.