Four social amplification tools to turn employees into social advocacy ninjas

Unfortunately it isn't easy to connect with an audience as a brand, especially if you're a small business that can't allocate enough funds to hire a social engagement team.

Additionally, company social accounts demand professional exteriors and most of the social audience is already fazing out content that appears to be promotional. In fact, as per a study conducted by Nielsen – a leader in consumer studies, only 48% of people claimed to trust ads on social. Most people, 84%, trust recommendations from friends, colleagues and family. So, encouraging your employees to participate in social outreach is a great idea – because it helps you tap into a high-potential means of marketing (word of mouth), and becomes an engaging activity for everyone involved.

Social employee advocacy, as it is termed, is not a new concept anymore, many companies have adapted it into their functional systems, but it could still create for you that advantage that you need. Not all companies are on social advocacy – your competitors may not be, and you could use that to get ahead of competition.

Here are four cool apps that can help you create and manage employee advocacy programmes:

LinkedIn – Elevate

An extension by LinkedIn, this could be an excellent employee advocacy tool for B2B small businesses. If you're already present on LinkedIn, this is a quick extra 20 minutes you require to set the ball rolling.

Elevate is built-in to LinkedIn, so once you buy into the program, managing it should essentially have the same feel as managing your LinkedIn account. It lets you curate professionally inclined content pulled from LinkedIn's own news feeds – Pulse and Newsle, and share that with your employees on LinkedIn.

Since Elevate is built-in, it comes with a bunch of advantageous features, one of them directly correlating your marketing efforts on LinkedIn to the views and follows on your company profile.

The content curated on LinkedIn can be shared on the same platform and on Twitter, so you have two strikes in one! Integrating with this kind of platform – that touches most of your professional sphere, can have yet another positive repercussion – you can impact both potential customers, and potential hires!

Lastly, the platform allows you to identify the best performing employee, and also gives you access to plans that can help you scale up your employee advocacy programme.

If you're wondering about the results that your efforts are driving, Elevate also lets you view traffic to your site, sales leads, new hires and other key business metrics.

DrumUp – employee advocacy

If you've struggled with social management issues, this is the app for you. It promises to cut your time investment by 90% thus behaving as a social management and employee advocacy platform.

Via the tool, you can invite employees to create accounts and access a common content stream that houses content curated by you. Your audience can then scroll through that stream and share posts across their social accounts – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn with a single click. The app will also tell them, and you, which posts did best on social in terms of specific engagement Key Performance indicators – likes, retweets, etc.

To curate that content, you can either set keywords related to your industry – say “copywriting” or “ad design” if you're an ad agency, and let the app find fresh, relevant content for you. You could also add RSS feeds of your favourite blogs/sites to the app and view feeds in-app while selecting the posts you want added to your employee advocacy stream – a great time saver if you can't find the time to create content regularly.

DrumUp also lets you add custom posts to share content created by you to your employee advocacy feed. You can type in an introduction, add an image, and even schedule posts to your company social accounts while you're at it.

Finally, the app updates your employees progress in terms of points to a leader board – gamified fun! You could give that winner court-side tickets or rotate a trophy. Another benefit of employee advocacy – excited employees. In a study, 78% of US professionals admitted that having some form of recognition motivates them to perform better at work.

Brand Amper

Have you had issues with employees representing you on social? Brand Amper has an interesting approach to this. They've conducted studies and believe that, when given the opportunity, your employees can make a strong case for you on social media.

Hinged on the principle of completely transparency, this social employee advocacy tool talked the unique approach of allowing employees to share stories via their platform to collectively represent a host of candid shares on your company's digital and social presence. Considering that your employees are in fact your strongest advocates – they work with you and are closest to your product and services – their recommending your products and company wholeheartedly can be a powerful and influential means of marketing on social.

Stories are engaging, and remain in people's minds longer. While stories have been used extensively by advertisers everywhere, they still work. Characters like Charmin Bears involve people by entertaining them and emotionally connecting with them. As a small business, you may not have the capital to invest in creative minds that can come up with those concepts, but you have something just as good – you have real characters in your employees.

Brand Amper has a cool way of collecting stories from employees while allowing them to retain their way of saying something or sharing something, and these human elements can add value to your business' presence on social media. An online representation of your company brand could also be a great way to find the right recruits!

Dynamic Signal – Voice Storm

“People Powered Marketing” – Dynamic Signal has an amazing way of describing their tool and employee advocacy. Their social employee platform, “Voice Storm”, has a number of innovative ways of turning this concept into practice.

The application provides an extra focus on engaging employees, and has been built to drive better engagement amongst employees. For example, using Voice Storm you can deliver quizzes, surveys and other fun activities to your employees' inbox to pop in that excitement they need to keep working and participating in the programme.

The app has also seen some advanced additions in employee messaging. You can send your employees real-time reminders, notifications and personalised invitations to events. The invitations are customisable and employees can add a bit of their personality in how they express invites – a nice way to help build good working relationships in the office.

Voice Storm is a personalised experience on the whole – it is customised to employees based on their role, seniority, location and interests. Using the platform, employees can view the brand on several social platforms to keep updated on important industry news.

Department heads are given additional access to features that allow them to communicate with their teams using a bunch of content formats from multiple sources.

To complete the circle, Voice Storm also provides performance metrics like audience engagement, share statistics and measure adoption. One unique feature of this app is the Black-list to which you can add words, concepts and phrases that you want your employees to refrain from using when representing your company on social.

There are hundreds of tools out there, each unique in their own features and the results that they can drive. Therefore, it is important to ascertain which one of them is right for you and which best fits into your day and the way you operate. Find that tool and you will have optimum efficiency.