Top Free Employee Advocacy Software

Employee advocacy software assists companies in driving brand recognition, increasing organic social sharing and engagement, and generating new leads through the voice of their employees. This type of software helps businesses build preapproved content libraries for their employees to access and share via mobile, email, or social media. Many of these tools offer gamification features to promote a higher volume of sharing amongst employees with their connections across social media.

Some employee advocacy tools utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning to track company mentions and relevant third-party content. Additionally, these tools measure the content that produces the highest engagement, as well as how advocates impact a company’s marketing and recruiting efforts. Some employee advocacy tools don’t just include a company’s branded content, some allow employees to add their own media sources and blogs they are interested in sharing. This type of software often integrates with CRM software, marketing automation software, and social media management software.

Key Benefits of Employee Advocacy Software

• Increases a company’s referral traffic and brand recognition
• Helps build up employees as industry thought leaders and grow their professional networks
• Assists companies in nurturing relationships with their employees and capture feedback in real time

Brands use employee advocacy software because consumers trust content and recommendations from people they know more than marketing messages directly from the brands themselves. This type of software enables employees to directly share and amplify branded and third-party content.

Positions employees as thought leaders — This type of software enables organizations to invest in their employee’s personal and professional development. Employee advocacy software positions employees as brand advocates, thought leaders, and industry domain experts, which helps build up their personal brand across various social networks.

Increases brand awareness and recognition — Increasing brand awareness is difficult to do organically, but employee advocacy software helps companies amplify their branded content and messaging in a more authentic way as the messaging is shared through their employees. The buyer journey is impacted earlier as employees’ personal relationships and networks build credibility and authenticity with the brand.

Improves internal communications within organizations — While many benefits of employee advocacy software stem from external brand communications, it’s important to recognize the benefits this type of software brings to internal communications within a company. Organizations have an abundance of information that they need to share with their employees, and employee advocacy software makes it easier to stay organized on company news and announcements.

Enables social selling — Social selling is a sales tactic that enables sales representatives to connect with people on social media networks to develop stronger relationships with them as part of the sales process. Employee advocacy software helps sales representatives connect with potential clients and increase their social media reach by enabling them to share curated, industry-related content.

Talent pool development — Employee advocacy software helps increase a company’s brand awareness, and can also help draw attention to their active job openings. Job postings that are shared by employees are often received better than if they are shared directly from a brand. Thus, that employee is essentially sharing a personal endorsement for the company by promoting a job opening directly to their social network.

Benefits of using employee advocacy spans across an entire organization. Marketing teams, sales teams, and human resource (HR) departments can all utilize this type of software.

Marketing teams — Marketing departments use employee advocacy software to expand their reach through their employee’s social networks, which ensures more people become aware of their brand. This type of software also helps marketing teams increase earned media, including word-of-mouth or peer-to-peer referrals.

Sales teams — Social selling through the use of employee advocacy software increases lead generation as it allows sales representatives to build and establish genuine relationships, as opposed to other sales tactics (i.e., cold calling). Employee advocacy software assists sales representatives in building their credibility through thought leadership, which enables them to create authority in their industry.

HR departments — HR departments use employee advocacy software to help their employees feel more connected to their company’s mission, which can help with retention. An increasing number of people are applying for jobs online when they see their friends and professional networks post the opening on social media. HR departments also use this type of software to help with talent acquisition as employees post about company news, recaps from company events, and overall sentiment of working for the company.