How to Determine Which Employee Advocacy Partner is Right for You [DOWNLOAD]

Employee advocacy is a relatively new thing.

Until about 4 years ago, there weren’t many organizations that were trying to engage their employees on social media. In fact, it seemed like many businesses were trying to use social media as a means to find information about job candidates, or to find out if their current employees were sharing sensitive or questionable content.

But we know this has changed.

Employees who share industry and company content on social media have been proven to increase social reach, drive sales, and create thought leadership.

• Content shared by employees receives 8x more engagement than content shared by brand channels (Source)
• Brand messages are re-shared 24x more frequently when distributed by employees vs brand channels (Source)
• 72.6% of salespeople using social selling as part of their sales process outperformed their sales peers and exceeded quota 23% more often (Source)

As with most digital strategies, though, change happens fast. The climate is now shifting to include employees in social media strategies – which is great! And the even better news here is that there are a ton platforms which make social media sharing easier for employees. But how do you know which platform is right for your organization?

Weighing Your Options

We’ve compiled a scorecard to help you search for an employee advocacy partner. This list will help you evaluate different vendors (of your choice) and their offerings. Depending on your organizational needs, there may be some criteria with higher priority than others. You can adjust the weight of each criterion to reflect how important that feature is to your enterprise.

If you’re already using an employee advocacy platform, use this scorecard to determine which features your platform offers, and which features they may need to adopt. If you’re still shopping around, use it to compare potential vendors.

Let’s Get Scoring!

Simply download the scorecard, open in Excel, and adjust the weight of each criterion to suit your organizational needs. For example, if you’re a B2B organization, LinkedIn sharing may be weighted a 5 (maximum) while Facebook sharing might be a 3.

Once you’ve adjusted the weights, substitute Vendor #1, Vendor #2, etc. with your Top 5 contenders for an employee advocacy platform. Score them on a scale of 1-5 according to how well they deliver on that feature (1 being low, 5 being high.)

The total is automatically calculated for you, and you’ll have your top pick for an employee advocacy partner in no time!

Remember, the platform you select should ultimately be a partner to help you achieve your marketing goals. The more a vendor can help you, the better your results will be, so be rigorous when determining what features are most important to you. Happy scoring!

Which features are most important to you when using an employee advocacy platform? Let us know in the comments! And as always, feel free to share this resource with your colleagues.