Employee advocacy software can help your brand attract followers, get more leads, and generate more sales. You can even attract quality talent through employee brand advocacy.
The employee advocacy software market is expected to grow by a CAGR of 8.5% during the next year, as more and more businesses are starting to understand the value of this type of platform. If you’re not leveraging employee advocacy tools, you could be missing out.
If you’re considering adding an employee advocacy platform to your business tool stack, you’re in good company. But how do you get started with choosing employee advocacy software? This guide can help.
We cover:
- What is employee advocacy software?
- Our top 12 picks of the best employee advocacy software programs, reviewed
- What to look for in employee advocacy software?
- Types of employee advocacy programs
What is employee advocacy software?
Employee advocacy software will help you build and scale an intentional employee advocacy program with minimal effort. Whether you’d like to mobilize employees to attract new customers, new job candidates, or both, employee advocacy software will help you streamline the process.
The software will help you stay on top of all advocacy-related activities, track metrics, and even award bonuses to your star performers. Aside from you providing some initial input, setting up your workflows, and actively monitoring performance, the software does it all.
The best employee advocacy software
With that said, let’s get to the meat of this article by breaking down the top 12 employee advocacy software to consider:
Referral Rock
Referral Rock does it all, whether you’re looking for employee referral software for employee-to-employee advocacy programs, employee-to-customer referral programs, or programs where employees serve as brand ambassadors – or even all three! You’ll be able to create a gamified advocacy program, a tiered program, or a multi-step one if you wish. And no matter what structure you choose, you’ll be able to track every time employees share your brand, and the customers or employees each employee-advocate brings in, through unique links.
Best for: Businesses of all types and sizes, from small businesses to enterprises; businesses that want maximum flexibility in how they design their employee advocacy program; businesses seeking to run a referral program or ambassador-style program via any channel (not just social media)
Give employees the freedom to share their links directly, or on social media with the messages of their choice. Instantly reward employees for their advocacy when it results in sales, and send out reminders to keep employees engaged. Then, track your employees’ impact with robust data reporting, and give your employees visibility into that impact at any time.
You can expand your scope even further by running other advocacy programs, such as customer-to-customer referral programs, affiliate programs, and channel partner programs inside the same platform. Referral Rock is a great tool for businesses serious about leveraging all types of advocacy programs to extend their reach and build their customer or employee base.
Top 3 key features:
- Referral Rock integrates with some of the most commonly used tools in businesses today, such as the HubSpot and Salesforce CRMs, plus Mailchimp, Stripe, WordPress, ActiveCampaign, Klaviyo, Shopify, and so many more.
- Referral Rock is consistently rated as the best “value for money” advocacy software, given the sheer scope of features you get within the pricing offered to its customers and the overall maturity of the platform.
- Referral Rock reliably delivers on the promise of stellar customer service. You’ll get set up in days rather than weeks, and the team is always on hand to provide expert onboarding guidance and support – for your launch and beyond.
| Type of advocacy | Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
|
Referral (new customers), referral (new employees), ambassador, social media |
Professional: $175+/month Engage: $200+/month Enterprise plan also available |
Demo and free trial | Concierge onboarding on all plans | 4.5 out of 5 (55 reviews) |
Our take: Referral Rock is the best value-for-money software – it’s the total package at an attractive price. It’s the ideal solution for businesses keen on maximizing every opportunity to leverage referral marketing, including employee advocacy, to build your brand.
Also hugely appealing is how the team will help you set up quickly and guide you every step of the way. Users also love the template customization features and email engagement features, which are constantly being refined and improved.
Overall, Referral Rock is definitely worth looking into, regardless of the size and niche of your business, for the potential ROI you could be earning from a single platform that does it all.
Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social (formerly Bambu)
Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social is purpose-built for social engagement. Expect this tool to deliver everything you expect in a social media management platform with the additional benefit of being able to drive employee advocacy through it. Think social listening, analytics, engagement, automation, and last but not least, social collaboration as a quick overview.
Best for: Travel, hardware, retail, and education businesses already using Sprout Social tools, as this is a premium add-on; businesses that want to focus on social media advocacy
Top 3 key features:
- Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social is easy to use, set up and maintain, whether it’s for content curation, selection, scheduling, or sharing for back-end users, content creators, and social sharers. Employees can even recommend content for sharing.
- Integrates with all the major social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, and even WhatsApp Messenger.
- Gamification features such as leaderboards, and the ability to provide incentives for sharing, allows for increased employee engagement and more social shares.
| Type of advocacy | Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Social media | $249-$499+/month, custom enterprise pricing available. The employee advocacy addon incurs additional charges. | Demo and 30-day free trial | Email, phone, community hub, learning portal, educational resources | N/A |
Our take: Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social is a user-friendly and engaging software that hits all the right notes for employee advocacy as powered by social media. Users will enjoy how easy it is to use the features to share, schedule, and collaborate on content and gain insights into performance.
Some businesses may find the prices leaning too close to the higher end. Costs start at $249 per month for the Standard plan, the lowest-tiered plan. And unfortunately, the employee advocacy tool isn’t included in the main Sprout Social plans and must be purchased as an addon.
Sprout Social recommends the software as an ideal solution for the travel and hospitality, computer and hardware, retail, and education industries. If you’re outside those buckets, it might not be for you.
Oktopost
Oktopost is a social media management and employee advocacy solution created by B2B experts for the B2B community. It does everything you might expect from a social media management solution, whether it’s social listening, monitoring, engagement, or performance tracking, together with employee advocacy. Oktopost offers powerful social media monitoring and analytics tools that support content amplification and data-driven scaling. The engaging user interface and data insights are routinely rated as some of its most popular facets.
Best for: B2Bs looking to scale their social media employee advocacy
Top 3 key features:
- Oktopost integrates with some of the most commonly used marketing tools available currently, such as Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, Microsoft Teams and Power BI, Facebook, Linkedin, Google Analytics, Canva, and Zapier, to name a few.
- Gamification through leaderboards, so employee advocates have visibility into performance and are actively engaged in going the extra mile.
- Extra social media-based employee advocacy tools, like advanced post-scheduling, support for rich media content, availability of a mobile app, segmented board creation, and the ability to implement banned keywords.
| Type of advocacy | Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Social media | Not listed | Demo | Phone, contact form, help center, dedicated customer success manager, onboarding and training | 4.4 (228 reviews) |
Our take: Oktopost is a popular and user-friendly employee advocacy tool for B2B businesses. Oktopost specifically targets businesses in the technology, financial services, higher education, manufacturing sectors, and law firms.
Based on our research, a small percentage of users experience a learning curve in terms of getting to grips with how certain features work.
But the brand delivers consistently on customer service, and a dedicated customer success manager is available for support.
Information on the pricing and availability of a free trial is unavailable on the brand’s website, which can be a bummer for people who like transparency.
Hootsuite Amplify
Not to be confused with the Hootsuite social media management platform, Hootsuite Amplify is an addon for employee advocacy. Hootsuite Amplify makes it easy for your employees to share content on social media networks, amplifying your brand visibility and increasing opportunities for social selling.
Best for: Larger brands already using Hootsuite tools, as this is a premium add-on
Top 3 key features:
- The user interface has been generally reported as intuitive and easy to get around by most users making content sharing easy.
- Hootsuite Amplify is primarily a mobile-centric solution, so employees can easily build their brand on social media and stay on top of updates across departments and regions.
- Seamlessly works with the core Hootsuite platform.
| Type of advocacy | Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Social media |
$739+/month for Hootsuite (must then add Amplify employee advocacy addon, which is only available on Business and Enterprise plans) |
Demo | Help Center or connect via Facebook and Twitter for social media support, Knowledge base | 4.39 (199 reviews) |
Our take: Hootsuite Amplify has generally been rated highly by most users for its ease of use, effortless onboarding, and highly responsive customer care team. The Amplify tool can be added seamlessly to your existing Hootsuite dashboard.
While gamification features like leaderboards exist to drive employee engagement, these are available to the admins only, and not to all the users yet. Disadvantages of this software revolve largely around employees not having visibility on the leaderboards. This essentially defeats the purpose of leaderboards because employees can’t be motivated by a friendly competition they can’t see. Hootsuite is also on the expensive side, especially given that you must pay extra for the employee advocacy tool.
Ambassify
Ambassify pegs itself as the complete social sharing and engagement tool available online. You can use many different features within this software to increase employee engagement and social reach for your brand.
There’s the ability to customize descriptions and pre-define visual and copy alternatives. You can use the campaign wizard to guide you to the exact campaign required specifically for the result you’re looking for. The solution is white-label ready, so you can customize the branding to make it your own and more.
Best for: Enterprise-level businesses that want to create employee ambassadors
Top 3 key features:
- Ambassify takes pride in the fact that it’s a low-effort, intuitive, and easy-to-use but feature-rich platform.
- Aside from automated emails and push notifications, you can use SMS and WhatsApp texts to engage your employees. And if you want to verify a share, you don’t have to do it manually. The platform will automatically verify shares for you.
- Ambassify can help you share your video content natively to your LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook feeds, so you don’t have to redirect the viewer to another platform simply to view the video.
| Type of advocacy | Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Ambassador | $742+/month | Unknown | Unknown | 4.48 (44 reviews) |
Our take: Ambassify has a lot of pros going for it, like the easy user interface and the sheer amount of useful features available. You have great reporting tools, GDPR compliance, and the ability to integrate with all your favorite tech/marketing software.
The Ambassify team quickly implements customizations – but not as an out-of-the-box solution, so users end up paying for the customized features.
Also, while the analytics suite is useful, it’s not as comprehensive as some users would like. Generally, though, Ambassify has been positively reviewed, especially for the highly-responsive customer support team.
EveryoneSocial
EveryoneSocial believes passionately in making every employee socially savvy. The software platform reflects this ethos in how it’s been set up to make the process as easy and efficient as possible.
You’ll find this software the ideal solution to engage every single employee regardless of their department, whether it’s recruitment, sales, marketing, branding, communications, or employee engagement.
Best for: Mid-market to enterprise brands that want to gain new employees through social advocacy
Top 3 key features:
- With EveryoneSocial, you can build custom content streams for different departments or verticals. You can even provide access internally for your employees to wider content platforms such as TED Talks. They can then organically share what they resonate with and connect it back to your brand.
- Gamification features include competitions and leaderboards to motivate employees to share.
- Ability to add admins or moderators for your content sharing.
| Type of advocacy | Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Social media, referral (new employees) | Not listed | Demo, free trial, and free plan | Chat, Help center, dedicated client resource | 4.48 (234 reviews) |
Our take: EveryoneSocial is best suited for mid-market to enterprise brands. It’s a great tool overall for ease of sharing and the ability to customize how you use, categorize, and share your content. While EveryoneSocial works for most social media networks, it’s not currently available for LinkedIn.
Also, you may find the pay-per-seat model cumbersome if you prefer software that can be made available to everyone in your organization at a more affordable price. Some users have pointed out that the software can sometimes lag or be buggy/glitchy, especially on the mobile interface.It also can’t handle employee referrals of potential customers.
PostBeyond
PostBeyond combines the best of employee advocacy and social sharing to help you become a powerhouse employee brand. PostBeyond makes it effortless for you to discover relevant content and share it across multiple social media networks simply with the click of a button.
Best for: Enterprises wanting to mobilize employees on social media
Top 3 key features:
- Users across the board enjoy the ability to schedule and auto-queue content on PostBeyond.You can schedule posts at the beginning of the week so you’re free to manage other, more critical tasks for the remainder of the week. The Auto-queue option helps you schedule content on behalf of your busiest executives.
- Employees can sign up for the platform through an invitation link, email, or an Excel file. There are guided onboarding support options as well as support for multiple languages. Employees also have their own personalized dashboards where they can view how they’re doing performance-wise.
- You have real-time compliance, mandatory hashtags, and compliance archive features to ensure your content is always on-brand and for training purposes.
| Type of advocacy | Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Social media | $1,650+/month | Demo | Phone, chat, knowledge base | 4.64 (507 reviews) |
Our take: PostBeyond is a user-friendly tool with many features that make it an ideal solution for social-media-focused employee advocacy programs. The scheduling option is popular among users. Plus, PostBeyond integrates with major marketing software such as HubSpot, Marketo, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, Google Analytics, Slack, and more.
Disadvantages of PostBeyond include the lack of more options, such as being able to tag content prior to posting and creating a better user interface on the mobile version. It’s also extremely expensive per month compared to other options.
Haiilo
Haiilo is, first and foremost, an AI-integrated employee communications platform. It will help you create a digital home for all your employees, make content creation easy, help you implement successful social recruiting, and measure engagement through automatic pulse surveys – just to name a few of its core features.
You’ll be able to generate more leads and sales through the social selling pipeline you’ll activate on your Haiilo platform.
Best for: Larger businesses seeking to activate mobile-first employee sharing; enterprises in the healthcare, energy, financial, manufacturing, automotive, and retail industries
Top 3 key features:
- The top-rated feature on Haiilo by users is how easy it is to share content to social media networks via phones or laptops because of its mobile-first design.
- Gamification features motivate more shares and engagement, and surveys help you understand employee sentiment better.
- Haiilo doesn’t require much of a learning curve. Users have generally reported that it’s intuitive and fairly straightforward to understand.
| Type of advocacy | Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Social media, ambassador | Not listed | Demo | Contact forms, Chat, Service Desk, Knowledge Base | 4.57 (264 reviews) |
Our take: Haiilo is easy-to-use, which right off the bat makes it appealing both for employees as well as management teams. It also functions as a digital tool to unify employee communications on one platform, which means fewer silos and more team cohesiveness.
There were concerns by at least one user over deploying the on-premises installation as there was a lag in getting on board with cloud updates. It also appears difficult to share a large number of photos and videos at a time.
Haiilo is ideal for use cases across healthcare, energy, financial services, manufacturing, automotive, media, tech, and retail industries.
GaggleAMP
GaggleAMP is a powerful internal communications software that doubles as an effective advocacy tool. GaggleAMP’s solution will help your brand build brand awareness, enable the sales team and empower internal communications across the company.
It will also help your HR teams drive workplace engagement while providing a means to attract and retain top talent and increase personal branding opportunities.
Best for: Medium to larger businesses in the computer software and IT industries, who want to mobilize social media advocacy
Top 3 key features:
- GaggleAMP offers a choice of over 50 different actions that employees can take across social media networks to boost brand visibility, such as post comments, follows, retweets, shares, and subscribes.
- One-click advocacy that makes it easy for your employees to share content without slacking on the job across platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams, so there are no clunks in the wheels ever.
- GaggleAMP integrates with many of the most widely used social media and tech platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Hootsuite, Pinterest, Marketo, Oracle, and Google Analytics.
| Type of advocacy | Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Social media | $300+/month | Demo and free trial | Support center, knowledge base, email, phone | 4.43 (268 reviews) |
Our take: While GaggleAMP can be used across industries, it’s found the most adoption among Computer Software and IT services providers. On the plus side, the platform connects to all the major social media networks, although user feedback suggests that it may need to keep up with the features updates on the platforms themselves. For example, GaggleAMP doesn’t work for LinkedIn Carousels.
The GaggleAMP team appears to be highly responsive to feedback, and much of the feedback has been included in development updates.
Social Seeder
Social Seeder is an ambassador marketing software that helps you run employee ambassador, influencer, and advocacy programs. You can identify, recruit, segment, and engage with your ambassadors to build highly-targeted campaigns.
You can also monitor the performance of your ambassadors or employee advocates, in this case, every step of the way.
Best for: Bigger businesses that want to turn employees into social influencers
Top 3 key features:
- Social Seeder set out to make their software easy to use, and the software scores highly on this aspect on review sites. Users generally find the software’s interface easy to navigate.
- The software makes it possible to cover the entire life cycle of advocate management, from recruitment to monitoring performance and conversion tracking. The software also has engagement features in the form of surveys and polls.
- Responsive and knowledgeable customer support,including support for customizations to fit your organization’s needs.
| Type of advocacy | Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Social media, ambassador | Not listed | Demo available | Contact form, email, technical onboarding, chat, workshop, and coaching on the Enterprise plan | 4.58 (15 reviews) |
Our take: Social Seeder is worth considering if you’re looking for full cycle advocacy/ambassador management inside one tool. In addition to tracking, you can run targeted campaigns and analyze how well your campaign is doing.
Social Seeder also has great customer support and is responsive to tweaks you may need to bring the software up to your required specifications. Pricing isn’t transparent, though, so it’s hard to know how much you’ll need to pay per month or per year upfront.
ClearView Social
ClearView Social’s core USP is its simplicity of design and use. Easy prompts and email reminders make it seem effortless for your employees to share content with the click of a button across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Best for: Mid-market to enterprise-level businesses that want to create more employee social sharing
Top 3 key features:
- ClearView Social’s smart scheduling algorithm called PeakTime™ leverages AI to identify the best times to post content on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to achieve maximum reach. The platform will schedule posts based on the unique best times for individual platforms.
- The Virtual Assistant feature posts content on the employee’s behalf without them needing to sign off on each one. Employees can toggle back and forth between keeping the feature ON or OFF as needed.
- ClearView Social also supports auto-liking employee shares through company accounts. Top posts can be reshared automatically as well to amplify their reach.
| Type of advocacy | Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Social media | Not listed | Demo | Email, phone, Help guide, Education (knowledge base) | 4.61 (219 reviews) |
Our take: ClearView Social is a great tool for mid-market and enterprise-level businesses to leverage employee ambassadorship for social reach. Overall, the solution is rated highly for its social media-centric ambassador features.
Still, a small percentage of users would like ClearView Social to develop more customization and features for posting and scheduling, such as being able to change the language based on location or having photos pulled into posts consistently.
Sociabble
Unlike many of the other employee advocacy tools mentioned on this list, Sociabble didn’t start off as a social media management software. It was the creative brainchild of a team of bootstrappers who wanted to create the ideal solution for businesses to inform and engage employees. At the same time, engaged employees often make the best ambassadors.
Best for: Bigger businesses with large teams, who want to turn employees into social ambassadors
Top 3 key features:
- Sociabble’s content is personalized to each employee and organized into channels thematically. Plus, it’s easily shareable to the employee’s social media platforms with just one click. Employees can even share third-party curated content related to your vertical.
- Gamification is another aspect that Sociabble scores highly on. You can use several different tools to keep your employees engaged and motivated to share, such as leaderboards, quizzes, polls, badges, and so on.
- Sociabble also allows you to extend your software’s use to preferred partners, external influencers, and even your brand’s biggest fans, who have a large social following.
| Type of advocacy | Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Social media, ambassador | Not listed | Demo | Email, phone, resources (knowledge base) | 4.7 (257 reviews) |
Our take: Sociabble delivers on the promise of being a highly engaging platform to attract and retain your employees’ attention. While the platform has all the expected features, you can customize it further to drill down or drill up. It’s a solution worth considering if you operate with bigger teams so you have enough resources to manage all of its moving parts.
Sociabble’s customer service is consistently rated high, whether it’s considering and implementing user feedback or their in-house consulting and support. A mobile-first solution, Sociabble works just as effectively across desktops, display screens, intranets, and social media networks. It’s another solution without transparent pricing, though, so it’s likely on the expensive side.
Employee advocacy software FAQ
Still have questions about choosing the best employee advocacy software for your needs? We’ve got you covered.
What is employee advocacy?
An advocate is someone willing to publicly recommend or endorse a brand or product. Employee advocates function in exactly the same way, except that they’re devoted to the cause of promoting their own company. The company benefits from a marketing perspective because employee messaging is more likely to be trusted and seen as genuine over random brand advertising.
- Employee advocacy occurs every time an employee recommends your brand or talks positively about it to the people on their network – friends, family, followers, and potential job candidates.
- Typically, in employee advocacy, your employees share content around your product, your company, and the latest company news and updates via their social media platforms.
- Your employees help you sell your products and services by providing trustworthy recommendations.
What are the key features of employee advocacy software?
The main employee advocacy software features are focused on engagement, tracking, and rewards.
- Use the software’s built-in marketing tools to encourage employees to share your brand online using their referral links or social media channels.
- Track your employees’ sharing and measure the ROI of their efforts through your software.
- Generate a bird’s eye view of performance through analytics and reporting functions to understand what’s working well and what needs to be fixed in your advocacy program.
- Set up single-tier incentives (one fixed reward) or multi-tier incentives (the higher the returns, the bigger the rewards) for your employees through the software.
- These incentives will be awarded when the employee completes a pre-determined action, whether that’s generating qualified leads, sales, or conversions.
What to look for in employee advocacy software?
Use these factors to help you identify the best employee advocacy software for your needs:
Integrations
On a very basic level, the employee advocacy software should allow for easy integrations with your existing marketing and sales stacks. You probably don’t want to switch back and forth between multiple systems to compare and contrast data. Does your advocacy software integrate with internal communications like Slack, marketing tools like Salesforce, your HR system, social media management platform, finance and payroll, your mobile app, and so on?
Automation
The best employee advocacy software should have all the core functions of an employee advocacy program automated. Think beyond analytics dashboards to the automation of rewards payouts and employee engagement. How easy would it be to promote your brand’s latest updates, notifications, or updated incentives using the software? At the same time, there should be enough flexibility to customize how you want the program to run.
Analytics and tracking
Speaking of analytics, your employee advocacy software should help you record and analyze performance to help you optimize and streamline your marketing activities for the best results.
The best employee advocacy software will allow you to generate trackable referral links that employees can share directly via email or social media accounts (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.). Trackability allows you to understand who’s generating sales for you, by how much, and reward them per how well they’re doing, all in real-time.
Gamification
Some employee advocacy solutions provide additional marketing tools in the form of gamification. This means that you can use the software to generate competitions (like creating leaderboards, for example) to encourage social selling by your employees. Higher rewards for higher sales/leads can be extra motivating.
Authentic sharing
Another distinctly advantageous feature that some employee advocacy platforms have is allowing employees to share content more authentically. So, they can share relevant content without adhering strictly to an authorized script or pre-written template.
This can, of course, be a lot better for attracting organic reach because naturally shared content looks more authentic and genuine. With some platforms, you can only go so far as having your employees share brand content or company news and updates in a pre-approved format replete with employer branding and rules of engagement.
What are the types of employee advocacy programs?
Your brand employee advocacy software should be flexible enough to help you run variations of your core employee advocacy program depending on your targets. There are a few different types of programs you can leverage depending on your audience segmentation:
- Employee-to-customer referral programs: an employee referral program where your employees refer new customers to you through various social networks. This program type is typically open to all employees across the organization. The combined social reach of your employees means that this option is an effective way to get your marketing messaging across with minimal spending.
- Employee-to-employee referral programs: a referral program subtype where your employees function as brand advocates to attract the right employees for your open positions. This employee referral program is generally open to all employees except for the recruiters or direct reporting managers managing the specific vacancy.
- Employee ambassador programs: The employee brand ambassador program subtype is generally similar to employee referral programs, except the employee advocates undergo formal training before serving as ambassadors.
- Social media employee advocacy programs: In social media employee advocacy programs, employees actively talk about your brand through social media posts, essentially drumming up brand awareness and interest through word-of-mouth social sharing. They’re extending your social media marketing to their networks. In other words, they help support the amplification of company content.
Conclusion
Employee advocacy software tools are all the rage right now, and with good reason. Leveraging employee advocacy can boost your business by leaps and bounds, provided you have software to help you manage all the moving parts and scale effortlessly. Use this guide to help you understand your non-negotiable requirements, and then read through our reviews to help you decide the best employee advocacy software for your needs.
