LinkedIn Elevate shut lanugo as a standalone tool when in December 2020. Overly since, some of its features have been integrated into LinkedIn Visitor Pages. Some — but not all.
Three years later, employee sponsorship is as important as overly – both within LinkedIn and wideness other social platforms. LinkedIn’s sponsorship options built into Visitor Pages are a unconfined place to start, but they offer limited functionality compared to defended employee sponsorship tools.
Here’s everything you need to know if your organization is looking for an volitional to LinkedIn Elevate to manage employee sponsorship and proffer the social reach of your brand.
What was LinkedIn Elevate?
LinkedIn Elevate was an employee sponsorship product provided by LinkedIn. It was a paid product with robust content curation and analytics features. Page admins could use it to hand-pick content for employees to reshare and hands track the success of their employee sponsorship programs with detailed analytics.
And it was working well for the companies that used it. LinkedIn reported that LinkedIn Elevate users shared 5x increasingly content than previously. This unliable them to influence 3x increasingly Visitor Page views, 2x increasingly Page followers, and 4x increasingly job views.
However, LinkedIn Elevate was sunsetted as a standalone product in 2020. Many of the features were migrated over to Visitor Pages, where they became self-ruling to use. That ways many LinkedIn Visitor Pages now have some vital employee sponsorship functionality misogynist at no cost. But the truth is that this embedded self-ruling version is not a well-constructed employee sponsorship solution.
#1 Social Media Tool
Before we go any further, let’s define employee advocacy. In the social marketing context, employee sponsorship ways that employees share your social content with their own networks to proffer the reach of your messaging.
It intuitively makes sense that you would want your employees to be brand evangelists. You want them to love the visitor they work for and share those positive feelings with their social contacts.
Why do you need employee advocacy?
There are nonflexible numbers to when up the importance of employee advocacy.
First up is trust. Edelman’s yearly Trust Barometer unceasingly finds that people are increasingly likely to trust regular people than CEOs. In the 2023 edition, Edelman found that 63% of people trust their neighbors. And 61% trust people in their local community.
Compare that to the 48% who trust CEOs and the 47% who trust journalists. It’s well-spoken that your message is much increasingly likely to be taken at squatter value when it comes from a familiar squatter (or someone in your existing social network).
Here’s an interesting twist on those stats. While only 48% of people trust CEOs in general, 64% trust “my CEO.” That is, people are much increasingly likely to trust the CEO of the visitor where they work. A CEO message crafted for employees and then shared on to the broader public gets an uneaten layer of trust built in.
But the most important way that employee sponsorship contributes to trademark marketing is the sheer reach of your employees’ networks and the power of their social actions.
For example, Hootsuite’s benchmarking data shows that in December 2023, the stereotype retail trademark had:
- 8K followers on Twitter
- 17K followers on Instagram
- 23K fans on Facebook, and
- 3.3K followers on LinkedIn
Of course, there’s some overlap, since most people follow brands on multiple platforms. But you moreover know that organic content no longer reaches all of your followers. The number of people who unquestionably see your content might be much larger than your number of followers. Then again, it might moreover be much lower. (It all depends on the algorithms.)
When your employees share your content with their personal networks, it increases the potential regulars pool in two ways.
First, some of your employees’ followers will see their posts well-nigh your brand. This is the most obvious reach extender.
But second, the social whoopee of sharing itself shows the algorithm a connection between your trademark and your employee. Over time, this makes algorithms increasingly likely to suggest your content to your employees’ extended networks. This can proffer the reach of all your posts, plane those your employees don’t share directly.
Think well-nigh the potential reach if each of your employees has only a couple hundred followers per platform.
The plane largest news? You can create content for employees to share on platforms where you don’t have much of a trademark presence. Or plane platforms where you have no trademark worth at all.
Lacking the time or upkeep to maintain a presence on multiple social platforms emerged as the top snooping in Hootsuite’s 2024 Social Trends Report. Employee sponsorship can get the message out without your social team having to be everywhere.
All of this leads to increasingly trademark awareness, increasingly web visits, and increasingly inbound leads. And, guess what? It moreover helps your employees whop in their careers. How? By helping to establish their own points and expertise.
Phew: That was a lot.
The TL;DR version is this. When employees share brand-approved content on their social networks, they exponentially proffer the reach of your social content. For increasingly on setting up an employee sponsorship program, trammels out our six-step strategy guide.
Why do you need an employee sponsorship platform?
If your employees love their jobs, they’ll likely talk well-nigh your company. That’s true whether or not you have an employee sponsorship program in place.
But using the right tools has a couple of key advantages:
- First, you can create brand-approved social content for your employees to share. You ensure it aligns with your wayfarers messaging. Once you post it in your sponsorship tool, it’s ready for employees to customize and share with just a couple of clicks.
Consistent trademark messaging is important for all brands. But this is particularly crucial for organizations working in regulated industries. An employee sponsorship tool that integrates with your compliance process is a must!
- You can customize content for variegated employee groups. For example, your salespeople probably want to share variegated content than your developers — plane if they’re talking well-nigh the same products.
- You can wangle analytics related to your employee sponsorship program. That ways you can test, track, plan, and understand what works. You can moreover create contests or leaderboards. These interactive tools encourage your employees to share more.
3 LinkedIn Elevate alternatives
Whether you’re a previous LinkedIn Elevate consumer or you’re new to employee advocacy, here are the weightier tools for 2024.
1. Hootsuite Amplify
Hootsuite Amplify makes it extremely easy for employees to share pre-approved content. They can wilt simple trademark advocates, or personalize content for thought leadership pieces. Amplify caters to all digital skill levels. It’s easy to onboard employees wideness the organization.
Hootsuite Amplify is misogynist for both mobile and web users. It helps employees share your message on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Based on the settings you choose, they can plane share to other platforms, like WhatsApp and SMS.
The easy-to-use admin tools indulge you to customize permissions and tags. Employees can stay unfluctuating to the stories and news they superintendency well-nigh most, resonating wideness variegated departments, divisions and regions.
Within Amplify, you can moreover create an internal communications feed. This can be used to:
- reinforce your culture
- highlight thought leadership
- reward your most passionate employee advocates
- share visitor announcements
You can moreover integrate Amplify with the internal communications tools you once use, like Microsoft Teams and Slack.
For organizations in regulated industries, Amplify removes barriers to social sharing by integrating with ProofPoint, a leading social compliance tool. When risk is mediated, employees finger empowered to share their work (and work life) on social.
Since it’s integrated into Hootsuite, Amplify moreover gives admins and employees wangle to Hootsuite’s built-in AI tools for generating content ideas and adapting captions. And, of course, Amplify includes expensive analytics, so you can monitor the top stories and content shared by your organization and track the ROI of your sponsorship program.
2. LinkedIn’s My Visitor tab
The components of LinkedIn Elevate that were folded into Visitor Pages now live on your organization’s My Visitor tab. It’s an internal communications space for employees only.
Within the My Visitor tab, admins can post organic and curated content for employees to share with their own networks. This is two-way amplification: Employees can share recommended visitor content, and visitor admins can recommend employees’ content for others to share.
There’s moreover a section for trending coworker content, where employees can interact with content from all their coworkers, whether or not they are directly unfluctuating on LinkedIn.
However, there are no seated sponsorship tools here for Facebook or Instagram, so content can only be shared within LinkedIn or to X (formerly Twitter). This is a significant limitation, expressly for B2C brands.
Note The My Visitor tab is only misogynist for Pages with 200 employees or more, as listed under visitor size.
3. GaggleAMP
GaggleAMP is a standalone employee sponsorship tool. Your employees connect their social channels directly to GoogleAMP, rather than to your existing social media management platform.
When your visitor admin posts new content, employees can get a push notification on the mobile app, or they can get an email rewording of new content. It has seated leaderboards and content functionality to encourage sharing. Employees can moreover be rewarded for liking or otherwise engaging with trademark content.