LinkedIn announced earlier this year that they will be sunsetting LinkedIn Elevate, its standalone employee advocacy app, merging it with Company Pages and offering the solution for free.
With LinkedIn’s deadline of December 2020 to sunset the entire app, what exactly does this mean for current companies racing to find an employee advocacy solution? As we all know, you get what you pay for and free doesn’t always mean better.
If you find yourself in this boat, let me start with this, begin exploring your options now.
Don’t get me wrong. I love LinkedIn. It has been and always will be a fantastic social media network that was architected to help people connect with one another and find jobs.
It is a critical channel for any social employee advocacy strategy, but at the end of the day, you do not want your valued employees spending their day on LinkedIn and eventually networking out of their roles.
As an employee advocacy expert who has worked alongside many enterprise teams to roll out seamless and successful advocacy programs, build RFPs and grow advocacy company-wide, I’d like to share a few tips on what has made all the difference in their approach and success with employee advocacy.
Choosing the alternative to LinkedIn Elevate
This seems like a no-brainer, but with so many platform providers out there, it can be challenging to find a strong fit.
As you begin your due diligence in searching, pay close attention to solutions that play nicely with your current martech stack, are seamlessly connected to your social media management platform and act as a complete social media management suite for B2B. This will help make sure employee advocacy is part of the day-to-day social media management workflow without needing to use different platforms to create content or translate B2C metrics into B2B language.
In addition, the data from your social employee advocacy program should not live in a silo. Your platform provider should be able to pump advocacy data across your martech stack giving you the opportunity to measure and optimize your entire advocacy program.
Not being able to measure real business impact from your employee advocacy program would be a major lost opportunity in growing your company’s business and justifying the investment in social.
Creating Content That Resonates
Today’s B2B buyers trust people, not brands. And with the social media marketing landscape changing at such a fast pace, brands must build employee advocacy programs around trust and transparency.
As Andrew Davies, Head of Global Digital Marketing at Capco, put it:
“When our employee advocates share content through social media, it always resonates much further and generates many more engagements than our corporate feeds. Today, people are far more likely to interact with content when it’s shared by someone they know.“
Your employee advocacy platform provider should give you the opportunity to fully optimize your content strategy by giving your employees the chance to drive the content bus and not just get hit by it.
This means making sure any suggested content from your employees is heard and distributed to maximize buy-in and help your content go further.
Tracking Metrics That Matter
As often shared with my customers, you can’t improve what you cannot measure and if you can’t measure a program, then why waste employee time sharing content?
Whether it’s boosting brand awareness or generating leads, exploring alternatives to LinkedIn Elevate App means examining your current program goals. Your platform provider should be able to work with you to map your goals and act as your trusted partner in the success of your program.
For most B2B marketers, they have shared, lead generation is important to their advocacy program knowing that untapped potential buyers are on social where you and your employees can reach, engage and eventually convert them.
A People Database can assist in determining what advocacy content drives pipeline growth turning your advocates’ audience into leads.
The potential is limitless and since a B2B advocacy program must provide metrics that measure true business impact and ROI, this is a powerful component to look for in vendors.
