You are always trying to find different ways to promote your event; from working with your event community, to reaching out to sponsors and speakers. What about using your own employees and event team? How can you find an easy way to get them involved in the promotion? And what does that mean for your event?
Employee advocacy is starting to take the spotlight in the content world, and rightfully so as employees are the biggest marketing assets that companies have. While your company's focus may be on LinkedIn and Twitter, your employees could be on a plethora of new and different social sites to increase your reach. This gives you the opportunity to venture into new social sites, without having your marketing and social media team spending any time nurturing new communities. People are also more apt to listen to people they know versus a company online.
There are many tools out there that can help you get started with employee advocacy, but we have two of our favorites to help you get your event out to a new audience.
Bambu
From the creators of the ever popular social media automation tool Sprout Social, Bambu is their latest release. Bambu is an advocacy platform that gives employees an easy way to share curated content across their social platforms. In both a desktop and mobile version, employees have two easy ways to share depending on how they normally use their social media.
Your team of contributors can curate content from across the web that may contain relevant news stories for your team to share. You can also share your own content; that means blogs, websites, registration pages, press releases, or anything else that you want your employees to know about and spread to their community. You can choose how long this story will be available on the app as well. For example, if you send out a registration link that closes in a week, you can have the story disappear from the timeline after a week so people are not sharing a link that goes nowhere.
The stories are sent out via an email digest to your employees. You can choose the frequency of the emails and then employees can read and share directly. They can share from LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook directly from the app. With a canned message created by you, they can immediately publish or put their own spin on it.
For events, this tool is extremely beneficial if you want to get your entire company involved in promoting your event. With little effort on their part, they can share a registration link in one click. If you have a particularly popular keynote speaker that was recently quoted on a big media site, you can share with your event team for a bigger incentive to get people to register. The options are limitless!
Sociabble
Sociabble was created by Brainsonic, a digital media provider and software editor based out of France. Developing a range of software solutions for communication, employee and social media engagement, Sociabble is a unique entity with the ability to advocate in 4 different ways. They have an offering for employees, brands, events and a social wall.
You can curate and create content directly on Sociabble through social media streams and RSS feeds. It even allows certain advocates to submit third party content to share with other social advocates. As an administrator, you can flag content or put it into a draft form before you distribute to your whole team. With a feed that looks similar to Scoop.it or Feedly, it is a one stop shop for employees to find out everything that is going on with your company or event.
Sociabble for events gives event marketers the ability to engage attendees before, during and after their events. The solution is customized for each client and works with what your goals are. You can choose to market your events through your current employee advocates or implement their Social Wall to drive activity during the event. You can integrate your social wall directly into your event website which acts as the go to place for all the information on the web about your event.
Sociabble has everything that you would be looking for as an event marketer in terms of social media content for your events. Being a fully customizable solution, this is ideal for teams who have a little more to spend.
In the end, either solution would help to get your employee advocacy program off the ground. Just make sure to set guidelines for posting and that your teams are really pushing out the content! Visit etouches.com to see how their event management platform can assist you in the logistics of event planning.
