person dressed up in a hot dog costume promoting 25-cent hot dog wednesdays

Some 10 million users and brands reportedly use Hootsuite to manage their social media. Now the Vancouver, British Columbia-based provider wants them and other to become brand advocates — and all they have to do is use a new mobile app. 

Hootsuite debuts its mobile employee advocacy application, Hootsuite Amplify, today. It claims it makes it easier for employees to share and consume their company's content on social channels. 

“Employees want to actively contribute to an organization’s success,” Ryan Holmes, CEO of 1,000-employee Hootsuite, said in a statement. “Amplify makes it easy for employees to share approved content with their own social networks, empowering them to be advocates who are engaged and connected with their company.”

screenshot of the hootsuite amplify employee advocacy platform

When an organization has news and content they want to publicize externally, employees can use the Hootsuite Amplify mobile app to share that content across their social networks. The University of Michigan was one of the pilot clients. They wanted to make their alumni ambassadors of the university.

For most enterprises, getting employees to share social content is probably a struggle. Matt Switzer, vice president of partnerships and corporate development at Hootsuite, said the company's larger enterprise clients have an average of about 5,000 employees — with a five-person social team.

Why not leverage the other 4,995? Why not make them brand ambassadors? 

"Why can we not galvanize these people to get the word out?" Switzer asked. "And that is exactly what this product is built to do. When the core team pushes out content to social channels, people will get notifications. They can react to get knowledge or push out the content in their social channels. It's way beyond what the social team can do on its own."

Tired Tactics

matt switzer of hootsuite headshot

Switzer said many enterprises find themselves pushing out social content but with a declining organic reach. Companies do things to push employees to promote content, like "Tweet cheats," emails with suggested tweets to share. 

But that's not championing employees to become brand advocates. And it's certainly not a user-friendly or easy way to help employees share company content.

"We've seen and heard so many different ways for people to try to generate home-spun advocate solutions that are tough," Switzer said. "We've gone to the next step."

Hootsuite officials said the new mobile app will help enterprises:

  • Boost awareness of brand, product and social responsibility campaign
  • Increase employee engagement, happiness and retention
  • Measure and optimize team participation, content performance and social reach

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Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic License Title image by photojim.