LinkedIn Elevate Alternative: 7 Things to Look for in a Replacement

The fact that LinkedIn Elevate is shutting down is no news to anybody. Some of the functionality will be merged with LinkedIn Pages, but it will be far more limited than that of Elevate. This is why many companies are now looking for an appropriate LinkedIn Elevate alternative.

If you have been using LinkedIn Elevate, you have probably realized the value employee advocacy provides for your business. A well-implemented advocacy program raises brand awareness, improves customer satisfaction, saves money in marketing spending, and, ultimately, grows your business.

For example, in less than a year, employees of KPMG Sweden achieved 420% ROI through their employee advocacy initiative.

Why Organizations Are Looking for a LinkedIn Elevate Alternative?

No wonder that with LinkedIn Elevate shutting down, many companies are not ready to limit themselves to just Pages’ functionality and are looking into other employee advocacy solutions.

For those organizations that have already experienced the power of brand advocacy, relying on LinkedIn Pages to deliver the same results is just not realistic.

The ones that do decide to go down this road will sacrifice their analytics, leaderboard, and controls. Even though this may be an option that will save money, it will not meet the needs of professional organizations that are both highly risk averse and value safety and control over saving a few bucks.

The tricky part here is choosing the right solution. The one you would stick with. It’s hard enough to add a new tool to an existing tech stack, so nobody wants to go through that several times.

Here is what you should look for when choosing software to make your advocacy initiative an even bigger success in 2021.

📚 Learn more about how employee advocacy can help you in your social recruiting and employer branding activities.

What to Consider When Looking for a LinkedIn Elevate Replacement?

Finding a LinkedIn Elevate alternative should be a well-though process. If you are already considering a replacement, make sure that you search for a solution that offers more features and that can bring your employee advocacy efforts to a whole new level.

Your LinkedIn Elevate alternative should enable you to generate even higher returns from your employee advocacy initiatives.

💡 If you are in the process of searching for a suitable alternative, we have a comprehensive guide for choosing the right employee advocacy software for your business.

1. Ability to reach every employee with personalized content

When we talk to our friends, we talk about things we feel passionate about. And that’s what social media is all about – in essence, it’s just us talking to our close circles. So it’s fair to assume you would rather share things close to your own work instead of your companies’ global or regional updates.

And what does that mean for your business results? Better conversions! Let’s say your marketing manager shares a blog about marketing automation – it’s quite likely that their connections will find it more relevant and, thus, convert better. In fact, your employees’ connections are 7x more likely to convert into a paying customer when they see the right content.

That’s where granular user segmentation plays a key role. Instead of sharing content with your employees based on their regions, dig deeper and filter the content your employees receive by role, department, location, language, and more. People are happy to share content they see value in, so by catering to each employee’s interests you yield better business results.

Haiilo has a proven track record in serving enterprise customers with thousands of employees like Amazon and L’Oreal. By using Haiilo our customers ensure each employee only sees content he/she finds relevant, which, in turn, leads to high user engagement and better conversions. A multinational financial services company Rabobank has gotten 97% user engagement on their employee advocacy program and 865k euros saved in advertising in only one year with Haiilo.

2. Ease of sharing

Another important thing to consider when looking for a LinkedIn Elevate replacement is the ease of content sharing.

The smartphone has changed the way people expect to communicate and be communicated with in their personal lives. On average, people spend 3,7 hours every day on mobile devices and social media is mostly consumed on mobile. It’s only natural to expect that your content has better chances of being shared if your employees first see it on their smartphones, too.

It goes beyond that, we’re all lazy – we’re used to social media platforms where it literally takes one click to share the content you like with your friends. So why would we make it more complicated for our employees?

Haiilo is the #1 mobile-first employee communications, engagement and advocacy platform. The app puts the most important and engaging content front and center with its featured posts highlights, while sharing to as many channels as you want takes one click only. Haiilo saves you the trouble of choosing the best times for posting with Smart Share, a feature that automatically schedules your posts for the most popular times on social media. We also provide an option to customize the look of the app to adhere to your brand guidelines.

📚Read on: What People Like to Share on Social Media  [INFOGRAPHIC]

3. Capacity to consolidate your marketing tools’ stack

If you work in marketing, you probably have way too many tools by now, so it’s hard to bring yourself to adding yet another one to the mix. That’s why it’s so important to seek out tools that consolidate your existing marketing stack.

The same goes for corporate employees – too much information, too many channels.  In fact,  36% of managers say they’re suffering from poor health due to the excessive amount of information they have to process at work.

Haiilo helps you bring your marketing tech stack together. You can easily pull content from your existing comms channels (Sharepoint, Hubspot, WordPress, etc.) and deliver it in a “ready-to-share” format to the relevant employees. You can also integrate Haiilo into internal comms tools so that your employees get updates on the platform they prefer: Yammer, Slack, Teams, Chatter, and many more.

This means that the content finds people where they are, and it can also be shared right on the spot, saving the moderators time in content production and the users – the time in sharing.

📚Read on: What is Advocacy Marketing and How to Get It Right.

4. Integrations that simplify onboarding and keep employee records up to date

It’s hard enough to get your family members to start using Zoom for group calls, let alone get thousands of employees to start using a new platform. Your CIO has probably had enough work in 2020 with setting up tools for remote work, so let’s make sure you don’t add more difficult integrations to their to-do list.

Another reason to seriously look into the integrations an employee advocacy tool provides is user management. Having employee turnover is a burden on organizations of all sizes, let alone those of thousands of employees. Ensuring new employees have all accesses they need and are receiving all the relevant information is a great challenge for the enterprise companies. This is why it’s important to look for software that can easily pull the necessary data from your existing user management systems.

Haiilo has integrations with Oracle, Azure, G-suite, Workday, and others. It automatically grants or removes access whenever an employee joins or leaves the company, and assigns employees to the information channels based on their role, location, and other criteria.

Our single sign-on also saves your staff the hassle of maintaining a bunch of usernames and passwords. It enables employees to log in using their existing company accounts in order to maximize engagement and to make the onboarding process smooth.

5. Reach beyond LinkedIn

There’s no doubt that LinkedIn is the go-to platform for sharing professional content. But it’s more than likely that you also use other social media channels for promoting your products and services. Many B2C companies prioritize Facebook and Instagram for advertising, and rightfully so. Just the amount of users is impressive: Facebook has over 2.2 billion active users, compared to LinkedIn’s 610 million.

What comes to professional content, LinkedIn is considered to be the #1 choice, but it doesn’t mean the other social media channels should be disregarded. Therefore, your LinkedIn Elevate alternative should enable your employees to share the company’s content on more than just LinkedIn.

According to the Pew Research Center, U.S.-based Twitter users have more education and more income than the general U.S. population. So if you are looking to target corporate workers with professional content, Twitter might be a very logical addition to LinkedIn many companies miss out on.

With Haiilo you can share content to a variety of channels: from LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Stories, and Twitter all the way to WeChat and Xing.

📚Read on: Top Communications Channels to Consider for Your Business.

6. Gamification that really gets employees involved

After all, your employee advocacy program is about getting people to share your content, isn’t it? That’s why many employee advocacy platforms have a gamification component to them. It’s that nice little competition part, that encourages your employees to share more content and possibly even get some perks for it.

Gamification of an employee advocacy program also ensures that your employees get recognition for their brand ambassadorship. And there’s no doubt that recognition is the special sauce that keeps your employees engaged. A study conducted by Harvard Business Review found that 72% of employees say recognition given for high performers has a significant impact on employee engagement.

However, the last thing you want is your employees spamming their network with irrelevant messages just to get points. What marketers want to achieve with their employee advocacy programs is to make sure the company updates are shared with a personal touch and get noticed by people who are likely to find them relevant, engage and possibly convert into a customer, job applicant, brand ambassador – you name it.

This is why we introduced HaiiloScore – the most advanced scoring system in the market, that values quality shares over quantity. The amount of reshares, reactions (summary of likes and comments), and clicks during the last 6 months contributes to the overall score. Your employees have better insight into how their posts are performing and have the ability to become true opinion leaders in their circles.

7. Analytics that give you actionable insights on how to impact your key business goals

When evaluating the success of your advocacy program, you should strive to go beyond looking at metrics like shares, clicks and reactions. To connect your advocacy program to the overall strategy of the organization, you need to be able to take action on your data and understand how it’s contributing to the bottom line metrics of the business.

It’s not about asking what is happening, it’s about understanding why it is happening and what we can do to improve.

That’s what Haiilo’s Workforce Insights analytics solution provides. For example, Haiilo allows you to move past measuring how many clicks your content received on social media. It allows you to segment your data and get answers to questions like which department is creating the most engagement, which content type should I be providing to each region or even which employee drove the most form submissions.

Likewise, you can use Haiilo to measure and attribute job applicants and successful hires to your advocacy program, making it more than just a way of getting eyeballs on your content. Being able to answer questions like these with the data enables you to connect your activities to bottom-line business goals such as revenue and employee retention.

In addition, Haiilo provides A.I.-powered insights that help you discover relevant information about your advocacy program. This ensures that even when you don’t know exactly what to look for, Haiilo will deliver those actionable insights to you at the click of a button.

Now you are all set for a successful employee advocacy software hunt! Companies like KPMG, DHL and Salesforce have already gone through their selection processes and decided to go with Haiilo. Here’s what Marissa Kraines from Salesforce said about their selection process:

Looking for a Powerful LinkedIn Elevate Alternative?

If you have already witnessed the power of employee advocacy in improving your marketing, sales, and employer branding initiatives, you are probably looking for an adequate LinkedIn Elevate replacement.

As seen in this blog, Haiilo is a comprehensive employee advocacy software that empowers employees to be your best brand ambassadors.

Its powerful analytics enables organizations to gain valuable insights for improvement and tie employee advocacy to specific business goals and outcomes. Its integrations with your current tech stack makes the entire process more streamlined and simplified. And its gamification features make advocacy fun and engaging, resulting in higher user adoption rates.

If you are looking to empower your employees to be your best brand ambassadors book a demo!