As people look to their trusted personal networks to discover new products, services and brands that fit with their lifestyles, the role of the brand advocate has never been more important. Smart companies are turning to some of their most engaged advocates—their own teams—to help amplify brand reach and increase leads and conversions.
Employee advocacy programs are steadily on the rise and becoming an integrated part of brands’ social strategies. A recent report finds 25% growth in employee advocacy program adoption and more than 30% growth in social selling in the past year for organizations with an advocacy program in place. Those that don’t have a program in place are now prioritizing advocacy to help amplify their brand and spread their reach, as well as share internal communications.
Recognizing this trend early on, Sprout launched Bambu by Sprout Social creating a suite of products that ensure your brand and its advocates have an authentic voice across social networks and profiles. Today, we’re excited to take an important step in bringing our products together as we integrate parts of Sprout Social and Bambu to foster a more data-driven approach to your social programs.
Introducing the Advocacy Report, Powered by Bambu
The initial integration of Bambu and Sprout means teams can readily access data to evaluate how social marketing and employee advocacy efforts work together for a more holistic social strategy.
As a first step, advocacy metrics from Bambu’s reports are now part of Sprout’s reporting suite through the Advocacy Report. Use the report to analyze the impact employees have on your brand awareness and how they are sharing curated content across their personal social networks.
Social teams can now pair the Advocacy Report with the Twitter Profiles, Facebook Pages and LinkedIn Pages reports to benchmark how content shared across brand profiles was then shared to their employees’ social profiles.
Transparent Measurement Across Teams
Sprout and Bambu users will seamlessly be able to access data from both platforms in one place, which means they can benchmark metrics from their advocacy program alongside organic brand metrics to inform strategic decisions across the organization.
Collaboration, from communication directors to social media managers, enables trend discovery across brand and employee social data to understand what content best resonates with given communities. Using the Advocacy Report, the social media manager identifies users with the most shares on their company’s branded content. They can then report back to the communications director on how the social efforts of employees impacted their brand’s social accounts.
From Products to Platform
Today’s update is the first step in bringing teams together across Sprout and Bambu implementations. Whether your focus is social media management, brand communications, building community or general marketing—surfacing data across disciplines provides a more holistic view and integrated approach to social analytics, engagement, publishing and advocacy.
If your team is using Sprout, but is unfamiliar with our Bambu solution, we’d love to show you more. Stay tuned for more updates and be sure to let us know any feedback!