Firstup vs. Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social

Firstup is a well-suited solution for companies that would like to spread brand awareness and get employees to be their number one ambassadors. Employees like to share/brag about the company they work for so why not use them as a driving force in spreading brand awareness!

Incentivized

It's a good fit for our recruiters because they are always looking for good info about our organization to share. It's a small but engaged group that takes advantage of having a niche topic and team. It also works well for huge company news, such as winning an award. Items that all employees know about and a large percentage of them are excited about perform best. Niche topics that are only relevant to one or a few small teams don't perform as well because employees not involved in that work are less likely to share.

Incentivized

• Intuitive, easy-to-use templates for posts, newsletters and email notifications.
• Consistent upgrades and innovation that keeps the tool current with other apps.
• Flexibility on how users can use the tool (i.e. comments, sharing photos, etc.) This decision is left to each organization, individually.

• Scheduling out content / shares for the week
• Providing a quick glance leaderboard of top content shares across departments
• Easy to learn and leverage user interface (UI)

Incentivized

• We'd love to see a calendar added that would show key upcoming dates.
• It would be awesome if the Message feature had a drop-down directory you could scroll through vs. requiring you to type a few letters before the potential names came up.

Incentivized

• Sprout to Bambu integration is not what was depicted in trial and is not used because of this
• Missing functionality: LinkedIn tagging
• Missing functionality: posting videos
• Missing functionality: posting something without a link. Example: picture from an event or community outreach

Incentivized

The program has given some early wins, and there are very active employees who have truly integrated sharing from Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social into their regular social media activity. It would be a huge lift to migrate people to a different platform. While we'd love to grow our program, there's already enough value to justify keeping an employee advocacy program.

Incentivized

It's fairly user friendly when it's working correctly. There are more instances of bugs and glitches compared to other tools, including Sprout Social's primary platform. There's also an exception for Facebook personal profiles where that is more clunky to share on compared to LinkedIn, X or even Facebook Business Pages. I'd also like more customization around photo formats/sizes and email templates. Despite those negatives, the end user can share quickly and easily, which is vital to sustaining user participation. Facebook can be clunky, but most of our employees share on LinkedIn, which is quick, easy and smooth.

Incentivized

I can't really answer this as the platform was already in place when I took my current role.

Incentivized

It was similar in that it helped us push prewritten messages out to our team, but the UX/UI was far more dated and not as intuitive. It's mobile app also wasn't very useful; made it difficult to edit messages and would constantly need you to log back in. The two things GaggleAMP had over Bambu however was more comprehensive analytics and the ability to automatically push out social posts

Incentivized

• We look at the earned media revenue tool that Firstup has, and we have earned media of over $4000 most months. Amazing!
• We have been recognized by peers, clients, and partner agents who say they always see our Hilldrup news pop up on social media!
• Marketing has been able to control the voice of the brand while amplifying the message to new audiences - amazing!

Incentivized

• Positive returns -- sharing our brand and enabling our employees to share and tell their stories, ultimately helping them reach their own goals.

Incentivized