Employee advocacy and social selling are growing trends in businesses where companies look for ways to empower employees to become authentic champions for their brands. Unfortunately, the way many companies go about this is by sharing mountains of white papers, case studies and sales brochures, none of which are particularly engaging for the employees or their social networks.

That may change today, as content discovery tool Trapit, Inc. has announced the launch of its new employee advocacy platform, which promises to give marketers the tools they need to ensure their employee advocates stay on message, while also providing them with fun, engaging content that they will actually want to share with their networks.

The new direction for Trapit comes as a result of its merger last year with employee advocacy startup Addvocate.

“We saw organically that customers were asking for a way to get content into the hands of their employees,” Trapit CEO Hank Nothhaft told me. “We were introduced to team at Addvocate and saw chance to create more compelling story.”

He explained that since the merger, Trapit and Addvocate have been “heads down working on deep integration” between the two platforms. “We didn’t want to do basic API retrofit and have disparate programs tied behind the scenes,” Nothaft said. “We wanted to build a unified product, working as combined team.”

“Authentic conversations and human to human contact”

Trapit’s content discovery platform is now focused on finding on-message content from across the web for businesses. For example, a company that develops artificial intelligence applications might see anything from articles about exciting advances in AI to funny videos of robots, and everything in between. The content is still relevant to the company’s interests, but employees may actually find it worth sharing.

Many of the Trapit’s core features remain intact, but the platform now has an added layer of control for content curation and sharing.

Trapit now divides features between two account types. Advocate accounts are able to view and share approved content only. Curators, on the other hand, can add and approve new content, manage permissions for advocate accounts, and more.

Nothhaft believes that employee advocacy and social selling will be a major growth area over the next few years, but he said that for it to work, the tools have to add value for both employees and their networks.

“I think we’re really going to see a return to authentic conversations and human-to-human contact,” Nothaft said.

Image courtesy of Trapit