In the past several years a new trend has started to form. Companies are acknowledging their limited resource and budget alongside the recognition that social messages don’t always connect with the best audience. Show So, how do you engage with your target audience while still maintaining a measurable and cost-effective marketing impact? Well, the rumours are true…it is social advocacy. Advocacy is the act of supporting an idea, need, person, or group. Now, social advocacy is the concept of empowering a team or group of individuals to support your marketing strategy by sharing content and connecting with a larger audience. This team can consist of employees, stakeholders, customers or business partners which ensures they have a foundation of knowledge about your company and the message and objectives they are advocating. Upcoming Social Advocacy webinar: Before we outline how to get started, we would like to explain two metrics that play a major role in and display the positive impact social advocacy has.
So, where do you start? It’s simple. It starts with having the right ‘tool belt’. To reduce any PR risks and ensure the appropriate messages with the right tone of voice are being shared it is beneficial to have a unified and simple tool. There are different options in the market now to help, but a popular option is, GaggleAMP. It is an easy to use, effective and intricate platform that fits all social advocacy needs. A tool as simple as GaggleAMP can encourage a unified and consistent effort to promote content, connect with a larger audience and build customer loyalty. Creation Agency provides social advocacy and will help get you set-up and support you on an ongoing basis. If you’re interested, get in touch on 0870 850 2274 or drop an email. Understanding the tools/software will provide a structure around the process for your team which in turn will help align and outline expectations. A common question that I’ve seen and been asked plenty of times is, how can you encourage participation from internal team members? Well, as you would implement any change, expectations must be set to guide your team to help achieve company objectives. As this is a team effort, the next step in your journey is to create trust and transparency by providing guidelines that express expectation to your team so they can confidently share your content. Having clear guidelines will eliminate potential confusion in the future, and prevent a decrease in motivation. Your guidelines should not be too restrictive as you want your team members to feel empowered and accountable for their contribution. Make the information easy to understand as each team member will have different levels of social media understanding. Within the guidelines it should state the following;
So, I’m going to emphasize the idea of incentives. Incentives can be a very powerful motivator. As stated in the previously, a tool like GaggleAMP can help facilitate incentives as it monitors participation by each team member. It also allows your team to monitor each other to see who is posting more, and who is getting the most engagement. This can help persuade team members to participate more and help promote your content. Your guidelines should be written to encourage and motivate your team members to participate as you can’t force them to do so on a consistent basis. Along with written guidelines, a complimentary motivator is to have regular training sessions. It will reconnect your team members to the overall objective, and allow them to provide feedback. If you’re interested in getting your Social Advocacy programme up and running, get in touch with Creation Agency. This article was contributed by Alexandra Sutton. During an interview, it can be difficult to explain your strengths and experiences to an interviewer who has never met you before. However, if you have a friend or connection with someone at that company, they might be able to explain to the interviewer why you would be a good fit for the role. If the interviewer trusts the employee who is vouching for you, then the interviewer will be more likely to trust you. This in turn will give you a better chance of getting hired. Social advocacy is like this with brands and companies. Companies can post on social media and their website, showing their client success stories and customer reviews, but it’s still hard for people to trust brands when they don’t have anyone they know vouching for them. People are more likely to believe information when it’s said, shared or posted by someone whose credibility they trust. Why is Social Advocacy Important?There are two major reasons why social advocacy is important to businesses: it builds brand credibility and generates buzz. 1. Builds Brand Credibility and ReputationSocial advocacy is what helps companies and brands build their credibility. It’s about getting other people to respect and talk about your brand, which will help you to grow your audience, as well as strengthen your reputation. Building brand credibility and reputation can happen internally, but in general, happens externally through customers, publishers and other well-known sources. For example, if well-known sites are sharing your content, this helps build your brand credibility. Chances are, plenty of people trust these well-known sites. So if well-known sites are posting decent content about your brand, people are going to believe them and think of your brand in a positive light. On the other hand, it can also happen internally, through a company executive or leader, for example. Let’s say that the CEO of your company is well known in the world of content marketing and your company is in the industry. Your CEO has a lot of followers on social media, as well as thousands of connections on LinkedIn. If this leader from your company is talking about your organization on social media, this will help to establish credibility through the eyes of their network and the brand’s target audience. If people in the industry start sharing your content because of your CEO, this is even better because people outside of the organization are talking about your brand. There can also be a combination of sharing from internal and external sources. If employees share content about your company from outside sources, they’re not only sharing the content about your company, but showing off the implied endorsement of these well-known sites. How to Foster Social Advocacy
2. Generates Brand BuzzBrand buzz can come from all of the examples above. Getting people to talk about your brand is always good, whether it’s by customers, CEOs, executives, new sites, publishers, etc. Earning Social Advocacy During the Buyer’s JourneyThis concept relates to the marketing flywheel. The flywheel is, as Jon Dick of HubSpot explains, a “circular process where customers feed growth.” The flywheel is three different phases: Attract, engage and delight. The Delight phase of the wheel relates to social advocacy. The idea is that if you focus on delighting your customers, by creating strong relationships and a positive experience for them, they will eventually become promoters of your brand, which will help the wheel spin right back to the attract phase. Employees as Company AdvocatesThe one group we haven’t yet talked about is an internal group: employees. Harnessing the power of your employees and their networks is huge. Getting people to talk about your brand can be difficult in some cases, but if employees are happy with their company, they can and will willingly become the brand’s number one cheerleaders, especially when it comes to company culture. This is great for generating buzz and a positive reputation. In addition, this type of social advocacy can help HR with employment branding and filling open positions. The Importance of Shared MediaSocial advocacy also relates to the shared portion of the PESO Model. This part of the model describes how content you post on your social media channels lives as owned media, but becomes shared media once you start seeing engagement from your readers. Meaning if you put content on social media, your readers will determine if it’s successful or not. This means that generating great and genuine content is the start to successful social advocacy. Obviously, every brand hopes their content goes viral, but creating content with that as the end goal is not a great idea. Instead, your goal for shared media should be to encourage engagement, communication and online word-of-mouth for your brand. So … now what? How do you foster social advocacy?The key is to create authentic and engaging content that real people will actually care about! Now that’s a topic for another post. In the meantime, learn how to boost credibility through social advocacy with Brandpoint’s Expert Series. |