Social media advocates are people who promote a business by sharing positive information about their experiences with it. Since most people trust recommendations from their peers more than advertisements from the companies themselves, having customers advocate for your brand online is a great way to boost business. Here’s how to find out who your best social media advocates are and how your brand can benefit from their help.
Social Listening
One of the best ways to find out who your brand advocates are is to learn who is liking and sharing your content online. One social media tool you can use for social listening is Hootsuite. This makes it easy for you to search for your business name on social networks, allowing you to see who is speaking positively about your brand. Similar tools include ReFollow, Traackr, and Tweet Reach. You can also simply search for your company’s name on Twitter, Facebook, or other social networks to find out who has mentioned it.
Once you find out who your best social media advocates are, you can reach out to them. The least you could do is comment on their blog posts or social network updates about your business and just say thank you. According to Quick Sprout, you should also consider sharing their content to show your appreciation. In fact, emailing them directly to thank them, as well as mentioning them on social media, can go a long way to encourage your brand advocates to keep it up.
Turning Employees Into Advocates 
According to TopRank Online Marketing, employees are often the best brand advocates. After all, they understand your business best, and they also represent a valuable resource you already have. So it makes sense to inspire your employees to become social media advocates, if they aren’t already.
You can use social listening to find out which of your employees are already great social media advocates for your business. You might be surprised to find that some of your employees have been promoting your company for a while without needing any encouragement from you.
If your employees are not currently advocating for your company, it might be time to start encouraging them to. EveryoneSocial advises that you create incentives for them to post positive things about the business on social networks. You can turn it into a contest to see which employee can post the most online, or which one is able to get the most shares from what they post.
DigitalSherpa recommends that you make a streamlined social media policy for your employees to follow. Make sure they know what to post and what not to post when it comes to your business. Otherwise, you could end up with a social media faux pas!
So perform a search for your social media brand advocates today. You might find that your employees are great at promoting your company. You might also find out that you have lots of satisfied customers who like to share about their positive experience with your business. Either way, it means you have some great social media brand advocates.
