How to Identify Brand Advocates in Three Quick Steps

Serina Fignole - December 19, 2017

Social media has become a staple in most marketers’ digital marketing plans. However, it is often forgotten that managing customer reviews and recommendations is just as important as posting content on social channels. This is because reviews and recommendations can convince people to make a purchase. A positive review can help build confidence in your brand and products. One way to get more positive reviews is through brand advocates.

Here are 3 quick steps to help you identify your potential brand advocates.

Step 1: Pay Attention

While it may seem as if your advocates are hiding in the shadows, they are actually standing in full sight – all you have to do is pay attention. A good place to start is by looking through your last few months’ worth of social media posts. You should pay close attention to people that are:

• Liking your posts and tweets
• Sharing and retweeting your content
• Commenting on your posts
• Conversing with and about your brand
• Linking to your content

All of these people could potentially be a brand advocate.

Step 2: Track Engagement

Now that you have started to look at who is most engaged with your content and brand, you should start to track their engagement over time. One idea is to create a spreadsheet that lists all of the people who have engaged with you in social media. Then, add additional columns to track different engagement metrics, such as: “post likes,” “comments,” “shares,” “retweets,” “favorites” as well as “link clicks”.

Step 3: Analyze

After you’ve tracked your followers’ engagement, it’s time to compare their engagement against your other followers by trying to answer the following questions:

• Who is “sharing” and “retweeting” your content more than anyone else?
• Who are the top 5 people “liking” and “favoriting” your posts and tweets the most?
• Who is commenting on your posts, @mentioning you in tweets, and posting questions regularly?

Once you are able to answer those questions, then you have begun to identify your brand advocates and it’s time to put those advocates to work. Stay tuned for our follow-up post about how to leverage your brand advocates.