When authentic content reigns supreme, social media advocacy can be a marketer’s most powerful tool. But mastering social media advocacy isn’t easy. Consider this playbook your navigation guide, full of insights, ideas, and takeaways that will help you grow your brand through successful social media advocacy campaigns.
What is social media advocacy?
Think of your ideal customer profile. Are they more likely to trust what a brand says about itself or the opinion of someone else? Research around social proof suggests it’s the latter. That’s the power of social media advocacy.
Social media advocacy is a marketing technique that involves strategically enlisting employees, partners, customers, influencers, or any other stakeholder to help support your social media campaigns.
Think of social media advocates as a subset of brand champions. These advocates can promote your business in a uniquely authentic way – to potential customers, partners, and even employees. Google uses employee social media advocacy to boost its employer brand. The tech giant receives 2 to 3 million applications each year, and its positive employee social media advocacy contributes significantly to the fact that people want to work there.
Google encourages its employees to highlight all the benefits that come with working for the company and share them via a hub called Life at Google and on social media. This includes all the fun events, gatherings, and social days they experience.
As the demand for brand authenticity and genuine interactions continues to rise, a solid social media advocacy strategy is as important as ever. It’s key to driving both sales and customer loyalty.
Types of social media advocacy
What type of social media advocacy should you choose for your brand? It depends entirely on the stakeholder you wish to enlist and the outcome you want to achieve.
Here are the types of social media advocacy:
Brand advocacy
Brand social media advocacy involves the active promotion of brands by anyone outside the organization. Consumers take social proof more seriously than self promotion because personal recommendations are considered more trustworthy than brand-initiated marketing.
Employee advocacy
In employee social media advocacy, companies encourage employees to share their positive workplace experiences and celebrate the company’s values and culture. This can involve showing off brilliant workspaces or promoting causes like Pride Month and support for veterans.
Customer advocacy
Whether it’s through reviews, testimonials, or social media posts, customer advocacy is an opportunity for satisfied customers to show their appreciation for your brand. These word-of-mouth recommendations are key to developing a strong reputation and can massively extend your social media reach.
How to master employee social media advocacy
Employee social media advocacy presents numerous benefits. Employees’ posts reach audiences you haven’t yet engaged with, boosting your visibility and increasing brand awareness. As mentioned previously, you’ll also help to build trust and credibility. In fact, 88% of people trust recommendations from people they know the most. Employee social media advocacy is also extremely cost-effective, as these organic posts can be successful without excessive ad expenditure.
With all these potential benefits, mastering employee social media advocacy should be at the top of your to-do list. Implementing a robust program is the best way to get started.
It’s easier said than done, but building a work environment with a positive atmosphere and highly motivated employees is incredibly important. The happier the employees, the more likely they’ll want to promote your brand.
You’ll also want to set clear objectives, select program leaders (e.g., staff members with a solid personal brand and social media presence), encourage and reward employee participation, and create quality content for them to share. Crucially, you’ll also want to ensure you track key metrics and obtain employee feedback. That way, you can review and refine your strategy for future employee social media advocacy campaigns.
Luckily, you can easily view your engagement rate for each of your posts using Emplifi analytics. Alternatively, you can track your interactions on Facebook when you switch the dropdown menu in Facebook Insights on the top-right menu of your All Posts Published metrics.
If you don’t have an engaged audience to review, study the behavior of someone who is popular with your audience. That may be a competitor or another brand who shares the same target market as your business.
How to build a successful social media advocacy strategy in 2025
To build a successful social media advocacy strategy in 2025, you must first understand the emerging social media advocacy trends.
Love it or hate it, AI and machine learning are influencing everything. Brands can now more efficiently identify and engage with advocates by automating processes, personalizing messaging, and analyzing behavior.
Short-form video content is also on the rise. With the likes of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube shorts, brands have recognized the value these formats can bring in building authentic and interactive content that grows their audience.
The growing importance of micro-influencers (those with 1,000-100,000 followers) should also be noted. These influencers can drive awareness with a smaller yet more engaged audience. Brands are now paying attention to these influencers, as they are cheaper and often more effective than celebrity endorsements.
Taking these trends into account, here’s how to build a successful social media advocacy strategy:
- Define your goals
Like with any marketing strategy, you must first outline your objectives. You may want to increase brand awareness, engagement, sales, or something completely different. The important part is to set clear, measurable goals that align with your overall social media strategy.
- Identify your advocates
As you will have already seen, there are different types of social media advocates, each serving a unique purpose. Whether you’re looking to engage with employees, customers, or perhaps even influencers, creating authentic content that builds brand credibility is always important.
- Provide shareable content
Speaking of content, setting clear guidelines for what you want to produce is a good idea. Videos, testimonials, quotes, or user generated content (UGC), whatever you decide, make sure it’s easy and rewarding for them to share.
- Engage with your advocates
Nothing is worse for your advocate than receiving little to no engagement after putting in a lot of effort. That’s why your brand account should always respond to and share the advocate’s content and offer shoutouts and rewards for their hard work.
- Track your performance
What’s the use of a social media advocacy campaign if you can’t measure its success? Analytical tools can help you record and understand your data, giving you the insights needed to tweak and improve your next campaign.
Metrics matter: How to measure the impact of social media advocacy programs
Measuring the success of your social media advocacy programs involves both direct attribution and indirect attribution.
Direct attribution refers to all the data you can collect for any social media campaign. It’s the cut-and-dried metrics you’re likely to be familiar with – likes, comments, shares, impressions, reach, click-through rates (CTR), and time spent on pages from your advocacy-driven traffic.
Indirect attribution refers to how your social media advocacy campaigns impact audiences that are not so easily attributable. For example, increased levels of trust. Unless you ask each viewer personally, it’s very hard to gauge the emotional impact your posts can have. This type of influence will often only be seen later down the line, with increased purchases, employee satisfaction, or job applicants.
There are, however, some techniques that can help to improve your tracking success. Custom tracking links, hashtag monitoring, and brand surveys can provide valuable insights into audience opinion.
Social media analytics tools can also improve your tracking and leverage your reach. A quality tool can help you better understand your audience, make better decisions, and optimize your return on investment (ROI).
What to look for in a social media advocacy tool
A quality social media advocacy tool can boost your campaign’s success, but it’s important you choose the right one. Here are some features to look out for:
- Community management: In social media advocacy, your community is everything, so having the right tools to manage this community is crucial. A competent solution will help nurture your relationships with advocates, track trends, and improve engagement across all social channels.
- UGC integration: UGC is becoming increasingly popular in social media advocacy, so a tool with integrated capabilities is an important feature to look for. The tool should help you source, manage, and publish UGC to amplify authentic brand experiences. As a bonus, it should distribute UGC across websites, emails, and social platforms.
- Social listening: If you don’t understand your audience, you’ll never know what they want. That’s why you’ll need proficient social listening capabilities to assist in identifying strong brand advocates and capitalizing on their potential.
- Employee advocacy: Your social media advocacy tool should enable your organization to share branded content easily. As we discussed earlier, the easier it is for your advocates to share content, the more likely they are to do so.
Final thoughts on social media advocacy for brands
When used correctly, social media advocacy can surely increase engagement with your brand and products. It goes hand-in-hand with the ever-increasing demand for more value-driven content and personalization, micro-influencers popularity, and the assistance of AI-powered tools.
Social media advocacy is no longer just a strategy; it has become an essential part of building brand awareness, trust, and loyalty. If you empower the right voices at the right time, your brand message will go further than any ad ever could.
