Author: David Leatham, Senior PR Director
Social advocacy is the number one thing clients have asked me about in the past 18 months, but why is that? Where has it come from? Where does it sit as part of modern strategic communications plan? Most importantly, however, does it actually work?
What’s it called?
For the purposes of this article, I’m going to refer to it as social advocacy, but I’m well aware that the classification differs by organisation and by agency. Some refer to it as an internal influencer programme, others I’ve come across include internal champions, individual leveraging and somewhat bizarrely the ‘employee outreach programme’.
Where has it come from?
Rewind 15 years to the early days of social media for business and the focus was all about setting up corporate profiles and outreaching on the key networks of the time. This was all organic, of course, as paid social simply didn’t exist (I look back on this time fondly as it was all about quality content, rather than how much you paid to target!). One of the key requirements of the time was to establish large social media audiences, but the agency push back was always to deliver quality followers over quantity.
With the right post, your content could be seen by a healthy number of relevant followers, whatever the platform, and I saw first hand how that began to translate into real-world commercial conversions.
Changing landscape
Then everything changed. It all became about how much you paid, not necessarily what your content said. This was obviously an inevitable move by the social networks giants to monetise. However, I think it also set off a chain reaction in that social media consumers naturally became more wary and less trusting of the content they were exposed to. Add to this the increasing pressure for social media managers to generate continually increasing month-on-month follower and engagement statistics and you end up with a vicious cycle of having to increase paid budgets – which obviously works in the favour of the social media networks.
Changing tactics
Not every brand has unlimited budget to utilise on either paid social campaigns or by developing campaign content that is clever enough to achieve cut through virally. From an agency perspective I found more and more clients asking me “what can we do differently on social, without spending additional budget, that’ll help us reach our key decision makers?”
There are plenty of tactics that can be employed, some better than others. However, the one I’ve kept coming back to and which I’m still introducing clients to now is social advocacy. In essence, using the already established and warm connections of individuals (mostly through LinkedIn) rather than the colder, faceless brands to reach out to your key target audience.
What are the advantages of social advocacy?
Social advocacy has a relatively simple strategic value. It takes advantage of the fact that people generally trust their individual connections more than they trust corporate brands. For example, if brand x says this is the best product the world has ever seen, people are still likely to be naturally cautious. However, if three or four of your trusted connections bestow the virtues of brand x and outline how it has made a difference for them, we as social media consumers are more likely to at least consider purchasing it.
The throttling of brand news feeds means that less people see your content than you might think or expect. However, with social advocacy, particularly by using long-form LinkedIn articles, a large number of individual connections are likely to have the opportunity to see your content. If you then utilise that content with multiple advocates and tie that in with brand content, overall impressions of key messages will significantly increase in result. There is still a requirement for quality content, avoidance of recycled narrative and eye catching assets, but you certainly achieve more cut through with target audiences (and all for free!).
What are the disadvantages of social advocacy?
If this is such a good tactic, so why isn’t everyone doing it? Well, a lot of businesses are, you just may not have realised.
As with most things in life, social advocacy is not the complete solution – there is definitely risk involved! If you build your communications strategy solely around two or three key advocates and their network outreach, who end up leaving the organisation, they take their personal connections and your hard work with them. The answer to this is getting that engaged audience to willingly and somewhat unconsciously transfer across from advocate to brand during the outreach. But that’s not necessarily an easy thing to do!
Another disadvantage is time. The best advocates are generally higher profile – managing directors, technical experts and social media aficionados. These people are perfect for advocacy as they are already audience rich, unfortunately as a result of their day-to-day roles they are also generally time poor. The answer to this is using internal teams or agencies, such as Prova (shameless plug, sorry!), to ghost write the content for that busy advocate, with them just having to personalise and post it.
Where does it sit as part of a wider comms plan?
It certainly doesn’t replace brand organic or paid social media outreach. Instead, what I‘m saying is that those tactics are much less effective that they used to be and can potentially cost a lot of money. Social advocacy allows you to effectively target the already established audiences of the people who work for you – all at a cost-efficient price point.
The person’s buy in to the strategy is vital. They have to understand what the objective is and why they’re a part of it. Done correctly and ‘alongside’ traditional PR, marketing, wider communications and brand social media, social advocacy can be really powerful.
Does it actually work?
I can only speak from my experience of working with a wide variety of B2B and B2C brands and I’ve seen it really help reach a different type of audience, who may not already be invested in the brand, but are in the person or people who work for that brand.
There are challenges as outlined above and measuring success is always a big question I’m regularly asked. However, with the right support and knowledge base, it’s possible to demonstrate that advocacy is a key part of the successful outreach achieved with a wider communications plan.