If there was any question that brand advocates can make a huge difference in converting their own networks into fans for your company, new data released today from Wildfire pretty much puts that one to rest.
Wildfire, the fast-growing social marketing company that is being acquired by Google, studied 10,000 social media campaigns over the past nine months and came away with some eye-opening conclusions. It summarized the analysis in a free e-report and is hosting a free webinar this Wednesday to showcase the key findings and share best practices for engaging advocates.
The study pretty much confirms that generating a community of sharers and advocates rather than simply building a huge contingent of fans (Wildfire calls them "joiners") is invaluable in spreading the word about you and in multiplying engagements. A few of the findings:
- The top 10% of brands get 39% of their fans (or "brand advocates") to share campaigns - achieving 3x greater engagement and 10x greater fan growth than the other 90% brands in the study
- Getting these brand advocates to share social media campaigns generates significant earned media (14 earned media impressions for each brand advocate)
- Brand advocates bring in an average of 1.3 new people each
- These advocates also impact fan growth by as high as 13x
In the study of Facebook social marketing campaigns, almost 700 brands were reviewed and the campaigns isolated to ascertain key differentiators that achieve success. Victoria Ransom, Wildfire's CEO and founder, said it is clear that brands should give users a variety of ways to engage with them and also give specific instructions about what to do to engage.
The coolest part is the six specific best practices of the top performing social brands. Rather than possibly short-thrifting the details by paraphrasing here, I recommend you download the report.