I attended a great webinar presented by Ekaterina Walter, founder and CMO of Branderati, where she illustrated the benefits of brand advocacy and influencers to help build brand loyalty and transparency. The webinar was called Entering the Age of Advocacy and in the webinar Ekaterina also offered detailed statistics that supports the fact that small communities with strong influencers are essential and should be taken under consideration in a product brand, particularly from social media where media platforms such as Instagram and Vine can be utilized by influencers to help boost its popularity within their following. Below are some notes that I have taken from the webinar but you can obtain more information through her Branderati blog.

• The Chief Marketing Officers are the customers.
• Customer to Customer word of mouth generates twice as many sales vs, paid advertising.
• The smaller the community, the greater the influence.
• The key elements of reaching communities: Relevance, Traction and Keywords.
• Use hashtags to turn free text into insights.
• Build tribes! Inspire movements!
• Being proactive is being helpful.
• Have employees be passionate.
• Reviews are critical.
• Sharing is caring.

Related articles

• Five tips to turn social media mistakes into customer advocacy (businessesgrow.com)
• 14 Top Marketing Pros Give Their Best Tip For 2014 (socialfresh.com)
• How Do I Love Thee? (business2community.com)
• How do you leverage your Facebook community in brand advocacy? (hiscoxusa.com)
• How to Turn Employees into Social Media Advocates While You Sleep (socialmediatoday.com)