Use Content Curation To Create Brand Advocates That Sing Your Song

Brand advocates develop within social media marketing, regardless of the size of your business, when multiple components converge to fill the needs of your target market. These needs differ related to the products and services you offer, the value they provide and the problems they solve for your customers. However, outside of your product offering, social connections begin to turn into brand advocates as you consistently and effectively deliver selfless value to them before, during and after the sale.

How do you recognize a brand advocate?

The Most Common Traits of a Brand Advocate:

1) They read and share the content you create frequently.

2) They share and comment on the content you curate regularly.

3) They often become customers of your company. (but not always)

4) They tell others about your product/service/content openly and often.

That value you deliver to your audience initially comes in the form of the content you share in your streams, through content aggregation, content curation and content creation. Let’s start by defining the difference between these three, as aggregation and curation are often incorrectly considered as the same.

Aggregation: Finding and collecting content to share

Curation: Editorializing and commenting on aggregated content when you post/schedule it.

Creation: Developing your own articles, graphics, videos and other content, specifically for the online and social media marketing benefits.

When you effectively aggregate, curate and create the content that your audience finds valuable, they will like, share and comment more and more frequently. The difference between making your social media marketing successful and a community full of brand advocates is what you do, or don’t do next. This is where most big brands fail miserably.

When your social media posts have intent and strategy behind them which resonate with your audience the shares, likes and comments roll in. Acknowledging these and moving them into conversations and ultimately real relationships is where everything we have discussed thus far becomes meaningful. There are very few brands that garner brand advocacy on the substance of their products and services alone. Brand advocacy comes from the relationships forged before, during and after the sale that takes a customer from someone who is just a customer to one that advocates for your brand on and offline. Do you see the difference?

Some Of The Benefits of Brand Advocates:

1) They expand your reach on and offline to their friends, customers and communities.

2) By expanding your reach to their communities and advocating your brand, they help you grow your community.

3) They help you organically and virally increase your sales and revenue by way of exposure, testimonial and conversation.

So where does the song reference come in from the title of this post? This week, the graphic on the right came in from one of our Pro users, @C4Compete. She wrote (or changed) a song based on the 12 Days of Christmas and turned it into the 12 benefits of Bundle Post. Unsolicited and out of the blue…

We have found that delivering value through our social media content strategy of aggregation, curation and creation, coupled with the users of our technology loving the value of the product and how we conduct customer service, results in not just brand advocates, but advocates that create content about us. That’s right. They write blog posts that mention Bundle Post. They create videos and graphics that promote Bundle Post.

When your social community begins to be made up of true brand advocates and customers that spread your message and promote your brand and products, I can assure you that you are delivering selfless value to them that is paying off in sales and revenue.

How does your content curation work together with your social media management to foster brand advocates to sing your brand song?