Achieving brand advocacy on Twitter

Building and nurturing relationships online with existing and potential brand advocates should be one of the underlying objectives of any successful social media marketing strategy. However, you might be surprised by how often many brands miss this key factor when focusing efforts on social media. Many mistake the milestone of achieving X amount of fans as succeeding, but if only 4 of those 5,000 followers are tweeting your praises, do you really have 5,000 fans or in reality is it far less?

As travel marketing specialists, we understand the need for advocacy in a competitive industry. A study from social@Oglivy found that 15% of all brand mentions online are advocacy mentions expressing positive comments. The study uncovered a large ‘social advocacy gap’ that travel retailers are missing out on, representing a huge opportunity for travel brands to harness these advocates and improve their social media marketing’s efficiency.

What or who are brand advocates?

In online communities such as social media, brand advocates are customers who will speak, tweet, pin, blog, vlog (you get the idea) in favour of your brand and services. Essentially, a brand advocate is someone who passes on good things about your company by online-word-of-mouth channels to other potential customers, in the hope that they will join in on purchasing a particular product or service from you as opposed to a competitor.

It’s proven that we as consumers are more likely to purchase a particular brand or book with a particular company if a friend, relative, or someone else we trust recommends it to us. Therefore, online-word-of-mouth-marketing works in a similar way. Brand advocates are essentially very happy customers who believe in your services and are happy to promote them to their following on social media or other online channels, like blogs and vlogs.

Sounds great! How do I get them?

Unlike Twitter advertising or paid celebrity and influencer endorsement, brand advocates are earned not bought. In order to gain brand advocacy, you should ask yourself: “Why should a customer care about recommending my brand?” What do you think sets your brand aside from competitors and what would make an audience want to fight your case on social media? Perhaps it’s a personal service, customer rewards, or even a free cuddly toy with every holiday; whatever it is, there should be something that creates a lasting connection between your brand and the customer. A connection that is worth shouting about.

Customer experience is the keystone of creating brand advocacy. It’s surprising how many travel brands welcome positive reviews on social media, yet fail to respond. Quick and efficient responses to negative tweets are only half the battle; if you’re only appeasing unhappy customers and not nurturing the relationships with your happy ones, then there is very little chance of creating any brand advocacy.

It might seem obvious, but here are a few tips to building brand advocate relationships in the travel sector:

· Reply promptly to all tweets. Even if a customer sends you a smiling emoji — send them one back. This Twitter user has taken the time to find you and reach out to your brand on social media; they deserve a response. This, of course, excludes spam! For tips on how to deal with Twitter spam, read our blog post on the subject.

· Retweet positive feedback. Manually retweeting customers’ feedback with a small message added is a great way of tooting your brand’s horn while letting a customer know you care. We recommend copying and pasting positive tweets, using a signal such as ‘RT’ to show it’s been retweeted. Make sure to add in their Twitter handle as well to let your potential brand advocate know they’ve been noticed.

· Thank users for sharing your content. You may have social sharing buttons set up on your website’s blog, or a hashtag that your brand promotes. If so, search for your blog’s URL, search for your hashtag and thank users for sharing your information. Alerts for hashtags and set words or phrases can be set up in platforms like Hootsuite or Sprout Social to make this kind of interaction easy.

· Don’t take your current followers for granted. Yes, we all want more followers, but the ones you already have are just as good. Try not to focus all your efforts on gaining new followers when a brand advocate may exist in your current ones.

· Don’t use automated messages! Messages that auto-thank-you for following remind you that you are just 1 in 1000s of followers and customers that a brand sees every day. However, genuine human interaction from a brand makes a customer feel special; it is an experience that stands out in their memory and lets them know that they are different to the other customers.

So, what next?

Relationships with brand advocates need to be developed and their experiences need to be nurtured. If a user is beginning to promote your brand in an open forum like Twitter, then usually they want to be seen and heard, and you need to make sure that’s the case. Retweet them, interact with them, and use their positive comments on your website. Use their suggestions and make sure they are given credit for their ideas. This could be in the form of a giveaway, a discount, a ‘customer-of-the-week’ promotion; let them know that you are grateful and they’ll be far more likely to continue interacting with your brand.

Once you’ve established a relationship with a brand advocate, you can assess their wider advocacy power. They may have a blog, a Pinterest board or Instagram profile where they document their travels, post about holiday dreams, and jot down their thoughts. These are all platforms where they could be writing about your brand and how amazing it is. Make the effort to look them up and interact with them across the wider social media channels to show that they are a valued mouthpiece for your brand.

It’s important to continue to develop your relationship with established brand advocates, so here are some ways to nurture your ongoing relationships:

· Incentivise brand advocates with promotions and discounts.

· Offer the opportunity to write as a ‘guest author’ for your brand’s blog.

· Offer refer-a-friend promotions and discount codes to incentivise them to sing your praises. This can be further developed by adding a worthy cause, for example ‘refer a friend and our brand will donate to charity’.

Image Credit: nosha (flickr.com) This image has been edited from the original. Gabriela Pinto, Achim Hepp, Kevin Galens (flickr.com)