Step 1: Knowing your brand –  Brands that will engage with social media followers and in turn develop brand advocates are those that:

• Listen
• Know their audience
• Engage and support their customers/fans on a human level
• Make relevant content
• Offer customer service through social channels and forums
• Build relationships over the common interest of their product or service
• Continue to test and review their approaches

Step 2: Liking your brand – When customers repeatedly repurchase, they show loyalty and commitment. Here brands need to be passionate, live and breathe their products as well as their online communities. Passion is what will encourage customers/fans to recommend brands, products and services to others.

Step 3: Talking about your brand – That’s when brands will need to turn their customers/fans into brand advocates. In an instant they become your insight partner. Brands can share and build socially interesting customer experiences into their branded content campaigns. A neat tool for activating your brand advocates is Expion’s Social Advocator. It works as a browser plug-in. Your advocates can use it to access and share pre-approved content in their social networks.

Step 4: Loving your brand – It’s here that word of mouth marketing can excel. That’s where loyalty on an individual basis begins to multiply with personal referrals and recommendations. This is where brands are putting their own customers/fans centre-stage. By giving their most vocal advocates a platform to share their own experiences brands are turning their brand love into authentic influence. And influence is something that will enable brands to achieve the ultimate goal of marketing – driving impact to company’s bottom line.

It’s important to remember, that brand advocacy does not just sit within the social media world – brand advocacy involves the real world too. Thus brands need to convert online conversations to offline conversations both inside and outside the brand. Online and offline marketing channels are important  to achieve real brand advocacy, as is the need for these channels to work together with consistent messaging that resonates with their target audience.

What are some other steps to build your social media brand advocacy? Share your examples in the comments.