Brands have been intensely focusing on racking up the “likes” on their Facebook page through various marketing tactics such as offering incentives, investing in Facebook ads, and more. But even with hundreds of thousands of Facebook fans, the road to kick ass Facebook engagement is a rather bumpy one.

Take a look at these stats working against you when it comes to Facebook marketing:

88% of Facebook users never return to a fan page once they “like” it (Brandglue.com.)

Due to EdgeRank, each time a brand posts to their Facebook page, only about 16-18% of fans actually see the post in their newsfeeds (source: comScore, Facebook.)

According to a recent Ehrenberg-Bass study, now you can add this stat: Only 1% of Facebook fans engage with brands.

So how do you overcome these obstacles and increase brand engagement? Focus not just on your fans, but on your fanatics (AKA your Brand Advocates) to share your content with their friends.

Why focus on your Brand Advocates?

• Brand Advocates are a different breed: They are 50% more likely to influence purchase decisions and 75% more likely to share great product experiences.
• By mobilizing your Advocates to share content on your behalf, you expand your reach beyond your current fan base to your Advocates’ networks.
• Brand Advocates will spread the love across channels (Twitter, LinkedIn, third party review sites, etc.), not just Facebook.
• Your customers don’t trust you anyway. 90% of consumers trust Word of Mouth; only 24% trust online ads (source: Nielsen.)

To learn more about leveraging your brand fanatics, download our whitepaper, Turning Fans and Followers into Brand Advocates.

You’re already sold on the power of Brand Advocates. You’re identifying and energizing your Advocates now to recommend your brand and products. What’s next? How can you get the greatest possible bang from your advocacy buck? How can you fully harness the power of Advocates to build your brand and business?

Watch the webinar below to learn about “Advanced Techniques for Energizing Your Brand Advocates.” (Click here to watch on Slideshare.)

10 Advanced Brand Advocacy Tips

1. Grow your Advocate Army. New customers, returning customers, and passives are three segments that brands can look to in order to identify and energize Advocates.

2. Leverage multiple touch points to identify and engage with Advocates: email, website, social channels, mobile, in-product, physical stores, customer service.

3. Use the full array of Advocate applications: reviews, stories, answers, offers.

4. Take Advantage of Advocate Apps. Various Advocacy apps can directly address marketing challenges and/or opportunities. For example, certain properties of a hotel chain are receiving poor online ratings and reviews. Using Advocate reviews, this hotel can focus their enthusiastic and highly satisfied Advocates on rating and reviewing these properties on third party review sites like TripAdvisor.

5. Energize Advocates by Segment. Not all Advocates are alike, so building a segment-driven Advocacy program is key to any brand advocacy strategy. Vary your messaging to target different Advocate segments and create distinct goals for approaching each segment.

6. Mobilize Advocates. Use Advocate applications to mobilize your Advocates around specific situations or opportunities. For example, Advocate stories can aid in brand repositioning, Advocate offers can drive lead generation, and Advocate reviews and stories can help to combat negative Word of Mouth.

7. Leverage Advocates for launches. Energize your most passionate customers pre-launch to build buzz and awareness about your new product.

8. Leverage Advocate content smartly. Advocate-generated content is digital gold. Place Advocate content on multiple pages on your website, on a dedicated tab on your Facebook page, in your paid search ads, etc.

9. Set it and forget it! Setup email marketing campaigns that ask new customers if they would recommend your product and write a review two weeks after the purchase.

10. Promote causes. Rally your Advocate Army to promote a charity and spread awareness to their social networks.

-Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance

Diane Beaudet, VP of Global Marketing Programs for Webroot, an online protection software company, discusses the power of Brand Advocates.

Some highlights from Webroot’s Advocacy Program:

• Webroot has created a brand army of 11,000 Webroot Advocates (and growing.)
• Webroot Advocates have written about 6,000 reviews.
• Over 500 positive reviews have been published to third party review sites such as Amazon, BestBuy, and CNET.
• Advocates give Webroot products an average rating of 4.5/5 stars.
• In one quarter, sales increased by 200% due to Advocate-generated reviews that were published on Amazon.

What’s next for Webroot’s Advocate Program?

Webroot plans to leverage their Advocates to drive sign-ups and participation in a new online community to be launched in 2012.

Read more about how Webroot is turning their enthusiastic customers into a powerful marketing force here.

Rob Fuggetta, founder & CEO of Zuberance, will be the guest speaker at the upcoming Northern California chapter meeting of the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG.)

Date: Thurs, Jan 19, 2012

Time: 6:30pm

Location: Parc 55 Wyndham Hotel, San Francisco

REGISTER NOW

Customer advocacy is the #1 priority for Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) worldwide, according to a recent IBM study. Fuggetta’s presentation, which is entitled “Turning Advocates into a Powerful Marketing Force,” will feature real-world case studies about how companies like Intuit, CDW, Rubio’s Fresh Mexican Grill and many others are leveraging their most enthusiastic customers to spread positive Word of Mouth and drive sales.

About the Speaker

Rob Fuggetta is the leading expert on brand advocacy and has more than 20 years of marketing leadership experience.  He is a former partner at Regis McKenna, the legendary Silicon Valley technology marketing and communications firm, where he co-led the global Apple account.  He later became the CMO at Genuity, a Verizon spin-out which went public in June 2000.  Fuggetta is the author of “Brand Advocates: Turning Enthusiastic Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force” to be published by John Wiley & Sons in 2012.

Social media campaigns get and keep Brand Advocates in consumer product goods (CPG) revved up, according to a new BzzAgent study published today in eMarketer.

The study showed that 39% of Advocates would recommend a CPG product before a social media campaign. That’s a very high percentage and further evidence that the percentage of consumers who are Advocates is much higher than people think. That percentage jumps to 61% after being exposed to a social media campaign, the study showed.

Additionally, after a year of being exposed to a social media campaign, actual purchase intent remained at 61% proving that social marketing programs hold long-lasting effects on brand engagement and advocacy.

-Rob Fuggetta, Founder/CEO, Zuberance

The following is an excerpt from Rob Fuggetta’s forthcoming book about Brand Advocates.

One negative review can cost you 30 customers, a study by Convergys found. Using the Convergys research as the baseline, you can see how much one negative review costs a small resort hotel in Orlando, Fla.

If your average revenues per customer are higher, negative reviews cost you more. One negative review costs a high-end fitness club $72,000, as the chart below shows.

Social Media Whup-Ass

This is a conservative estimate of the amount of money you can lose from negative reviews. It only focuses on lost sales. It doesn’t take into consideration the lasting financial impact of negative reviews on your company or brand’s reputation.

Also, it doesn’t take into consideration other ways Detractors spread negative Word of Mouth, like email, social channels, and offline.

In the old days, PR people would tell their clients who wanted to battle newspaper editors, “Don’t pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel.”

Today that man is the social consumer, and he’s got a barrel of social media whup-ass for you.

Read more excerpts from Rob’s forthcoming book here.

-Rob Fuggetta, Founder/CEO, Zuberance

Facebook to Start Placing Ads in User News Feeds in January – AdAge

Facebook will feature its “Sponsored Story” ad units in users’ news feeds starting next month, giving marketers a more prominent foothold in the social network. The move is seen as an important step toward Facebook’s goal of delivering ads to its huge mobile-user base, and perhaps ultimately to third-party websites. “We really see Facebook becoming the operating system of the Internet for ad delivery in the future,” says ad executive Dave Williams.

Most Top Brands Have Google+ Pages, But Few Have Many Followers - Mashable

At this point, most of the top brands have Google+ brand pages, but only a fraction of them are getting many visitors, according to two research firms.

Foursquare Gros to 15 million Users, More Than Tripling its Community in the Last 12 Months – Econsultancy

This marks a year of strong growth for Foursquare, during which it secured $50m of venture capital funding  that put a value of around $600m on the company. A blog post by co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadural said the cash would allow Foursquare to “move more quickly”, and the new membership stats suggest it has worked.

Twitter Joins Facebook, Google, Launches ‘Brand Pages’ for Marketers – AdAge

Twitter’s existing brand pages have been under the radar, especially compared with the buildup around Google+ brand pages, which were launched last month. But Chief Revenue Officer Adam Bain said that he’s spent the better part of the past year meeting with chief marketing officers, and brand pages were a recurring and frequent request.

Instagram Becomes the Largest Mobile Social Network – Socialfresh

Instagram added 2 million new users last month. Everyone seems to love the fast growing app (only available on iPhone for now).

The Marketing Power of Brand Advocates

A rock star collection of mind-blowing stats about your most enthusiastic customers (AKA Brand Advocates.)

Use Your Advocates’ Reviews as Marketing Copy

CDW’s Senior Segment Marketing Manager, Lauren McCadney, on Advocate reviews: You can hire the best copywriter, but they’ll never beat an Advocate when it comes to authenticity. (Clip taken at the Chicago Brand Advocacy Series.)

How JetBlue Built Long Lasting Relationships on Their 10^th Birthday

If you want to make an impact on someone, and create Brand Advocates, do something unexpected and delightful.  For example, what if you were to give away gifts on your birthday? 

That’s exactly what JetBlue did on its 10th anniversary, as Morgan Johnston, Corporate Communication Manager, explains in this clip taken at the New York Brand Advocacy Series.

How Do You Energize Brand Advocates?

At the New York Brand Advocacy Series, attendees and panelists were asked, “How do you energize Word of Mouth?” Here are their answers.

The Adventures of Brand Advocate Man

It’s a bird..it’s a plane..no, it’s BRAND ADVOCATE MAN! Watch the story of how Brand Advocate Man helped a struggling marketer energize her Advocates and become a social marketing Superhero!

-Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance

The recording below is from our recent webinar, “3 Case Studies in 30 Minutes: How Three Travel and Hospitality Companies are Increasing Sales and Ratings by Leveraging Their Brand Advocates” featuring social marketing success stories from Rubio’s, Tryp by Wyndham, and Qatar Airways. The speaker was Founder/CEO of Zuberance, Rob Fuggetta (@robfuggetta).

Key Takeaways:

• Brand Advocate definition: Highly-satisfied customers and others who pro-actively recommend brands or products without being paid.
• Brand Advocates are a different breed- They are 2X more active content creators and 4X more likely to share great product experiences.
• On average, 50% of a company’s customers are Brand Advocates.
• Identify your brand’s Advocates by asking The Ultimate Question: On a scale from 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our brand or products to your friends? (9′s and 10′s are Advocates.)
• Advocate marketing has a sales conversion rate of 5% or higher compared to traditional marketing at less than 1%.
• Rubio’s Advocates have created over 3,800 Yelp reviews and shared 60,000 offers with their social networks.
• 41% of Tryp’s Advocates recommended the hotel by creating reviews. The average start rating was 4.7 stars out of 5.
• 43% of Qatar Airway’s Advocates actively recommend the airline. Qatar Airways is seeing an 80% click-through rate on Advocate stories that were shared with their social networks.

-Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance

The recording below is from our recent webinar, “5 Case Studies in 30 Minutes: How Five Software Companies are Increasing Sales and Positive Word of Mouth by Mobilizing Their Brand Advocates” featuring social marketing success stories from Intuit, Microsoft, NetApp, Webroot, and Symantec. The speaker was Founder/CEO of Zuberance, Rob Fuggetta (@robfuggetta).

Key Takeaways:

• Brand Advocate definition: Highly-satisfied customers and others who pro-actively recommend brands or products without being paid.
• Brand Advocates are a different breed- They are 2X more active content creators and 4X more likely to share great product experiences.
• On average, 50% of a company’s customers are Brand Advocates.
• Identify your brand’s Advocates by asking The Ultimate Question: On a scale from 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our brand or products to your friends? (9′s and 10′s are Advocates.)
• Advocate marketing has a sales conversion rate of 5% or higher compared to traditional marketing at less than 1%.
• Webroot Advocates have created 5,500 reviews and rated their security software an average of 4.5 out of 5 stars.
• NetApp is seeing an 80% in-bound click rate from offers shared by their Advocates to their social networks.
• Intuit has identified a brand army of 30,000 Advocates. 11,000 Intuit Advocates. have recommended Intuit through reviews and offer sharing.
• For a particular campaign, 96% of Microsoft SMB’s Advocates shared an offer with their Facebook friends.
• Norton’s sales jumped $25 million and their ratings doubled on Amazon after energizing Norton Advocates.

To learn more about the benefits of energizing Brand Advocates, download our whitepaper, “The ROI of Energizing Brand Advocates.”

-Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance