by David Tien on Sun 24 August 2014

Buying people to follow, like, or puff up your own brand is easy.

If you've spent any time on social networks, you'll be inundated with posts offering "LikeForLikes" or "IncreaseYourFollowers". It's becoming a more common, and even ignored if not completely accepeted, practice these days.1 Truth be told, as we started building our own brand and social presence the thought definitely occurred to us. That initiatl ego boost and credibility bump would have felt great.

But our team ultimately decided against it, and chose to eat our own dog food and focus on engagement and organically building our presence and brand. Not surprisingly, the 'trick' to developing great brand advocates is to build a great brand, which in turn involves building a great product/service. Simple, right?

I'm not going to talk about how to build a great product -- I assume you've either already done that, are working towards it, or planning on it. So let's call that the first step.

Organically developing brand advocates is about service. It's about putting the customer first. And social media, like no other medium, has shifted the power dynamic towards the consumer.

The following steps will show you how to take a great (or potentially great) product and cultivate brand advocates.

  1. Get Active
    Contribute content, discussions, and thoughts with real value. Get involved on social networks, blogs, forums, and meetups. It does not mean spamming the community with product blurbs or advertisement. The main point being to start building your identity, and building a true relationship with your community.

  2. Listen
    Track and monitor the discussions in your network and community. Pay particular attention to any influencers or top posters. These will be the users who's voice and words will have impact and help shift discussions.

  3. Engage
    Don't just use social media as another way to blast out spam to your community. Leverage the one-to-one and direct communication capabilities for true engagement. Build direct, and meaningful relationships. And as with any meaningful relationship, this will take some effort.

  4. Reward
    Enable your advocates to be your lead voice. Provide them with valuable content, tools, and special services so they'll stand out in a crowd.

So will this work for us? We absolutely believe so. Follow or Like us and follow our journey.


  1. [mediashift blog](http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2014/09/buying-fake-twitter-followers-will-leave-you-tweeting-to-mannequins/ 

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