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3 Ways to Find Brand Advocates


Allison Smith

Jan 17, 2020

My colleague Marc recently wrote a blog post on brand advocacy likening his mom to the ideal advocate. He hit it spot on: moms always support your “brand,” they defend you in public and are never afraid to tell others how amazing you are. While moms are built-in advocates, finding brand advocates for your business requires more time, effort and organization. Social marketing tools like Meltwater's help brands identify, segment and organize potential advocates across social communities. Meltwater lets you spend more time engaging with advocates and less time looking for them.

Keep reading for 3 ways to find brand advocates using Meltwater.

1. Social Listening to Find Brand Advocates

Meltwater uses keyword-driven search campaigns to find social media mentions about your brand, competitors and industry. The most straightforward way to find potential brand advocates is by simply looking through and sorting the list of your incoming brand mentions.

Browsing through brand-related searches is an easy way to identify potential brand advocates. Try sorting by “Views” or “Rank” to bring farther-reaching posts to the top. See definitions of view and rank below:

Rank analyzes the author of the post based on all discoverable social information. Rank takes into account the size of the author’s community, the frequency at which they participate in social environments, the channels on which they have a presence and their level of engagement with you. Rank is on a scale of 0 to 10. Views represents the total possible unique views for a specific post if everyone to whom the post was directed was able to observe the post in their stream. This is the number of impressions the post made in the world!

2. Social Media Sentiment to Find Brand Advocates

Social media sentiment can save you time when looking for brand advocates. Sentiment in Meltwater is driven by natural language processing (NLP), grouping together the most positive and negative posts for you to browse through. 

While on the Listen tab, put your mouse over “Analysis” in the menu and select “Sentiment.” The resulting page displays posts for your brand search broken down by sentiment by day in a bar graph and overall sentiment in a pie chart. Click on the green parts of the bar, or the green slice of the pie to browse through the list of posts that displays below the graphs.

3. Social Media Engagement to Find Brand Advocates

We’ve looked at how to find potential advocates through social listening and sentiment analysis, but what about community members who engage with your brand? Meltwater centralizes your brand’s engagement on Facebook and Twitter, offering up metrics that can identify users who interact with you frequently.

On the Engage tab, select either “Most Engaged Contacts” or “Top Retweeters” to see the users who interact most with your brand. The time period on each graph can be changed to focus on a specific campaign or spike in engagement.

The first two ways of identifying potential brand advocates looks only at single interactions, so the mentions may not necessarily equal advocacy. These users could become advocates later on, and the ones who mention you more frequently have more potential. The third method uncovers community members who are potentially advocating for your content, but not maybe not for your brand or products. No matter which method you use, after you identify potential brand advocates, use Meltwater to dig deeper into their social profiles. You can create lists here of users who have positively mentioned your product once and another for those who have mentioned you several times. You can also organize user lists by geography or campaign as needed.

While a brand advocate on social media will never quite live up to a mom-vocate, they can have a significant positive influence on your brand. Meltwater reduces the time and effort that it takes to identify potential brand advocates and gives you tools to research, segment and organize them as well. Log in and get started now!

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