5 benefits of Social Reach Optimization (SRO)

Are you reaching your target audience on social media? Connecting with customers, stakeholders and job candidates can be a real challenge. Social media algorithms change frequently, decreasing the reach of your company pages. And despite the effort you put into your content and social media strategy, people may hardly interact with your posts. How do you solve these issues? The answer is closer than you think. In this blog post, you’ll learn about the many benefits of brand ambassadors.

Brand ambassadors are the key to success

Your audience wants to read authentic, personal stories on social media. They’re not interested in constantly seeing marketing content and advertisements. That’s where your employees come in. With employee advocacy, your employees become your brand ambassadors. Using their personal social media channels, they share relevant and self-generated content about your organization. It’s a great way to improve your organic reach on social media, as consumers are more likely to trust information from an employee than from a CEO. But why stop there?

Introducing Social Reach Optimization

Your employees are just one type of stakeholder in your organization. What about including others? Social Reach Optimization (SRO) is about increasing your organic reach on social media by involving multiple brand ambassadors. For example, you may also utilize your dealers and franchisees. Social Reach Optimization puts real people and significant stakeholders at the heart of your social media strategy. They create and share authentic content about your organization, not because they have to, but because they think it’s worthwhile to share.

5 benefits of Social Reach Optimization

Well known strategies in marketing include Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Advertising (SEA) and Social Media Optimization (SMO). Why should you add Social Reach Optimization to the list? With SRO you can:

1. Increase your online reach without extra costs.
   On average, your employees have about 750 connections each. Furthermore, social media algorithms ensure that posts from employees reach more of your target audience’s timelines compared to company posts. This way, SRO may result in up to 600 extra views per employee per post!
2. Strengthen the connection with your employees.
   When everyone in your organization is active on social media, they’re always up-to-date on important news and exciting new projects. It creates a sense of social bonding between colleagues and increases their connection to your company
3. Get higher conversion.
   Leads that you acquire through personal accounts are seven times (!) more likely to convert to prospects or customers. The same applies to potential candidates for your recruitment department. When they’re referred by your current employees, conversion is much higher
4. Increase trust in your organization.
   Research shows that 76% of social media users are more trusting of social media posts from employees, compared to corporate posts. What real people say is much more credible than anything a company shares
5. Improve engagement.
   Authentic content created by your brand ambassadors doesn’t only contribute to a higher online reach, but improves your engagement as well. Get ready to rake in those likes, shares, and comments!

We’re all in this together

You can’t do Social Reach Optimization on your own. You need your employees, dealers, and franchisees. How do you align these brand ambassadors? If you want people to feel connected to your brand, you need uniform communication. Whatever the source. That’s why you help your ambassadors. By managing your online marketing in one place, like Apostle’s Brand Advocacy platform, you have more influence on the way stakeholders promote your products and services online. You can even provide them with content to share by creating and scheduling social media posts.

How to get started 

You’re convinced of SRO’s benefits and want to implement it in your social media strategy. Great! Where do you start? First, you have to remember that brand advocacy has to be voluntary. You can’t force your stakeholders to share authentic content about your organization. So how do you motivate them to become brand ambassadors? You let them know what’s in it for them. For example, show them it’s an opportunity to share their accomplishments and strengthen their personal branding. And when you’re using SRO for recruitment purposes, it may even decrease their own workloads. 

Everything you need to know about Social Reach Optimization

Want to learn more about implementing Social Reach Optimization? Download our whitepaper and discover the benefits of SRO for your marketing, recruitment and sales departments.