Increase organic reach and engagement by collaborating with your audience

Here's the thing – many brands and businesses are struggling to generate organic engagement and reach on social media, especially on Facebook. There is no shortage of blog posts and articles with tips to help you buck this trend: use images (silly billy), keep your copy short (you bore), ask questions and run polls (why don't you) they say.

Not many of them, though, say much about your content. If your stories are not engaging, your audience will not engage with you no matter how you package your stories up. If you post stories worth engaging with, your audience will naturally engage with you.

What makes engaging stories?

A lot of research and hard work helps produce engaging stories, so there’s no easy wins there. However, one thing we notice more and more is that advocates and influencers are pretty good at producing engaging stories. Or, perhaps, it might be more accurate to say that consumers find content generated by advocates and influencers more engaging than some of the content brands and businesses produce. This is backed up by a study published in the Journal of Marketing:1 consumers find ads more persuasive if they know the ad is created by a fellow consumer.

Consumers find ads more persuasive if they know the ad is created by a fellow consumer. ¹

Curation of stories through advocates and influencers works – these stories add more depth to your social presence and make your narrative richer. So influencer/advocate outreach is now an invaluable part of our social media plans for our clients. It helps build personal relationships with our audience and some of the most engaging stories we post on our clients’ channels come from influencers and advocates. We also find, unsurprisingly, that a story is likely to get more engagement if the advocate/influencer's profile fits within the demographic of a client's audience.

How can you collaborate with your audience on social media?

Advocate/influencer outreach

Consumers are getting really good at creating content. Reaching out to these guys to recognise the quality of their work is a fantastic way to build relationships. Some will happily give you permission to use some of their content on your social media channels. The trick is to ensure the story fits within your narrative and the advocate/influencer fits within your audience demographic.

UGC Competitions

Competitions are a great way to incentivise your audience to share their stories with you. We come across some exceptionally good stories when we go through the entries generated through competitions. Feed these stories back into your social ecosystem and share them in status updates during, and even after, the competition.

Other ways

Often there are additional opportunities which are unique to each business and brand. For instance product launches or events can yield some wonderful stories, but to make these work, you'll have to prepare and plan well in advance.

What’s the most effective way to share your audience’s stories?

Don’t change the story

We’ve experimented a lot here and, perhaps unsurprisingly, we discovered the best way to share these stories is to share them as they are i.e. do not change the words. So we share these stories word for word, but we do fix grammar and typos, and we do not change the images or videos.

Credit the creator

Crediting the creator and giving a very brief overview of who they are improves the performance of the status update. If the creator has a social media profile, tag their profiles/pages.

Make it relevant

Seems obvious, right? Your brand and social media presence will be stronger if you choose to share stories that are relevant to your brand’s narrative and enforce what your core message.

What's the best way to identify and activate influencers and advocates?

We can help you create an engaging influencer/advocate campaign. Just give us a bell on +44(0)2036372639 or drop us a line at to get started.