Why A Social Advocacy Mobile App Is A Must For This Year

May 9, 2016

Social advocacy, I’m sure you’ll agree, will be huge this year whether it’s through employees, influencers or channel partners. Utilising your advocates’ social media accounts is certainly the way to go to increase your overall reach.

Why social advocacy

Nielsen reported that 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family when making a buying decision. With this knowledge in mind, it is not surprising that the popularity of social advocacy has increased exponentially.

LinkedIn further discovered that if brand content is shared through advocates such as employees, it will receive 2x more clicks than content shared through the brand directly.

Encouraging social advocacy
But the question is, how do you encourage your advocates to share your content in the first place, when they have little or no time to do this at work? The answer to this is, make it as easy as possible for them, and create a mobile app for sharing your content, at a time or place that works best for them.

PCs are not really convenient for managing social media, especially if you want to be actively listening, communicating and responding to your audience. Let’s face it, it isn’t always convenient to perform these tasks during working hours. They quickly get put to the back of the priority list, leaving your social media brand content to be infrequently posted out through your advocates. Only by being socially active regularly and responding to engagement frequently will you really receive the results that you the brand and the advocates themselves desire.

Why a mobile app?
Tim Hughes’ (who works for Oracle and has a huge social presence) recent blog post on making time for social media highlighted the importance of fitting social media in and around your life. Whether that’s during your breakfast, on your commute to work, lunch break or even when you get home from work. It’s about fitting it into your day to day life.

With Facebook reporting that 73% of people always have their mobile device with them, a mobile app could make a significant difference to the success of your social advocacy program, and getting many more advocates on board posting your content.

Not convinced? Here are a few more stats to show just how important, and how much of a difference a mobile app for social advocacy could make to your brand.

Mobile usage:

• Users pick up their mobile devices 150 to 200 times a day. This equates to 30 billion mobile moments each day. (Forrester)
• Users spend an average of 1.8 hours on their smartphones every day, with mobile apps taking up the majority of that time. (Forbes)
• More than 50% of mobile users pick up their phone immediately after waking up. (Deloitte, 2015)
• Users spend 84% of their time each month in five or fewer apps. (Forrester)
• The proportion of 4G users jumped from 8% to 25% in the last year. (Deloitte, 2015)

With this in mind, if you created a mobile app, the posting of brand content could easily fit into and become part of your advocates’ daily routines. They could then; post content, monitor their activity, conduct social listening and engage with their community as and when it suits them. Only by doing this will they receive the 2x higher CTR that LinkedIn reported.

Popularity of mobile vs PC’s 2016

Gartner recently reported that PC shipments have fallen 9.6% in the first quarter of 2016, due to many consumers now conducting a high proportion of online activity on mobile devices, reducing the demand for computers.

The chart below, created by Global Web Index highlights the expected increase of time spent on mobile devices, and the predicted fall of PC/ laptop/ tablet usage per year.

Many brands are now trying to take advantage of this knowledge by developing an app to improve the efficiency and ease of their employees’ day to day tasks.

Why bother turning on a PC, tablet or laptop, when you can do exactly the same activity on your mobile, the device you most likely have with you anyway? Especially with social media, the community that is always active. You need to be able to respond to engagement and act accordingly as and when necessary. Creating posts and sourcing content maybe more convenient to advocates out of working hours, perhaps on their commute or before work. By providing that flexibility you can suit all individuals’ preferences.

From the chart below, you can clearly see that 61% of businesses have invested in mobile apps within the last 12-18 months. This indicates that many organisations are embracing this technological development and are recognising its importance for their brand.

So don’t fall behind; it’s time to invest in a social media advocacy mobile app to revolutionise your program and encourage further adoption and engagement from your advocates. Only by making it simple for your advocates will they truly want to be on board and in fact stay on board.

This is something we have recently invested in ourselves and we’re pleased to say, it will soon be available for our customers. We foresee that this will drastically increase the adoption of social advocacy for many brands. We can’t wait to see the results. Stay tuned!

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