6 Keys For Building Strong Youth Brand Advocates in China

Oh, so you’ve heard about social media? It’s about time. Now that the almost every company on the planet is aware of the importance of social media, let’s take a look at how to use social media to help build youth brand advocates in China. (And if you’re not aware of social media’s importance, first read this, and then time travel to the 21st century where you should be.)

A key question to first think about is:

How do you use social media to market your brand, get your customers to love you and talk about you?

As the number of digital agencies worldwide grows exponentially, companies will constantly be trying new and different social media strategies resulting in documented successful (and unsuccessful) case studies.

Any brand executing social media campaigns is somewhat trying to build customer advocacy for their brands. If they’re interested in having people talk about how good their brand is, then this is advocacy. Moreover, brands are interested in activating customers to push their friends and family to buy a product.

So how do we integrate consumer advocacy and brand advocacy? Let’s first look at a definition for brand advocacy:

“Brand Advocacy, is the active sharing of one’s beliefs, interactions, stories, experiences, thrills, and disappointments in regards to all products and brands.”

Brand advocacy in the social media world is built up by consumers clicking on a brand’s “fan” button on Renren or Facebook, sharing an online product review, setting your status message to things like, “Brand X is amazing!” and so forth.


So what are the essentials to building strong youth brand advocacy in the growing China social media landscape?

1. Product, product, product!

To make your customers love you, you have to put out good products. It’s as simple as that. Don’t expect to change consumer opinion by putting out a social media campaign if your product does not meet consumer standards. If you know your product is bad, social media cannot fix it.

2. Bring something new to the table.

Youth in China are becoming increasingly experimental. This is reflective of a maturing youth consumer. For example, a recent McDonald’s campaign utilized the specific demographic of Douban and created a unique “Bring your toys to life campaign” that involved uploading photos of your nostalgic McDonald’s toys acting out storylines. This was innovative and fresh. The Douban youth applauded McDonald’s for this campaign.

3. Create an interactive environment.

If you are going to create a mini-site (or a not so mini-site) for your campaign, then it’s best to create an interactive environment so that your brand advocates actually have something to do there. Ask them to participate, create something, interact with the brand, and share with friends.

4. But make sure it’s easy to do.

Provide clear guidelines, intuitive instructions, and create an easy to read and navigate user interface. The easier it is, the more your customers are enticed to interact with you.

5. Sharability.

Make sure if a customer endorses your brand, it is visible within his or her friend circle. This is why it’s best to utilize existing popular Chinese social networks such as Renren, Kaixin, and QQ. Of course it’s important to keep in mind that in China you must work directly with these social media networks and strike an exclusive deal. It’s highly important to involve platforms if you want to run social media campaigns in China, engaging in discussion early on with these folks can save you some time. (Not necessarily money though!)

6. Measure quality over quantity.

Instead of looking at the number of of impressions/clicks/comments you receive from the campaign, make sure to actually read what customers are saying about your brand. Just because your page generated millions of clicks, it doesn’t mean this has any effect on sales or brand advocacy.

If you’re unsure about entering into the social media foray and are still unclear about creating youth brand advocacy, it’s best to make sure you’re staying true to your brand ideals and not jumping on board a trendy social media campaign. Measure your options carefully, look at successes AND failures, and let us know if you need some actionable ideas.


Extended Reading:

• Fast Company Influence Project Fail
• Old Spice Success