Over the last 12 months, Facebook has moved to a fully paid media network, and are making it hard for brands to “earn” reach with their own content to their own fans. Brands are now looking for better ways to reach these fans – and the friends of the fans. One way, besides paying for social reach ads, is to leverage the audiences of advocates (aka superfans, ambassadors, influencers).

We think that a 1000 active brand advocates have more reach and engagement power than about 3million brand fans/followers and here’s why:

The average advocate has 245 Facebook friends¹, and 33% of those friends will see their post². A brand page’s post, on the other hand, will often only reach 3% of their fan base³. Thus, a post on behalf of a brand page with 1M fans will reach about 30,000 people. 375 advocates posting about a brand will make the feed of about 82 friends per advocate, reaching over 30,600 people.

So that’s one of the reasons we are adding 20 Fortune 1000 customers in Q1!

1. PewResearch
2. Stanford University
3. IgniteSocial