3.6 weeks into the new year and I'm blown away with the energy and momentum we're seeing with EveryoneSocial customers around their advocacy initiatives. What's driving this? What are they focused on? Where are we going?

What's driving the momentum around advocacy?

Every year advocacy gets bigger. At it's core, advocacy is simply word of mouth marketing. Everyone understands what that is and its value. It's not complicated and it's not convoluted. It's about people connecting with other people. Advocacy is about doing word of mouth at scale. Combine that with social being the channel, executives becoming more active on social, a continued focus on efficient grown and it shouldn't be a surprise that advocacy programs are getting more attention and resources. I've long believed that advocacy is the most efficient way to engage your target audiences and I believe more and more teams are coming to that conclusion.

What are leading teams focused on for 2026?

  • Activating all senior leaders. This trend is only gaining momentum. Leaders are the ultimate advocates and they have a massive halo effect on a program as a whole. Helping them to be active on social is a win, win, win. If you do one thing over the coming months, activate your C-suite.
  • Going deep on ROI. As one customer said to us recently "this is the most important thing we're focused on in 2026". The data is all there. Customers, prospects, hiring candidates, etc. are engaging with your content. Pulling out examples and proving it's impact on the business is the goal for every advocacy program. Leading teams are deeply focused on this.
  • Bigger programs. Programs are getting bigger. The reason is simple: the more advocates you have, the higher the ROI . As I've said in prior posts, it used to be us encouraging our customers to think bigger, now it's the other way around: our customers are telling us they're going big (often enterprise wide) out of the gate! I think a 100K+ programs are on the horizon.

Where are we all going?

Advocacy is something that every company should be doing. Our goal here at EveryoneSocial is to make launching and running a program as simple and efficient as possible. It's not only no one's job to be an advocate it's rarely someone's full time job to run an advocacy program! Especially as programs grow, simplicity, intuitiveness (overall UX) and efficiency are critical. This is what we're investing in and building towards with the EveryoneSocial Advocacy platform and we have a lot of exciting new features and capabilities we'll be rolling out over the year.

The other thing that's continues to be reinforced is that advocacy relates to ALL the core functions of a business: sales, marketing, comms, recruiting being the main ones. People and revenue, those are the two most important things for any business. They're the lifeblood! We have customers that use EveryoneSocial across these and other functions and we have customers who (in some cases for 10 years!) ONLY use EveryoneSocial for a single function (e.g., recruiting, employer branding). No matter how or where you employ advocacy, it will positively impact that function.

What should you do?

We're here to help in any way we can. Thinking about starting an advocacy program? Wanting to activate your execs or your sales or your recruiting teams? Looking to scale your program to new heights? There has never been a better time to do this than right now. Advocacy is all we do and we offer a number of unique capabilities and offerings around exec activation, roi and attribution, and team specific tools. We'd love to chat, talk about your goals, and how we can support.