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In the past, community management was more of a reactive job—the community was seen to be there, and the community management team reacted and responded to what was happening. This including answering to comments, tags, DMs, story mentions, and making sure that the community felt nurtured and listened to.

And then when it was time to find ambassadors or influencers, it was an entirely separate team that worked on that—going through agencies, different kinds of tools online, reaching out via e-mail to different people with strong followings, and trying to establish deals.

Today, however, the best approach is one far from that.

As the gap between consumers and creators online reduces further and further, there are far more potential ambassadors for your brand that you’re already interacting with.

People—normal people—are getting better and better at engaging their own communities. When they love certain brands, they’re not afraid to use their skills to tell people about them. And if they’re incentivised, this only improves further.

Every brand has these loyal, hyper-engaged followers, who themselves are creators and thought leaders in their own communities. The big question is, how do you find these for your brand? How do you engage with them and align them to your objectives?

Let’s learn.

Sliding through your DMs

Your DMs are the place with the most direct interaction with your community. Here are the different kinds of valuable, engaged people you can find in your DMs.

People who ask a lot of questions

These people are highly motivated to learn more about your brand, your products, and your values.

They are curious, and if you reward their curiosity by engaging with them further, they’ll be even more engaged with your brand, and love you even more.

These are the curious ones.

People who tag you in a lot of stories frequently

Assuming that what they’re saying about you is positive, these are people who have bought your products already and LOVE sharing about you, without even being asked to do so.

This is very powerful. Check if these folks have a good community of their own, and find ways to incentivise them to not only post more, but also evangelise their communities to your brand!

These are the ones that express.

People who react a lot to your stories

These are folks who are actively engaged with your content. This means that they like what you’re doing—and chances are that they would love to engage with you if given the opportunity.

These people are the engaged ones.

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Check your tags

The next place you’ll find engaged and potential ambassadors is your tagged posts.

People who tag you very frequently

The same thing applies here too—they either LOVE sharing about you specifically, or they love sharing about all the brands that they’re impressed with.

This is a great thing. These people come into the category of people who love to share everything they do, and they are usually the advice-givers in their own communities, and you should tap into them!

These people are the communicators.

People who have high engagement

Check the comments on their posts. Are their followers engaged? Are people responding positively? Do they seem to be able to inspire their community?

No really, do they inspire? This is a feeling you’ll get, and when you find the people who have this ability to inspire others, and if you’re able to inspire them, it’s extremely powerful.

Also check the rest of the posts of these accounts. Are their feeds coherent? Or are they like a street with tons of billboards everywhere? What are their values? What do they communicate?

These people are the inspirers.

People who create very beautiful content

Then there are people whose primary strength is in the area of creating beautiful content.

They are great photographers (or hire them), know how to tell great stories through videos, Reels or TikToks, and their followers love the content they create.

And when they love your brand or your products, they can do a GREAT job of creating beautiful content for you, which you can then use in ads, on your feed, on your website, wherever you like.

✨ Mini Case Study✨
Reagan from Vaer Watches (and one of Ubu’s customers) recently told me that he was absolutely amazed with how he was able to get some very authentic content about his watches through his community.
When he used that content for ads, they performed WAY better than the ads they made after spending tens of thousands of $ on photo and video shoots.

Doing this at scale and setting a system

Think of what I wrote above as the first principles to ambassador-finding.

Yes, you can do this just when you need to, but to really put yourself in a good place and have a constant supply of potential ambassadors to engage in different campaigns, you need to put in place a system for this.

Imagine this—you do all this at scale by putting in place a system to identify ambassadors during the day or week by looking through ALL the interactions you have, and then by the end of the month you have plenty of ambassadors that you’ve already vetted and are ready to go.

How do you exactly do this? Stay tuned for a future article on putting in place a system to farm ambassadors ✨

Wrapping up

How are you currently finding ambassadors for your brand? What are you doing with them? Let me know in the comments below or by sending me an email at:

mayank [at] getubu [dot] com

Shameless plug: Ubu is a tool that helps DTC brands engage and grow their community better by combining Inbox Management, UGC/Analytics and an Influencer CRM. We're growing pretty fast in Europe, and I'd love to have you give it a shot for free for your brand.

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Selling Social

How finding your top brand ambassadors is a…