While some of the most obvious forms of of using social media for advertising are tools and functions inherent in social networks themselves, one of the best ways of advertising is actually utilizing the communities you build using these social networks. By creating strong relationships with your fans and followers, you can then empower your community to be evangelists for your brand. This word-of-mouth marketing can often be much more powerful, and have a greater reach, than just using social media platforms to share a single message about your product.

To encourage your community to act as evangelists for your product, thank your fans and followers for kind words and building buzz about your brand by retweeting the things that your fans have to say, or publicly thank these users on Facebook. Additionally, you could offer highly active members of your community the opportunity to review products as a guest blogger, which will benefit them with more traffic to their own Twitter, Facebook, and/or blog. Encouraging your community to actively talk about your brand will not only encourage others to do the same, but these fans and followers will likely remember your brand or business beyond the walls of social media, recommending you to friends and family in the “real world.”

After you build and encourage evangelism about your brand in your social media communities, you can recruit these dedicated fans to promote a new product or campaign. While they may not be customers themselves, these evangelists can spread the word about your business, reaching others who may themselves then become customers. If an evangelist of your brand can lead to even one sale that you would not have gained otherwise, they are worth their weight in gold.

Just remember to always thank your evangelists appropriately — especially if they are extremely beneficial for you, whether financially or by other terms meaningful to you and your business.