Whenever I think of the advantages of a small, patriotic army defending their native soil against overwhelming odds, I think of 300 the movie. Granted, the Battle of Thermopylae was wildly exaggerated in the movie, but you get the gist. A small militia of dedicated Greeks defeated the vastly superior army of the Persians using the advantages of training, equipment and good use of terrain as force multipliers.

Of the 28 million Fanpages monitored by Quintly.com, 24 million of them have 10 million Likes or more. That’s nearly 85% of the Fanpages they sampled.

According to the The Wall Street Journal says the average Facebook Fan costs $1.07.

So doing some quick math, companies are either spending 10M x $1.07 = $10,700,000 or they’re buying cheap and meaningless fake likes (which even at $0.01 per fan = $100,000).

I don’t know about you, but I don’t happen to have $10,700,000 lying around in order to buy a massive Fanpage (never mind the fact that you have to boost your posts after to reach those folks, but we’ll get to that later).

If you’re like me, one of the 127 million U.S. businesses that has fewer than 1,000 employees, the odds seem overwhelmingly stacked against you.

But don’t despair, just like in the movie 300, as few as 135 Brand Ambassadors at your company can prove to be more powerful than a Fanpage with over 1,000,00 fans.

135 Brand Advocates Vs. 1 Million Facebook Fans

So, let’s break down how these numbers work.

According to Pew Research, the average Facebook user has 338 friends and, on average, 33% of those connections will see and interact with their social messages. So that means for every message a Facebook user posts, on average, 113 of their friends will see that post.

135 Brand Ambassadors x 113 Connections = 15,209 Total Reach

On the other hand, Valley Wag is reporting that the total number of fans who actually see your post is as low as 1 or 2 percent.

1,000,000 Fans x 1.5% Organic Reach = 15,000 Total Reach

Taking the median of 1.5%, that means you’d only need 135 Brand Ambassadors to reach 15,000 people on Facebook.

Wanna Make It Go Even Faster?

Do you want to do more with even less?

Of course you do.

So why not get your brand advocates to connect their Twitter and LinkedIn feeds as well?

When you add in the average 208 Twitter followers and 393 LinkedIn connections per user, you’ll only need 48 brand ambassadors to give you the same reach.

And, needless to say, the cost of starting a fifty person Employee Advocacy program is significantly lower than $10 million.

Do you know 50 people who would be willing to promote your brand? If so, you just might have what it takes to take on an army of 1,000,000.