A Nielsen study found that 92% of consumers trust family and friend recommendations far more than direct brand communication—and PurView’s team saw no reason mortgage brokers would be any different.

A B2B property intelligence platform built by Teranet Inc., PurView’s social strategy started out almost entirely dependent on brand-authored content like product pages, sales collateral and direct outreach to reach its audience of mortgage brokers. The branded messaging couldn’t close the trust gap with PurView’s audience.

Maria Policelli-Sohrabi, Digital and Social Media Marketing Manager at Teranet Inc. and the marketing team identified the specific opportunities behind the problem: no formal advocate program existed, social listening wasn’t being used to identify high-affinity users, and there was no content pipeline built around social proof from real users. Left unaddressed, the cost of this gap was clear: over time, without a trusted voice in the market, it would be more expensive and more difficult for PurView to hit the team’s goal of gaining new broker customers each quarter.

Untapped distribution channels with pre-built trust

The distribution channel PurView needed already existed inside its own customer base. That insight came from combining an external data point with an internal one. Externally, that trust gap was already well established through the Nielsen study. Internally, using Sprout Social Listening to look at existing PurView users through a social lens. They tracked LinkedIn activity, Instagram and TikTok followings, industry award nominations such as Canadian Mortgage Awards Broker of the Year and speaking engagements at events like the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario (FSRA) Exchange. A clear pattern emerged. A subset of PurView users were already respected, visible voices in the mortgage broker community, and several were already talking about PurView without prompting or brand support.

The dots connected when the team realized these were not just satisfied customers, but untapped distribution channels with pre-built trust that brand content could never replicate.
Maria Policelli-Sohrabi
Social Media and Digital Marketing Manager at Teranet

Convincing leadership to fund a formal ambassador program meant translating that insight into a business case. To do so, the team paired that credibility argument with a concrete ROI model, including broker onboarding targets by province and a defined revenue goal. This stacked against a modest program budget of roughly $2,000 in paid social and $500 in boosted posts. When layered with in-kind benefits like free reports and conference registration, leadership could then evaluate the proposed ambassador program as a lead-generation investment rather than a brand play with “soft” metrics.

Ambassadors tell the story, in their own words

Social intelligence was the primary screening tool for the resulting ambassador program. Rather than pulling names from a current customer list, the team used Sprout Social Listening to build a scored pipeline of potential advocates across three provinces, evaluating each candidate’s PurView usage, social engagement and industry credibility. That process produced a first-round list, a backup list and a documented shortlist rationale.

Sadiq Boodoo surfaced through exactly this process—he was already a PurView subscriber, he had industry credibility as a speaker at the FSRA Exchange event, and had a combined social following of roughly 8,770 across networks where he was already sharing PurView content. He’s since become the program’s strongest-performing ambassador, headlining PurView’s “Combatting Fraud” Market Insight Forum and posting about PurView proactively, more than a year after his initial recruitment.

Ambassadors advocate in their own voice through named, bylined content rather than brand-scripted testimonials. The clearest proof: PurView now uses its ambassadors’ own words to recruit the next cohort. A brand recruitment post quoting Boodoo, Principal Broker at Approved Financial Services—”Being a PurView Ambassador means advocating for a solution that directly improves client service, reduces risk and improves workflow”—reached mostly people who weren’t already following PurView (59% of views) and earned a 21.4% engagement rate per reach.The performance was well above a typical brand post because it was Boodoo’s own words doing the persuading, not PurView’s brand voice.

Proof beyond one ambassador

Boodoo isn’t the only example of the pattern persisting. The same pattern showed up at PurView’s annual “Combatting Fraud” Market Insight Forum, where ambassadors Christine Xu and Sadiq Boodoo shared the stage with outside authorities like legal counsel from LAWPRO and regulators from FSRA. Year over year, engagements rose 11.7% (128 to 143), reactions rose 16.3% (49 to 57), the blended engagement rate rose from 6.4% to 6.9%, and attendance grew nearly 35% (266 to 359). Since the topic stayed the same and impressions barely moved, the results suggest that ambassador involvement helped make the forum more compelling and effective. 

The program at scale

Across 32 ambassador-tagged posts since launch (tracked using Tagging and Reporting in Sprout Social), the program has generated 12,587 impressions and a 12.1% engagement rate per reach, with roughly 90% of tracked views coming from outside PurView’s following.

There’s still room to grow. PurView has opened applications for its 2026-2027 ambassador cohort, expanding the program beyond its original invite-only group. Ambassadors have also moved from content contributors to public-facing brand representatives at national events and trusted advisors feeding into product development, with a 2027 referral program planned to turn that trust into a trackable acquisition channel.

Teranet’s PurView didn’t just find a workaround for brand skepticism—it built a distribution channel brokers actually trust. Curious what your own customers could do for your reach? Book a demo with Sprout Social to see how Social Listening can help.