Oktober 2009

HOT TIP: Building your Fan Base is More Important than Ever!

There has been a lot of big news from Facebook over the past few days and while the reaction from consumers and developers has been mixed, the news for Fan Page owners is exciting! To begin, the action of 'becoming a fan' will now be dramatically more viral because every time someone becomes a fan of your brand a newsfeed will automatically be published (e.g. "Joe became a fan of XYZ Brand"). This means that for every person that fans your Page, potentially hundreds of their friends will be exposed to your brand and many of them may choose to become your fan also. For Fan page owners, this will result in even greater brand exposure and should make it easier to build your fan base. Of course, you still need to give Facebook users a reason to want to become a fan of your brand - that's where Wildfire's tools can be so powerful (FYI, last week we launched a campaign for a nationwide gifts company that generated 100K fans in just 4 days!).

Also positive are proposed changes to the friend invite (otherwise known as "Facebook Requests") functionality of fan page applications. Currently, when users wish to invite their friends to engage with a Fan Page application they choose from an alphabetical list of all their friends. Given that the average Facebook user has 150 friends, this makes it very time consuming for users to carefully select relevant friends and many end up either not inviting their friends or randomly selecting friends (usually those with names beginning with 'A'!). According to new changes proprosed by Facebook, the new friend selector will include better ways to categorize and sort friends so that users can more easily select those friends for whom a given invitation will be particularly relevant. We anticipate that this will result in a much higher response rate to friend invites.

Finally, Facebook also announced exciting plans with regard to Fan Page analytics. Details are limited at this stage, but according to Facebook they will soon be providing a richer analytics experience for Fan Page owners, which should make it easier for Page owners to evaluate the performance and value of their fan interactions.

NEW: Partnership with Email Software Campaign Monitor

We're excited to announce a partnership with Campaign Monitor, a leading provider of email marketing software (read integration tutorial). We received a lot of feedback from our customers that they would love to have an automated way to transfer the leads they collect via their Wildfire campaigns to a third party email software. To service this need we've partnered with the great team at Campaign Monitor, who arguably provide one of the best email software solutions in the world. Now you can take your campaign leads from your Wildfire account and automatically sync them to your Campaign Monitor account; thus combining the best of both worlds - the power of Wildfire to grow your email subscriber base and the beauty and simplicity of Campaign Monitor to communicate with this base. The setup process is very easy and takes just a few minutes. For more information on how to get started please read our tutorial.

NEW: 'Share your Favorites' Campaigns

Facebook users love sharing content that enables them to express more about their hobbies, interests, likes and dislikes and one of the most popular ways to do this is via 'share your favorites' campaigns (e.g. "share your social media favorites", "pick your top 5 surf spots" or "pick your top 5 movies of all time"). We've just added 'share your favorites' to our suite of social media marketing tools so that companies & agencies can easily create their own 'top favorites' campaigns to engage their Facebook fans, their website visitors and to spread the word about their company within Facebook.

Wondering how this might fit with your particular company? If you're a clothing company you could run a "pick your dream outfit" campaign where users pick from your inventory to build their ideal outfit. For travel companies, "pick your top 5 beach destinations", "pick the top 5 countries on your travel to-do list" or "pick your favorite adventure activities" are just a few possible ideas. If you're a restaurant, how about running a "my favorite entrees at [your restaurant]" or "my favorite wines" campaign? The possibilities are endless and to make a campaign even more enticing (and to provide a powerful way to build your fans & newsletter subscribers) try combining it with our sweepstakes format (e.g. "Pick your favorite outfit and then go into the draw to win it!").

HOT TIP: How to build an effective Social Media Marketing Campaign

In one of our last posts we gave you tips on how to create engaging, viral campaigns. But creating an engaging campaign is just one piece of the puzzle; equally important is coming up with campaigns that meet your business goals. There are many easy ways you can do this - if your goal is to drive sales, consider combining a coupon with your campaign (e.g. after entrants have entered your sweepstakes, quiz or contest use our coupon solution to provide them with a discount voucher). If your goal is to educate consumers about your products, weave this into your sweepstakes entry process (e.g. Zappos ran a shopping spree sweepstakes with us which required entrants to choose the clothing items they'd want to win from zappos.com and then input the clothing SKU numbers into the sweepstakes entry form). User generated contests are also powerful ways to educate consumers about your brand (e.g. Facebook ran a contest with us that required entrants to submit stories about how Facebook is doing good in their community) and so too are quizzes (e.g. check out the quiz currently being run by Snapple that helps entrants decide which of the Snapple flavors would be best for them). If your goal is to build your newsletter mailing list, Facebook fans or Twitter followers, sweepstakes and contests provide a powerful way to do this, but make sure that your promotion is tailored to attract those consumers who are most likely to consume your company's products. For example, if you're running a sweepstakes be sure to choose a prize that you think is especially appealing to your specific target demographic (i.e. don't offer the chance to win a MacBook Pro if you're trying to promote luxury travel to an audience of retirees!)

The Selena Gomez campaign currently running via our platform is a great example of how to tie in the power of social media with specific business goals. Selena Gomez, a star on the Disney channel, is in the process of launching her music career. She decided to run a user-generated contest via Wildfire that asks entrants to submit a photo demonstrating what they are doing to promote Selena's new album. Many thousands of entries have been submitted and these include user-generated videos, posters, side-walk chalkings, billboards, tshirts, events, websites and more promoting Selena's album. What's great about this contest is that it not only has powerful reach within the social networks (thanks to the newsfeeds and friend invites sent by entrants and voters, hundreds of thousands of people have been exposed to the contest) but also in the 'real' world (Selena's album is being promoted via posters, events, chalkings and more).

NEW: Quizzes for Facebook Fan Pages & Facebook Connect

We are excited to introduce a new, engaging promotion format: quizzes. No doubt you have seen quizzes showing up in your Facebook newsfeed; they can be highly engaging and viral because they allow for self-expression. While many of the quizzes that show up in the newsfeeds are trivial, when done right they can be both highly viral and highly relevant to brands. For example, if you're a travel company you could run a quiz that tells users what kind of traveler they are and then present users with some suitable trip suggestions. If you're a clothing retailer, a 'what's your style?' quiz would be a fun way to spread the word about your company and present users with targeted clothing suggestions. Our quiz format is easy to use and enables you to create fully customized quizzes, upload custom graphics, custom newsfeeds, product information and more. We also enable you to combine quizzes with sweepstakes or coupons, which is a powerful way to create campaigns that are both highly viral (quizzes are a great way to encourage consumers to publish newsfeeds) and generate leads (via sweepstakes) or sales (via coupons). For example, you could run a quiz 'what kind of bride are you?" and then direct people for the chance to win a dream honeymoon and/or a discount voucher for 20% off wedding invitations.

IMPROVED: Coupons for Facebook Fan Pages & Facebook Connect

Want to be able to individually track your coupon sales or ensure that coupons are only redeemed once? We've now updated our coupon solution to allow for the upload, display and tracking of unique coupon codes (i.e. each coupon redeemed contains a unique code). Jamba Juice launched a campaign this week ('Jamba Bucks') that uses our unique code functionality in a very unique way. They are giving out coupons via our Facebook Connect Product and Facebook Fan Page Product that can be redeemed at Jamba Juice stores. When consumers redeem the coupons they either recieve $1 off their purchase or they may find they are the lucky recipient of one of the many thousands of prizes that Jamba Juice is giving away, including cash prizes of $10,000! To make Jamba's campaign even more fun and viral, we have combined it with our virtual gift solution so users can send Jamba Bucks to their friends in the form of fun, Jamba-branded virtual gifts like smoothies, bucks, and cartoons.

NEWS: Awesome New Office

We're excited to have moved into a new office! It's nothing fancy but very functional - perfect for a lean start-up. If you're ever in Palo Alto and feel like stopping by, our new office is located just around the corner from Facebook Headquarters (almost) at 3485 El Camino Real. We'd love to see you!