Your Social Media Growth Never Looked So Good (aka Social Media Monitor)

I’m excited to write about a new product we’re launching called the Social Media Monitor, which is an important step toward our vision of offering a comprehensive platform to measure, analyze, and act on your social media engagement.  In a nutshell, the Wildfire Monitor gives users the ability to compare the growth of several social objects over time. Think of it as Compete.com for the social world.  At launch, the objects we support include Facebook pages and Twitter accounts.

The utility of the Monitor is probably best illustrated by example, so let’s dig in.  All a user needs to do is enter the name of one or more Facebook pages or Twitter accounts.  Conveniently, you don’t need to know someone’s Twitter screen name as we let you search using real names, too.  In fact, we try to make it as easy as possible by providing intelligent suggestions as soon as you start typing.

Say you’d like to compare a series of brands on both Facebook and Twitter to see their respective reach and growth over time.  Perhaps one of these brands is your own, so you’re interested in evaluating how you stack up against the competition. Let’s take some of the largest U.S. retailers as an example: Walmart vs Target vs Amazon.

Notice that in terms of Facebook fans, Walmart and Target were neck and neck until September, after which Target took the lead and has been steadily leaving its competition behind.  A recent surge in November and December puts the gap between Target and the #1 US Retailer at around 600,000 fans.  The Facebook fan count for Amazon is considerably smaller than the previous two, but don’t count them out just yet.

Examining Twitter followers reveals that Amazon’s deal Tweets (@amazondeals) have a bigger audience than its competitors’ equivalents, and the buzz around Black Friday and Cyber Monday has given the E-tailer a significant follower boost, whereas the others failed to grow any faster than previously in the year.

Now that you had a first look at the results, say you suddenly remembered that you left out a relevant comparison point, Sears.  Easy! Just click the “Add more” link on the results page, and you can include other objects in the comparison. Similarly, you can remove any objects you no longer care to compare.  Check out our retail example with Sears added into the mix: Walmart vs Target vs Amazon vs Sears.

[caption id="attachment_1377" align="alignnone" width="540" caption="Various features available in Social Media Monitor"][/caption]

So now your comparison is exactly the way you want it, and you’re really pleased with how it looks, so you’re eager to show others.  Well, the Monitor is equipped with all the sharing features you’d expect: you can email a link to the comparison, Like it on Facebook, Tweet about it, or even embed the growth chart on your blog or website.

[caption id="attachment_1375" align="alignnone" width="540" caption="Sharing a Comparison on Social Media Monitor"][/caption]

Lastly, say you’re curious to keep track of this comparison week after week.  We have you covered: just subscribe to the email alerts and every 7 days we’ll send you an email with the current state of the objects you compared as well as the growth since the last update.  Now you don’t have to constantly check the social networks for updated fan counts (but you could still do that for fun, of course).

Tracking social media fan bases is valuable not just for big brands and consumer products; interesting findings can be uncovered in all sorts of domains.  For instance, with College Football Bowl Season just around the corner, we had a look at how the Top 5 BCS-ranked teams are doing in the social space: Auburn vs Oregon vs TCU vs Stanford vs Wisconsin.  Looks like the Badgers are #1 when it comes to Facebook fans, but Oregon’s hot on their trail, doubling their fan count in the last two months!

[caption id="attachment_1409" align="alignnone" width="540" caption="BCS National Championship Game: Auburn vs Oregon"][/caption]

What will you compare with the Wildfire Social Media Monitor? We’re curious to hear about any interesting social media success stories you find.

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How to Avoid Misspending Money when Running Your Facebook Ads!

In two recent blog posts we shared some highly effective and highly popular tips for how to maximize the success of your Facebook ads via A/B testing and clever use of images, titles and copies. But following all of this great advice will never work if you fall prey to a common but potentially fatal mistake. In this post we’ll explain what this mistake is and what you can do to avoid it!

So let’s assume you’ve followed our advice about A/B testing and you’re running two ads side by side. Your ads are driving to a sweepstakes which you are using as a way to generate leads for your company. The first ad (ad A) is generating a click through rate of 0.037% and the second ad (ad B) is generating a click through rate of 0.035%. So ad A is doing better than ad B, right? WRONG! This data (seen below) is taken from a real ad campaign we recently finished running and if you’d decided to run ad A and pause ad B you’d have ended up costing yourself a lot more money and generating far poorer results. Why? Because although ad A generated more clicks, the people who clicked on it were far less likely to enter the sweepstakes than those who clicked on ad B. In fact, when looked at in terms of cost per entry (i.e. the total money spent on the ad campaign divided by the number of entries that the ad campaign generated) ad A was almost 4x more expensive than ad B.

What does this illustrate? That you can’t measure the success of your ad on number of clicks alone. Instead, you need to define the goal of your ad (e.g. number of entries, number of coupons redeemed) and then A/B test to determine which ad results in the lowest cost per acquisition (CPA) and not cost per click (CPC).

But how can you measure the CPA of your Facebook ads? Fortunately, Wildfire recently released a new analytics platform that makes it easy for our whitelabel customers to measure the true ROI on their Facebook ads. We’ll explain how it works in 5 easy steps.

Step # 1: Generate referral sources to track the real performance of your ads
Wildfire’s new analytics platform enables our whitelabel customers to easily link their Facebook ads to the campaign they’re running with Wildfire (be it a sweepstakes, a coupon, a giveaway or another of our campaign types) so that they can measure which ads are resulting in the lowest cost per acquisition (i.e. cost per entry, cost per coupon collected etc).

To do this, log into your Wildfire account, click on ‘analytics’ next to the campaign you’re trying to measure and then click on ‘add referral source’. First you’ll be asked to name your referral source — this is so you can remember which ad applies to which referral source (so, for example, if the first ad you want to test is one with a photo of a cupcake, you could name your referral source ‘cupcake ad’). You’ll then be provided a URL that you should use to link your cupcake ad to your campaign. Once your ad goes live, our analytics will automatically track how this specific ad performs in terms of visits to and entries in your campaign.

Step # 2: Input the referral sources into your ad campaigns
When you are creating your ad, take the referral source that you generated for this particular ad and input it as the destination URL for that ad.

Step # 3: A/B test
Create a variety of different ads to find out which perform best. Follow the steps in our previous post about A/B testing to learn how best to optimize and test your ads. 

Step # 4: Analyze the results
Now it’s time to analyze the results of your ads and figure out which are performing the best in terms of Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), not Cost Per Click (CPC). To do this, you need to create a very simple spreadsheet that shows total money spent and total number of campaign visits and entries for each of your ads. You can calculate the CPA of each ad by dividing the total money spent by the number of entries.

The lower the CPA, the more effective the ad!

 

The important thing to remember is that your cost per entry is determined by two main ratios: your click-thru rate and your entry rate.  As you can see from the example in the spreadsheet, the ad with the highest click-thru rate only has an entry rate of 16% whereas the winning ad has an entry rate of 54%.  This is why you should look not only at click-thru rates, but also entry rates when determining which ads to pause and which to expand on.

Step # 5: Pause those ads that are not performing well
Now that you’ve identified which ads are generating the lowest CPA, pause all other ads. You may want to try A/B testing new ads against your current best performing ads to see if you can generate ads that produce even lower CPA.

Calculating your ROI
After you have optimized your ads, you now have a set of effective ads that will continue to bring in more leads for your business.  You can compare the cost per lead of your Facebook ads with other marketing channels— Pay Per Click (PPC), email marketing, telemarketing, trade shows, direct mail— you may be surprised at how effective Facebook turns out to be for generating leads for your business, especially if your promotion takes off in popularity.

We are strong believers in the effectiveness of Facebook for generating leads— in fact, we have hundreds of major brands continuing to launch one promotion after another.  We know it works well.

So what do you do with your lead?
You've got your lead, which at its most basic is an email address but can contain many other fields (since you can customize your Wildfire entry form to ask your entrants whatever information you feel is useful to learn).  You can add these leads to your email marketing database as subscribers to your newsletter, or for other outreach.

You might consider using one of many email marketing self-service solutions like ConstantContact or MailChimp to message your new leads to stay in regular touch with them and strengthen the relationship your brand has with its customers. With Wildfire Promotion Builder, you can actually sync up your leads management with several email marketing solutions so that the leads port right into your email service.

An exciting bonus!
Facebook introduced a feature just last week called “Tell Your Fans,” where Fan Page administrators can now import sets of email contacts (like the ones you got from your Wildfire promotions) and message out to those users using the Facebook messaging system, as a way of telling them to visit and “Like” the Fan Page. This is a great way to reach out to users after they’ve interacted with your campaign to remind them of the great reasons to “Like” your page!

This is an especially valuable feature if you happened to run a promotion using Wildfire, but didn't require your users to like your page before they entered.  You should also use this in your ROI calculation, with the knowledge that money you spent on ads went to acquiring Facebook page “Likes,” even after the end of the promotion.

Now that you have the knowledge to accurately assess the ROI of your promotional and advertising campaigns in a variety of different ways, planning a marketing strategy for your brand will be a much more effective and measurable task! What metrics do you use to analyze the effectiveness of your marketing outreach? We’d love to hear from you about them in the comments below!

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BIG NEWS— Wildfire selected as Finalist in the Mashable Social MediaAwards, and we need your help to win!

The Wildfire team has some super exciting news— we just found out that we've made it into the top 5 nominees for the category of "Best Social Media Management Tool" in the 2010 Mashable awards! The Mashable awards one of the most prestigious social media awards in the world. There were over 40,000 nominations in this year's awards so we are very honored to have been selected as a finalist.





We are over-the-moon at the prospect of winning the award— but we can't do it without your help! Please take a minute to submit your vote for Wildfire to win the award for "Best Social Media Management Tool!" Mashable is accepting votes on a daily basis, through December 15th. Among the millions of votes flying around, yours could be the one that makes us the winner! We really appreciate the support you've already given us, and thank you in advance for taking the time to cast your vote (by clicking on the Mashable button above, or by clicking here) and spreading the word to your colleagues!

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BREAKING NEWS: Facebook Changes Its Promotions Policy — Wildfire Provides Compliant Solution

Facebook has just announced an update to its promotions policy. The major change in this update is that, going forward, there is no longer a requirement to obtain approval from Facebook to run a promotion entirely within Facebook. However, companies do still need to comply with Facebook's promotions guidelines and they do still need to use a third party application (e.g. Wildfire's contest and sweepstakes applications) to run their promotions. What does this new policy mean for your promotions plans? Here is a breakdown of the details.

What has changed

• Previously, in order to administer a promotion inside of Facebook, you had to either obtain explicit approval from a Facebook representative, or else run your promotion in two parts by  "publicizing" it in a tab on Facebook but "administering" it (collecting submissions or entries, conducting the drawing, judging winning entries, or notifying winners) off of Facebook, like at a Wildfire microsite.


• Now, there is no need to obtain approval to administer the entire promotion inside of Facebook, so users participating in your promotions will remain inside of the Facebook environment by default throughout the entire process flow of the promotion (and do not need to be taken to microsite to submit their data). This is great news because generally promotions that are run entirely in Facebook have better conversions (i.e. higher entry rates) and higher rates of sharing (via newsfeeds and friend invites) than those that are only publicized in Facebook but administered via a microsite.

What has not changed

• All promotions still need to be compliant with Facebook Promotions Guidelines and its Platform Policies. This means all promotions must still "be administered through an application on the platform", and can "only be entered by going through a location on the Canvas page of an application in Facebook or on that applications tab on a Facebook Fan Page."


• This means that, as before, no promotions can be run simply by asking users to write something on the wall, alter their Facebook profile picture, change their status, or upload a photo. The promotion needs to exist within the environment of a dedicated application, like Wildfire's sweepstakes or contest applications.

What you need to know

Wildfire remains the easiest tool to use to create a compelling and intuitive promotion for your Facebook fans. Best of all, when you run a Wildfire promotion, you know that the functionality of your campaigns is 100% compliant with Facebook's promotions guidelines, even in the occasion that they change.

We have updated our promotions platform in accordance with these changes, so that any promotions built from now on will automatically run entirely within the Facebook environment instead of taking users to a microsite as they enter. If you have a promotion that was previously built but not launched yet, it will also behave according to the new changes. If you have a promotion that was launched prior to the announcement, and you did not receive Facebook approval at that time, the administration of your campaign will still occur through a microsite.

As always, we welcome any questions, concerns, or feedback you might have. You can leave a comment in the box below, or email us at info@wildfireapp.com. We're happy to address all inquiries!

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How to Use A/B Testing to Achieve Positive ROI on your Facebook Ads

Our recent post about optimizing the performance of your Facebook ads was so popular (several businesses told us that after following our advice they saw positive ROI on their Facebook ads for the very first time) that we have decided to continue the Facebook ads topic. This time, we want to explain in an easy way how you can effectively test, measure and optimize your ads (what many call ‘A/B testing’) to ensure that you get maximum results.

What is A/B testing and how can it help your Facebook ad performance?
A/B testing is the process of comparing two ads against each other, one slightly different than the other, and seeing which one gets the best results then testing the ‘winning’ ad against a new variation and so on until you’ve optimized your ad. So, for example, you might run two ads that have identical copy and targeting but one has a photo of a cupcake and the other has a photo of a burger. You measure which has the best results and find that the burger is the most successful image. Then you test the ad with the burger image against a new variation - perhaps you test another image to see if it beats the burger image or you keep the burger constant in both variations of your ad and you instead try adding different copy to your ad to see what works best. You keep testing ads against each other in this way until you find the optimal combination of images, text and audience targeting for your ad. Anyone can do this—you don’t need to be an expert to optimize your ad.

[caption id="attachment_1190" align="aligncenter" width="351" caption="Which ad will perform better? A/B Testing is one way to find out, accurately."][/caption]

How do you use A/B testing to increase the performance of your Facebook ads?

Advice # 1: First decide what you are going to measure to determine success
Before running two variations of an ad to determine which is more successful, you first have to decide how you’ll measure success. Below are a few possible success questions:Is the winning ad the one that:

• gets the most clicks?


• leads to the most fans?


• produces most signups?


• yields the most coupon redemptions?

Common practice is to measure and optimize for click-thru rate but you should be aware that this isn't necessarily the best metric for your business. For example, you may have created an advertisement that is great at getting people to click, but terrible at getting people to complete your sign-up form, become a fan or browse your website. In other words, your click-through rate is high but your conversion rate is low.  Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) takes both the click through rate and conversion rate into account, so it's generally the strongest indicator of advertising success.

CPA Example 1: If your goal is to generate fans, you could measure the effectiveness of each of your ads in terms of generating fans.

CPA Example 2: If your goal is to generate email address, measure the cost per email address acquired by each version of your ad.

CPA Example 3: Of course the most powerful measurement would be the number of sales that each ad generates for your business, but realize that for most businesses there may be a delay of many weeks or months between when someone clicks on your ad and when they buy your product so you’d need to wait too long to test which of your ad variations is most successful in terms of sales.

The idea of A/B testing is that you test, measure and learn quickly, and not wait months to get results.

Hot Tip! Sometimes it may actually make sense to optimize your ad so that people do NOT click on it. This might seem odd, but you can actually remind users about your brand and pay very little in return because ultimately you only pay if someone clicks on your Facebook ad. So, for example, you may want to run ads for your existing fans to wish them a ‘Happy Holiday’. This will generate very different results from an ad that contains an explicit call-to-action (e.g. click here to get a free Holiday coupon) but if your goal is branding discouraging clicks can be highly cost effective.

Hot Tip! Wildfire recently launched conversion tracking in our new analytics dashboard (see “NEW PRODUCT: Real-Time Campaign Analytics” for more details) which enables you to run different ads to your Wildfire promotion and track how well they are converting in terms of the leads they generate.

Advice # 2: Choose a control for your experiment
The next step in your process is to create your ‘control’ ad. This is the starting ad against which you will test new variations of this ad in order to see if you can improve its performance. So start out with whatever you think will be the most effective image, copy and targeting for your ad - this will be your ‘control’ ad. Don’t worry if you’re not sure - the great thing about A/B testing is that you start with your best guess and then you use measurement and testing to turn your best ‘guess’ into an ad that’s proven through measurement.

Hot tip! For inspiration for your ‘control’ ad try looking at the ads of other companies that are known to successfully use Facebook ads (e.g. Groupon, Zynga, Living Social). You should also read our post about successful ads,  “18 Super Easy, Highly Effective Tips to Grow your Fans via Facebook Ads.”

Advice # 3: Now create your ‘test’ ad by changing a single element.
Now that you have your control ad, its time to create ads to test against. When creating new ads for testing change only one element in each new ad. If you change more than one element (e.g. the image and the text) when you measure the results you won’t know if the change in performance is due to the new image or the new text.

Example for test ad #1: You might work on optimizing your ad image first by creating several new ads in which you try a new image for your ad but keep the description and title the same.

Example for text ad #2: For the next set, keep the image and description the same but change the title in each ad.

Example for test ad #3: Finally test different descriptions, each with the same title and image.

You may also test the target audience for the ad by keeping the ad exactly the same but targeting different kinds of viewers e.g. 20-30 year old women versus 30-40 year old women (the Facebook ads tool provides you with this targeting feature). Altogether it’s not unusual to run through approximately 20-30 variations of your ad for one ad campaign.

Hot tip! Unlike A/B testing for Google ads, where titles and descriptions are extremely important, on Facebook graphics trump both of these characteristics. Spend more time testing different image variations, followed by title, and then, if time and budget permit, test your ad description.

Advice # 4: Test a large number of images
When doing your image tests, focus on quantity - we’d recommend testing 5 images at a minimum, but testing 20 images is preferred. If you test many images you may find that several of them work well - which will provide you with a great base of images for your future ad campaigns. For some very effective tips and tricks about exactly what types of images to try, check out our previous blog post with “18 Super Easy, Highly Effective Tips to Grow your Fans via Facebook Ads.”

Hot tip! When testing images try to form a hypothesis about which ones will ‘win’ rather than simply waiting for the data to find the winner. This will help you to learn why one image is better than another, thus enabling you to become more and more adept at choosing appropriate images in the future.

Advice # 5: Use A/B testing to identify the appropriate target audience
Facebook ads have very powerful targeting features. You can control which users see your ads based on very specific guidelines, such as age, gender, geographic location and even interests. Use A/B testing to identify what kind of audience is most receptive to your ads by displaying identical ads to users with different demographics or interests.

Example for targeting: You might try displaying your ad to American women aged 25-35 years who indicate they are married and then to American women aged 25-35 years who indicate they are unmarried. This will help you to determine if your ads resonate best with married or unmarried women. You might then wish to further refine your audience by running the ads for American married women aged 25-35 years who indicate ‘cooking’ as an interest versus those who don’t.

Advice # 6: Run all the versions of your ad simultaneously
When you are testing different variations of an ad be sure to run them at the same time. If you run them at different times you won’t know if the reason for the different performance of the ads is the changes you made to the ad itself or differences relating to the timing of the ads. For example, if you’re testing two images and you run one on Friday and the other on Sunday, the Sunday ad might perform better because of the image or perhaps just because people have more time to click on ads on Sundays because they are not at work. Unless you run the ads simultaneously you won’t be able to isolate the true cause of performance differences.

Advice # 7: Run your ads long enough to reach statistical significance
Be sure to run your ads so that they get enough clicks for your results to be statistically significant. You may find, for example, that in the early stages of your test one ad gets twice as many clicks as the other but if the number of clicks is very low (e.g. 10 clicks for ad A versus 5 clicks for ad B) you simply don’t have enough data to be sure that Ad A is performing better than Ad B. As a general rule of thumb, make sure you have at least 100 clicks for each ad.  Once you’ve run your ads long enough then pause the less effective ads and push your budget towards the successful ads, versus running the “losers” for longer and wasting your budget.

Advice # 8: How to use Facebook’s ad tool for A/B testing
To run your A/B tests using the suggestions provided in this blog post, the following steps are necessary:

Step 1: Use the "Create a Similar Ad" feature in Facebook’s ad set-up wizard. This will enable you to quickly duplicate your ad in order to test small changes to it.

Step 2: In order to ensure your ads get displayed by Facebook an equal number of times (which is critical if you are to run an accurate test), you have to create a separate ‘campaign’ for each ad variation. This is because when multiple ads are running within a single campaign, Facebook's system will allocate more of your daily budget to higher performing ads, and often ads that are added after the first two or three do not get run at all, which makes them useless from the point of view of A/B testing.

Advice # 9: Don’t always assume that Facebook’s ‘suggested bid’ is the best
When setting up an ad Facebook will ask how much you are willing to pay per click for each ad.  You’ll notice Facebook offers a suggested bid but you should take this suggestion with a grain of salt.  You’ll notice in the image above, which is a real campaign, the suggested bid is between $1.06-2.03, yet we bid $0.65 and get a good amount of traffic. In other words, we pay almost half of what Facebook suggests and get good results. The point is - start low and then move your bids up until you start to get traffic. You might have to increase your bids as high as the suggested range, or even above. But it depends on many factors, so don’t be afraid to play around with bids until you get traffic at a decent price.  Be aware, however, that the more granular you get with your targeting, the more expensive your ads tend to be, i.e. you’ll pay more if your ad targets a very specific demographic (e.g. 30 year old women from California who are married) versus a broad demograhic (e.g. women from the United States).Advice # 10: Evaluate and improve upon your results
For each round of tests you run going forward, make the winner the new “control.” This way, your control ads will keep evolving with each ad campaign effort you undertake, and your ad strategies can continue to be refined over time.

When you’re evaluating the results for the campaigns you run, remember to pause all ad variations that are producing a high Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per Entry (i.e. if you are running a promotion). These campaigns are clearly not cost effective so you’ll want to save your precious ad budget for those that are and switch of your expensive ads as soon as you can.

Hot tip! Be aware that certain times of the year will be more competitive when it comes to running ads and thus more expensive. For example, around the holidays lots of companies are wanting to advertise their products so you may find that the cost of your ads increases. You should take this into account when you evaluate your campaign success during the holidays.

Advice # 11: The most important lesson of all!
Lather, rinse, and repeat! There is no such thing as a perfect ad (at least, a perfect ad that you can run over and over, for any campaign or any purpose.) In our experience, by the time you’ve narrowed down a successful ad from your tester group of 30, you can run it for a few days or weeks (depending on how narrow your audience is) until it falls out of vogue. Call the Facebook audience fickle, picky, or quickly disinterested, but successful brand ad campaigns are those that evolve continuously. Logically, this makes sense. Once you have found the winning image, title, copy, and targeting info that’s generating you all the attention (with clicks and entries), you won’t be able to keep running it successfully because you’re basically showing it to the same people over and over again and once someone has clicked on your ad once they are unlikely to do it again unless you show them a new ad. So for better or for worse, you’ll need to keep developing new ads (and using our A/B testing techniques to enhance them) if you want to continue running successful ads on Facebook.

We hope the advice is helpful to make your ads perform better. Use the comments box below to provide us with your own advice and feedback!

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NEW PRODUCT: Real-Time Campaign Analytics

Among the many things the social web has brought to our attention, it’s the impact of “real-time”.  Now more than ever, thoughts and actions are communicated and distributed at near the speed of light, and being in the know on what’s happening ‘now’ has taken on new importance.  It’s in that light that we’re excited to introduce Real-Time Campaign Analytics to our clients.  In fact, we feel strongly about democratizing access to real-time information, so we’ve enabled this capability to all accounts on the Wildfire platform.  What’s the fuss all about? Let us give you a quick tour of the features of our analytics package.

On the surface, we’ve created a new user interface for every published campaign that provides at-a-glance access to vital campaign stats.  Under the hood, we put a lot of effort into building the robust analytics engine that powers the data in real-time. We’re proud of the scalability this affords us, as we’ll be able to provide the most up-to-date information even as the number of campaigns we support grows dramatically.

The tool that our clients can use to view their campaign data is aptly named the Campaign Analytics Dashboard, and here’s a screenshot of what it looks like for many clients.  In fact, this image was taken from our very own promotion! It’s cliché, I know, but we’re eating our own dog food.

When you first visit the dashboard, the entire lifetime of the campaign is displayed by default, giving you the entire picture of what’s been going on.  At the top of the dashboard are the key performance metrics including visits, entries, and entry rate, accompanied by useful reference statistics like daily average or best-to-date.  Below that, we provide an interactive time chart that lets you see the activity on your campaign day-by-day.

Beneath the graph we display the key metrics broken out by whatever channels the campaign is published to.  As you probably know, a Wildfire campaign can be hosted on Facebook, on a microsite, or even as a widget on a client’s website.  In all cases, we provide visibility into user participation on each channel.

For our most sophisticated clients, we also offer the ability to create custom referral sources, a powerful tool that allows you to identify where engagement is coming from down to the narrowest segments.  Using referral sources, clients can effectively optimize their campaigns by discovering and nurturing the most efficient distribution channels.

For example, you could A/B test different marketing copy for your email newsletters to see which version drives the most entries.  Similarly, you can optimize ad spend on a campaign by associating each ad creative with a different referral source.  All the tools of the trade for online marketing are now available for social.  We think that’s pretty powerful.

We’re determined to offer the most comprehensive and up-to-date reporting platform for social media marketing.  Analytics Dashboard is a great step forward, but it’s only the beginning.  Stay tuned for more improvements.

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How to Get Your Brand Noticed this Holiday Season

Last month we listed some themed promotion ideas for Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday and received some great feedback from our readers! This month, we’ll explore some ideas for successful December holiday promotions so that your business can start the holidays off in high-performance mode! 

The December holiday season can be the best time to bring in new customers and reconnect with current ones because consumers are in ‘shopping mode’. One of the best ways to capture consumer engagement around your brand is to run special Holiday promotions that offer exclusive and compelling deals and discounts. Here are some suggestions to give you inspiration.

IDEA #1: Drive Sales with a “Daily” Holiday Deal!

Create some themed daily deal promotions in accordance with the daily festivities of whichever holiday you prefer! For example, there’s the “12 days of Christmas,” 8 nights of Hannukah, and 7 nights of Kwanzaa, not to mention however many days you’d want to spend celebrating the New Year. To do a daily deal, you could use our coupon module to offer a different coupon every day. You could either publicize in advance what the coupon will be for each day of the campaign or you could keep an element of surprise by only letting people know what the coupon will be on the day it is released. Instead of offering a coupon, you could use our group deal format to announce a different group deal for each day of the campaign.



Here is a great example of a successful group deal that's capitalizing on the "12 Days of Christmas" with a special discount!

 

IDEA #2: ‘Tis the Season for being Charitable! Use a promotion to benefit a cause and rally your fans.

Create a campaign that’s focused on giving donations to a charitable cause, like a coat drive for the winter, or Toys for Tots. Your promotion type can vary-- choose virtual gifts for a fun and engaging way for users to contribute (set it up so that for each “gift” given, you donate a certain amount of money to the charity of your choice), or choose a Sign-Up Form where you can build in a multiple choice option for users who enter, allowing them to choose from a list of charities (that you select) which one they prefer you to donate $1 on their behalf to. This is a great way to generate marketing information about the engaged users who are finding and interacting with your promotion.

IDEA #3: Use Holiday-themed user generated contests to drive engagement and sharing among friends.

What family doesn’t have a collection of photos from their get togethers at Christmas or for their New Year’s celebrations?  You can drill down to very specific contest instructions, like asking entrants to upload their favorite picture of their babies or young children opening gifts or sitting with Santa!  Or, you can make the contest open to more broad entries, like photos and write-ups of “Your Favorite Holiday Moments.” An easy way to do this (allow both photos and essays to be voted on in one contest) is to create a Wildfire Photo Contest, but set the photo upload minimum to zero — that way those who don’t have a photo of their memory easily available can still enter by just submitting a written description of their memory. By not requiring a photo, you’ll find that your entry rate will be higher.

Lots of fun contests could also be themed around ‘New Year’s resolutions’ such as a ‘Tell us about your craziest New Year’s Resolution’ essay contest or a ‘List your top five wishes for the world for 2011’ or even a ‘Top 5 things I pledge to do in 2011 to help my country’ essay contest.

IDEA #4: Get those Last Minute Shoppers to make a Purchase with a Great Group Deal!

We’ve all been there— waiting until the last minute to get gifts or sniff out the best discounted deals is a staple of every holiday season! Entice deal-hungry users and fans by appealing to their gift giving sensibilities with a deeply discounted Group Deal. Buyers are most attracted to deals that show a discount value of over 50% off. While the deal may be a steep one, the value of a new (or returning) satisfied customer during the holiday season can translate to lots of buzz marketing and some great customer loyalty going forward.

IDEA #5: Draw ‘em in with the chance to win and then encourage them to buy.

Sweepstakes are a powerful way to get people to click on your ads and/or visit your fan page so why not run a Holiday-themed sweepstakes to get people’s attention and then encourage sales by offering a coupon to all sweepstakes participants. You could either do this by combing our sweepstakes format with our coupon format so that as soon as people have entered the sweepstakes they are automatically directed to your coupon or you could email a coupon offer to all sweepstakes participants at the end of each day or when the sweepstakes ends.

There are tons of great ideas for a Holiday-themed sweepstakes. You could give away vouchers to major retailers to help winners with their holiday shopping or you could offer the ultimate holiday food hamper so the winner can eat like a king during the holidays. Offering a trip to somewhere warm and tropical would be an incredible Holiday prize now that winter has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere, as would a shopping spree for the winner. To make your promotion more viral give entrants a reason to spread the word about the sweepstakes by building in a referral feature like “if you win, your friend wins too!” Simply add an input field that asks something like this:  “Who referred you to this promotion? If you win, they’ll win too! Just add their email” into your entry form — its a very enticing and super simple way to enhance the virality of your promotion!

This holiday sweepstakes draws attention to the prize, which is a digital camera, to allow for "capturing holiday moments."

Do you have some great holiday promotions ideas to share? Leave them in the comments below, we’d love to hear from you!

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18 Super Easy, Highly Effective Tips to Grow your Fans via Facebook Ads

Unless you have a large existing fan base or newsletter base, the best way to grow your fans is via Facebook Ads coupled with a promotion (e.g. contest or coupon). In fact, the #1 way that Facebook users find out about fan pages is via Facebook advertising so it is extremely important to your overall social media success that you know how to run Facebook ads effectively. Simple things like the image you choose or the title you use can make the difference between success and failure when it comes to advertising. We’ve compiled a list of practical, easy-to-implement and highly effective tips to help you maximize the performance of your Facebook ads.

What  Images Should You Use?

Tip #1: Ads with people, and especially close ups of faces and eyes tend to get a higher click through rate. In other words, give your ad a human touch!

 

Tip #2:  However, don’t use an image of a person if this doesn’t fit with what you’re promoting - ads with an image that’s relevant to your advertisement tend to be most successful.

Tip #3: It's best to upload horizontal (landscape) images to ensure you're maximizing the space available, which is 110x80 pixels

Tip #4: Include branding in your image. Only a tiny percentage of people exposed to your ad will actually click on it but lots will see it so it’s important that you maximize your branding. The great thing is that you can opt to ‘pay-per-click’ for your Facebook advertising so if someone learns about your brand by looking at your ad but doesn’t click, you just got brand exposure for free!

Tip #5: Scale your image as large as possible. Meaning, zoom into your image so that it extends as close to the edge on all 4 sides as possible without losing the sharpness of the image. For example, an image that contains one close up of a face will be more appealing than one that contains full body shots of multiple people, all of whom will appear so small in the photo that you wont be able to see any details.

Tip #6: Another trick you can try after your image has been created is take a large step away from your monitor and see if you can still make out what the image is from far away—if you can’t tell, the image isn’t as clear as it could be for a good ad.

Tip #7: Eliminate unnecessary surroundings around your main image, either by giving it a transparent background or a white one. You don’t want to distract people from what you want them to notice.

Tip #8:  Use colors in your image that contrast with Facebook’s shades of blue— they command more attention and stand out from the rest of the website.

Tip #9: Be creative! You want your ad to stand out from the millions of other ads your audience is exposed to every day.

What Title Should You Use?

Tip #10:  Ask questions. People who read questions to themselves are often sub-consciously answering them also. If your question is compelling enough, they will want to click through to see the answer.

Tip #11:  Limit titles to one line.
Tip #12:  Try titles that will elicit some kind of reaction from your audience, like making them laugh.

What Text Body Should I Use?

Tip #13: Be clear with your message – what are you offering and why should a user care?

Tip #14: Give a compelling reason to click: access to promotions (deals, coupons, sweepstakes, contests, giveaways) is the number one reason people become fans.

Tip #15: If you’re targeting users based on certain “Likes & Interests” or demographic information, tie that information into your copy. For example, an ad targeting users living in Palo Alto, CA, can fare better if the words “Palo Alto” or “Bay Area” were in the copy, making the ad appear more relevant to the viewer seeing it.

Tip #16: Ask people to like your brand— telling your audience exactly what you want them to do is a surprisingly effective methods of getting users to do what you requested. For example, “Fall is here and so is our seasonal pumpkin cupcake. Click ‘like’ if you think this sounds delicious!”

 

Tip #17: Don’t forget a call-to-action! Try messages like “Click here!” or “Enter now!” to let users know exactly what they’re supposed to do within the interaction.

Tip #18:  Try not to sound like a large corporation in your body message. Speak to your audience like people.

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5 Creative Suggestions for Engaging your Fans and Selling More During the Holidays

Holiday season is soon upon us and there’s no better time to motivate your loyal customers and acquire new ones through fun, seasonal promotions. Based on numerous research reports, it seems that Facebook fans get especially excited about fun, holiday-themed promotions so if you haven’t done so already, it’s time to start planning your holiday promotions for October, November and December.

November in particular is a big month for holiday themed promotions in the United States. While the most widely known holiday for Americans is Thanksgiving, November is also a popular shopping month, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday prompting users to get excited about huge discounts and great deals.

Here are some creative ideas for promotions to run for Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday.

IDEA #1: Encourage word of mouth and social spread by giving away the “Ultimate Thanksgiving Dinner”

Run a sweepstakes to give away the ultimate ‘Thanksgiving Dinner’ – enormous frozen turkey, pumpkin pie, the works! But to make it more ’social’ and to encourage word-of-mouth spread, why not offer up two Thanksgiving feasts - one for the winner and one for the friend that referred the winner to the sweepstakes. Track these referrals by including a text field in the entry form asking the participant, “Were you referred by a friend? If so, what is your friend’s full name? You could both win the grand prize!”.

IDEA #2: Drive engagement and sharing among friends with a Recipe Contest

Doesn’t everyone think that their family’s Thanksgiving meal is the best? Why not encourage this friendly rivalry by running  a Thanksgiving Recipe Contest! Allow users to upload both photos and text as their submissions but set the photo upload minimum to zero when setting up your Wildfire photo contest — that way those who don’t have a photo of their recipe easily available can still enter (i.e. you’ll get more submissions by keeping the effort required to enter lower).

IDEA #3: Combine Thanksgiving-Themed Virtual Gifts with Charitable Giving

Create a virtual gift campaign to enable friends to send each other free Thanksgiving themed virtual gifts like funny images of Turkeys, or a family around a dinner table, or the iconic cornucopia. Combine this with an opportunity to ‘give back’ by offering to donate $1 to a hunger-relief charity of your choice for every gift sent.

IDEA #4: Drive Sales with a Black Friday Coupon or a Group Deal!

Black Friday is the biggest shopping day of the year! Many people have grown accustomed to enormous sales and huge discounts as merchants try to drive customers into a buying frenzy in preparation for Christmas. Take advantage of this expectation by creating a specially themed Black Friday coupon of your own, granting your fans a high value discount on one of your products! Or even better, offer up a group deal — i.e. provide your product or service at a big discount but only if a certain number of people commit to buy the deal before it expires.

IDEA #5: Create excitement for Cyber Monday by giving away ‘Mystery’ Coupons

This Epicure promotion is a great example of a timely, holiday themed promotion— a photo contest of family Thanksgiving feasts!

Cyber Monday developed as online merchants responded to brick and mortar stores and their steep Black Friday discounts, which drove users into stores and away from computers, by offering their own steep discounts on internet orders the following Monday. Get creative with your own online coupon codes— by using Wildfire’s unique codes functionality, you can create a set of “mystery” coupons, where each coupon’s value is unknown until the user claims it on your fan page! For example, some coupons may give you free shipping, others 10% off and a limited number might be lucky enough to get a 70% off coupon. We’ve found this kind of ‘mystery’ coupon format creates lots of excitement, strong ROI for our clients and great word of mouth spread because consumers are so excited to share this campaign with their friends.

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What is the #1 way to Grow your Fans? Here are 8 Tips to Maximize yourSuccess…

The number one way to draw a crowd of users to your fan page and turn them into fans is to run promotions. Social media studies have repeatedly shown that the top reason users fan and follow brands online is to gain access to exclusive deals and discounts— so use your fan page to give users what they’re looking for. However, all promotions are not created equal.  At Wildfire we have observed and assisted in the powering of thousands of campaigns where, over time, we have noted  that there are specific strategies to follow when creating promotions that greatly increase the success of fan campaigns. Here is the complete 8-tip post detailing the top advice we’ve learned from observing the tens of thousands of promotions that have been run via the Wildfire social media marketing platform.

TIP # 1: CHOOSE YOUR PRIZE CAREFULLY

When you’re running a sweepstakes or a contest, the prize you choose plays a big role in the success of your campaign. Your prize does not need to be very expensive to attract users and fans to your promotion. Two things to consider:

• We have found that prizes that generate the most excitement are the ones that “money can’t buy,” — for example, tickets to a sold out concert, backstage passes, limited edition merchandise or the chance to be featured by a company on their website or in their stores. For example, Facebook is running a fun contest with us right now where the winner will have their artwork featured in the new Facebook office in India, which you can check out here.


• Be sure to choose a prize that is relevant to your brand so you can attract consumers who are genuinely interested in your company. For example, if you are a restaurant, give away free dinners or a gourmet food basket— an iPad giveaway is far less relevant to your brand, and may attract users who are interested in electronics, not your restaurant! Dunkin Donuts is currently running a contest, for example, in which the winner will get five years worth of free coffee. Only true DD coffee lovers will want to win this prize!

TIP # 2: RUN REGULAR CAMPAIGNS

One of the biggest mistakes we see companies make is putting a lot of effort and money into doing a 'big bang' launch campaign for their fan page, but then having no plan to keep their fans regularly engaged once their initial campaign is over. In our experience, companies that run regular promotions (e.g. "Fan appreciation days" or "Friday Flash Deal") are much more successful in building up an engaged and growing fan base than those that do not. For example, the fans of the Swell.com Facebook Fan Page rally around the surf clothing retailer’s weekly apparel giveaways, called “Win it Wednesdays”. Likewise, tying campaigns in with upcoming holidays (e.g. Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Halloween) is a great way to provide regular, calendar- based engagement your fans can get excited about.

TIP # 3: MAKE BUYING FUN

Unlike with Google, consumers generally go to Facebook to engage with friends and have fun, not to buy products. To change this dynamic and encourage fans to actually make purchases, therefore, we've found that the best method is to make the buying process fun and social! For example, Haute Look, a “members-only” designer clothing retailer ran a campaign with Wildfire that offered up 'lucky coupons'. Consumers had to become fans in order to get a coupon, but they didn’t know whether they'd get a high value or a low value coupon until they filled out the entry form and claimed it. The coupons ranged in value from free shipping to 50% off high value items like designer jeans. The campaign resulted in a 5x ROI for Hautelook and 20% of buyers were first time purchasers. To see more great examples of how to make buying fun and drive sales with promotions, click here for more campaign examples: http://bit.ly/bkk1MO

TIP # 4: OPTMIZE YOUR FACEBOOK ADS TO SEED YOUR CAMPAIGN

Unless you have access to a large existing base of fans or newsletter subscribers, you’ll need to use Facebook ads to help drive users to your promotion. There are many things that you can do to dramatically improve the performance of your Facebook ads. Some of these relate to the actual design of your ad (see our 18 Super easy, highly effective tips to grow your fans via Facebook Ads. blog post to learn more) and others relate to the way you target your ad (see our 4 Tips to Nearly Double the Performance of your Facebook Ads blog post for highly targeted advice) but in both cases you can hugely influence the success of your ads if you follow our easy tips.

TIP # 5: MAKE IT SOCIAL
The power of Facebook and Twitter is that they enable users to share your brand with their friends. So to really make the most of Facebook and Twitter, you should look for ways to make your promotions inherently social. For example:

• If you’re running a user generated contest be sure to allow the public to vote. Entrants will contact all their friends to encourage them to vote and thus help spread the word about your brand.


• If you are running a sweepstakes, make it social by offering a Group Prize (e.g. "concert tickets for you and your 5 best friends") and ask entrants to invite the 5 friends they'd want to share the prize with or offer a Referral Prize (e.g. award a prize not only to the winner but also to the person who referred the winner).

TIP # 6: KEEP IT SIMPLE & EASY

In our experience, the simpler and easier you make it for consumers to engage with your promotion, the better your results will be. For example, if you’re running a sweepstakes, don’t ask for any more information from users than you need - the shorter the entry form or the less steps required to engage, the more people will enter. If you’re looking to collect user generated content, ask for things that consumers have readily available like vacation, pet, hobby or family photos. And if you run a video contest, be aware that these get far fewer entries than photo contests because of the effort required to create and upload a video. On the flip side, generating a few great video entries may serve your goals better than receiving hundreds or thousands of photo entries - especially if your goal is to create customer generated content that you can use in your marketing materials.
Pictures of a user making a funny face are easier to take and submit than creating a whole video.

TIP # 7: TAP INTO PASSIONATE COMMUNITIES
We've found that campaigns that tap into people's passions and interests play a greater role in determining the success of a campaign than do factors like the value of a prize or even, in many cases, the size of an advertising budget. Campaigns that involve pets, children, charities, hobbies (e.g. surfing), music, and other interests are consistently among the most successful we see. For example, we had a non-profit run a pet-related photo contest that got over 10,000 photo submissions in one week with no advertising budget and a tattoo parlor that got thousands of submissions to their 'best tattoo contest' with limited marketing. Target your ads to your specific demographic for best results.

TIP # 8: COMMUNICATE!
Once your promotion is up and running, don’t forget to publicize it to your existing fans, followers and newsletter subscribers on a regular basis. At a minimum, message your fans once when you launch the promotion, once during the middle of the promotion and once a few days before it ends. For highly successful tips to ensure that your fan updates get maximum exposure, click here: http://bit.ly/bOYnE8

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Facebook Launches its Hyderabad, India Office with a Sweet Mural Design Contest!

Facebook will celebrate the official opening of its brand new Hyderabad, India Office on September 30^th with a Mural Contest powered by Wildfire. The winning artist will receive a $2000 prize and have their work prominently featured in the new office, covering a big wall! The contest will be Facebook’s 9^th promotion powered by Wildfire.

The Mural Contest will create buzz for the new office and facilitate positive engagement with India’s quickly growing number of Facebook users. Participants will have the opportunity to share their vision of Facebook’s future in India and what impact it will have on the Indian community.


Optimally located in India’s technology hub, the Hyderabad office will be Facebook’s first in Asia and help further fuel the company’s already explosive growth in the region. Recently, Facebook surpassed Google’s ‘Orkut’ and is now the number one social network in the country with approximately 13.5 million users. With India’s population being 1.1 billion, the Palo Alto based social network expects the number of Indian Facebook users to continue to grow rapidly. The Mural Contest will further build on this momentum and help create a lasting relationship with Facebook and its users.

Indian artists can upload samples of their portfolio from September 30th to October 22^nd. Voting on the finalists will commence on November 1^st and end on November 14^th. For official rules and details click here.

[caption id="attachment_1032" align="aligncenter" width="396" caption="Congratulations, Facebook!"][/caption]

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Clicks to Bricks: Altimeter’s Social Commerce Conference

The Altimeter Group, a research-based advisory firm that helps companies and industries “leverage disruption to their advantage” as well as the publisher of the recent social media report The 8 Success Criteria for Facebook Page Marketing, is hosting its first event, a conference centered on social commerce-- and you should check it out! 

In these fast evolving marketing times, “power is shifting to the shopper.” The Rise of Social Commerce conference will enable attendees to learn firsthand how this is changing the channel, brand positioning, and the buying experience for users.

We’re going, because we want to learn new insights to help our  team build communities, enhance brand loyalty and gain insights on how to improve our customer relationships, as well as network with leaders that are making it happen.

Are you coming? We’ll see you there!

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Wildfire Turns One!

People say “Time flies when you’re having fun.” And they’re right.

One year ago this week Wildfire came out of private development and into public beta. We opened our doors to the world, and it has been an amazing ride ever since.

One year ago there were five people huddled around one desk, sharing an office with the great folks at the FBfund. Over the year, Wildfire’s suite of applications grew, and so did it’s headcount. We grew into our first office, and within 6 months found ourselves having outgrown it. When the walls seemed to be busting out of their seams, we split the team and moved the overflow into another space on the same block. The time it took for us to outgrow that space was much shorter than the first--within a month we were packing a u-Haul and moving to downtown Palo Alto, giddy as schoolchildren to move down into the center of the startup tornado, where all the cool Silicon Valley startups live.

In one year Wildfire went from 5 full time employees to 40. By the end of this calendar year there will be many more. With each added body, our team is enriched with more intelligence, more enthusiasm, more engagement, and more tenacity. With each addition, we become even better.

In one year we raised a round of funding, acquired tens of thousands of customers (including hundreds of major brands), reached many millions of consumers, grew to over 12,000 Facebook fans, and leveled up from 6-packs on Friday evenings to our own office kegerator. We are thrilled.

And you know what else? We couldn’t have done it without you. And several others. Thank you very much to everybody taking the time to read this post-- your support, kind feedback, comments, and questions let us know that you are enthusiastic about and supportive of our growth.

As for the “several others,” there are many:
Thank you so much to everybody at Facebook for their continued support and friendship; to Harrison Miller, Andy Collins and the rest of the team at Summit for their enthusiasm and attention; to Dave McClure, Jeff Clavier, Aydin Senkut, and Gary Vaynerchuk for digging our product and wanting to be involved in our first round of funding; to Yee Lee, Hiten Shah, Om Malik, Sebastien de Halleux, Ro Choy, Javier Olivan, Matt Monahan, Joe Beninato and many others for your invaluable advice and support; to the entire Wildfire team here and abroad for being the best team in the world; and most of all, to our clients for appreciating our product and spreading the word!

Here’s a virtual toast to an even better year to come! And better yet, if you're in the Bay Area, come to our roof this Friday, August 13th for a proper birthday party!!

[caption id="attachment_1023" align="aligncenter" width="368" caption="A Toast! To a Great Second Year, and Many More!"][/caption]

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Facebook Fan Page Tab Width Change Announced

Several months ago we posted an article about upcoming Facebook design changes to Fan Page tab widths. While Facebook made the announcement that it was planning to change the tab width to 520 pixels from the previous (and current) 760 pixels back in October 2009, the official change date has just been announced: the week of August 23rd, 2010.

The official statement from Facebook can be seen below:

“We announced plans last October to remove application boxes and application info sections as well as reduce the width of application tabs to optimize for the new profile and Facebook Pages format. We will be moving forward with these changes the week of August 23, and want to help you understand what to expect.
Based on feedback from developers, we have committed to the following plans to ensure a smooth transition:

• Boxes. We will notify users via messaging in profile boxes and in the Help Center that the "Boxes" tab, boxes on profiles and Pages, and application info sections will be going away.


• Application Tabs. Next week, we will give Page admins the ability to preview their custom tabs in the new 520 pixel width so they can modify their layouts as needed. All profile and Page tabs will be resized automatically beginning the week of August 23.

These updates are designed to simplify navigation for users, reduce complexity for developers, and enable us to build the next generation of tools for growing your business with Facebook. We'll share more of our plans for the roadmap in the coming weeks.

To read our post about this change, which explains the differences in the design and how it will look for your fan page, click here.

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NEW WILDFIRE PRODUCT: Group Deal

Overview

We’re excited to launch Group Deals, the first social buying application for Facebook Fan Pages and Facebook Connect! With a Group Deal any business, whether it’s a large brand, an agency or a small or medium sized business, can easily and cost-effectively sell their product or service in a socially engaging way on Facebook or on their website. You may have heard of the awesome success of companies like Groupon that make buying fun and social. Now with the launch of our Group Deals format companies of all sizes can create their own Groupon-like deal within minutes and publish it on their fan page and/or their website. Group deals are the ideal way to make buying both fun and social!

How it Works
For those of you who don’t know what a Group Deal is here’s how it works:

1. Your company offers its Facebook fans a special deal on a product or service at an awesome price – but the deal only activates if enough people commit to buy the deal (e.g. "get a appetizer, entre and desert for $15 if 50 people commit to buy this deal")


2. Consumers commit to the deal by providing their contact information and their credit card details (we collect this via PayPal).


3. If the minimum number of consumers commit to the deal before the deadline, the deal activates and consumers’ credit cards are charged. We automatically email the consumers with instructions for redeeming their deal. If the minimum number is not reached, consumers’ cards are not charged and we email them to let them know the deal is off.

Wildfire takes care of the entire process of running a group deal - all you need to do is define the value of your deal, the minimum number of buyers required and the duration of the campaign!

Top 7 Reasons to run a Group Deal

1. It’s a great way to make selling to social network users fun, social and engaging


2. It’s a powerful way to encourage word of mouth spread about your company's product or service


3. It’s a great tool for selling old stock or unsold inventory


4. It encourages regular engagement with a company's Facebook Fan Page or Website (e.g. by offering regular weekly group deals)


5. It’s easy to set-up - campaigns can be live within minutes


6. It’s highly affordable and scalable


7. It’s secure through PayPal’s verification process

Note on Fraud & Security
We've partnered with PayPal to provide a secure and scalable solution for your company to run financial transactions and for consumers to buy Group Deals from companies that are PayPal verified. This way there is minimal risk that consumers will engage in fraudulent transactions and your business can be assured that funds we’ll be collected.

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Wildfire is Hiring!

Why work at Wildfire? Wildfire wants to create a collection of solutions that take the hassle, marketing degree, and technical training out of implementing a marketing strategy for your brand or company (no matter how large or how small it is). Our team is still on the small side, which means it feels more like joining a new family than worrying about remembering your 10-digit long unique employee ID number. We’ve enjoyed some great success since launching our product to the public, but with great success come greater expectations, which will require quite a few talented additions to our already pretty awesome team. We are on the lookout for folks with inquisitive minds, witty demeanors, the motivation to volunteer their brains to tasks outside their “job description,” and head diameters that are friendly to the wearing of very many hats.

Read about and apply for our open positions on the jobs page here.

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The 8 Success Criteria for Facebook Page Marketing: an Altimeter Report

Altimeter, a leading research and advisory firm in the technology space, just published a great report on Facebook Page marketing. While doing their research, they reached out to some of the industries leading experts on social media, Facebook marketing, and disruptive marketing technologies--- one of these contributors was Wildfire! It was great to be able to add some of our knowledge about the social media marketing space to this great collection of research. Check it out below-- the guidance you will find in this study is the freshest on the market, it is an excellent source to add to your knowledge base!

The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing  

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How to Create Top Performing Promos for your Fan Page (PART 1)

When it comes to building engaged fans and followers on Facebook or Twitter, promotions like contests, coupons, sweepstakes and giveaways should be #1 on your priority list. According to Jupiter, a market research company, brands that run contests have twice as many fans as those that don’t. According to Razorfish’s FEED study, by far the biggest reason that consumers fan or follow companies is to access deals and exclusive offers. But how can you maximize the success of your Facebook and Twitter promotions? Check out Part 1 of our two-part blog post detailing the top tips we’ve learned from observing the tens of thousands of promotions that have been run via the Wildfire social media marketing platform.


TIP # 1: MAKE IT SOCIAL The power of Facebook and Twitter is that they enable users to share your brand with their friends. So to really make the most of Facebook and Twitter, you should look for ways to make your promotions inherently social. For example:
● If you’re running a user generated contest be sure to allow the public to vote. Entrants will contact all their friends to encourage them to vote and thus help spread the word about your brand.
● If you are running a sweepstakes, make it social by offering a Group Prize (e.g. "concert tickets for you and your 5 best friends") and ask entrants to invite the 5 friends they'd want to share the prize with or offer a Referral Prize (e.g. award a prize not only to the winner but also to the person who referred the winner).

Check out an example of a currently running Group Deal that's highly social,the W Scottsdale Group Deal-- a certain number of people are needed to get the deal, so if a user wants to purchase the deal, he will want to share it with friends to reach the deal tipping point!

TIP # 2: KEEP IT SIMPLE & EASY

In our experience, the simpler and easier you make it for consumers to engage with your promotion, the better your results will be. For example, if you’re running a sweepstakes, don’t ask for any more information from users than you need - the shorter the entry form or the less steps required to engage, the more people will enter. If you’re looking to collect user generated content, ask for things that consumers have readily available like vacation, pet, hobby or family photos. And if you run a video contest, be aware that these get far fewer entries than photo contests because of the effort required to create and upload a video. On the flip side, generating a few great video entries may serve your goals better than receiving hundreds or thousands of photo entries - especially if your goal is to create customer generated content that you can use in your marketing materials.
Pictures of a user making a funny face are easier to take and submit than creating a whole video.

[caption id="attachment_986" align="aligncenter" width="354" caption="Pictures of a user making a funny face are easier to take and submit than creating a whole video."][/caption]

TIP # 3: TAP INTO PASSIONATE COMMUNITIES We've found that campaigns that tap into people's passions and interests play a greater role in determining the success of a campaign than do factors like the value of a prize or even, in many cases, the size of an advertising budget. Campaigns that involve pets, children, charities, hobbies (e.g. surfing), music, and other interests are consistently among the most successful we see. For example, we had a non-profit run a pet-related photo contest that got over 10,000 photo submissions in one week with no advertising budget and a tattoo parlor that got thousands of submissions to their 'best tattoo contest' with limited marketing. Target your ads to your specific demographic for best results.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="376" caption="The P90X promotion generated hundreds of entries from people passionate about working out and staying fit."][/caption]

TIP # 4: COMMUNICATE! Once your promotion is up and running, don’t forget to publicize it to your existing fans, followers and newsletter subscribers on a regular basis. At a minimum, message your fans once when you launch the promotion, once during the middle of the promotion and once a few days before it ends. For highly successful tips to ensure that your fan updates get maximum exposure, click here: http://bit.ly/bOYnE8

read more...