Analytics for Wildfire Promotions on Facebook Tabs

Soon after Facebook migrated Pages to use iframes (instead of FBML), we updated our analytics tracking for promotions to leverage the newly available enhanced flexibility that came with iframes. So while this functionality has been available for some time already, I do think the value it provides is significant enough that it bears highlighting. In a nutshell, all the tracking capabilities that Wildfire offers around promotion visits and entries are fully available in the context of a Facebook Tab, just like they have been for other channels like Facebook Canvas, Microsite, etc.

Of particular note is that referral sources are also fully functional on Tabs, which is great for marketers who want to drive users to a promotion within a Tab. Basically, a promotion running inside a Facebook Tab can serve as the landing page and Wildfire will track user activity on the promotion against any new or existing referral source. What this really means is that marketers can perform advanced segmentation, ad optimization, A/B testing, etc. while retaining strong brand visibility because end consumers are landing on the brand's Facebook Page directly.

Warning! This awesome feature is only available on our white label product!

How might a brand use this functionality? For instance, imagine you're spreading the word about a promotion through an email newsletter, and you'd like to A/B test the content of the email to see which layout and language drives the most participation. Not just in terms of clicks, though; most email marketing tools provide that already. What you might want to know ultimately is which version drove the most promotion entries. In this case, you could create one referral source (a Wildfire-provided URL) for each email, which users would click on to reach the promotion on your tab. Then, as users visit and engage with the promotion, you can analyze in real time which version is driving the most visits, the most entries, or even which version is most effective in terms of conversions (entry rate).

Similarly, if you run ad campaigns that drive traffic to a promotion, you can now send users to a Tab directly and still benefit from all the granular reporting that comes from using referral sources, allowing you to optimize for the best-converting ad creative while ensuring that users still see the promotion in the context you intended — within your Facebook Page.

So go ahead, take advantage of the power of referral sources on your current or next white-label campaign, and let us know your success stories.

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3 Easy Ways to Run Super Social Promotions on your Fan Page

You’re a social media marketing manager that's used all the Wildfire tips to build up a great group of fans and followers. What's next?

Now you need to start focusing on actively engaging your fans over a sustained period of time. An active fan is one who has an interactive relationship with a brand and, at least once a month, reacts to posts on the brand page, indicates a “liking” for various content, re-posts a brand’s messages or creates original content on the page.

To understand what makes fans return to your page, we need to ask why they committed to it in the first place. Razorfish published a study some time ago that asked consumers why they fan and follow brands. The greatest percentage of people, by far, responded “for the exclusive deals & offers”. So if you want your fans to watch out for your updates, you should reward them from time to time with special offers like coupons, giveaways, contests and more. We’ve seen that companies that offer regular deals (e.g. Friday specials or Tuesday giveaways) build highly engaged fan bases.

One easy way to promote interaction is to build in an extra social dimension into the Wildfire promotions you run— here are three easy ways to run super social promotions on your fan page.

The most social promotion of all?


Contests are at the heart of social promotions, and designing successful ones from an engagement perspective is not easy.  We’ve analyzed the entry and interaction metrics for thousands of promotions, and have come up with some recommendations for highly engaging ones.

Contests which encourage users to submit content they have created themselves are inherently more social, as most people who enter their self-created content into a contest also want to share their entry with friends and family. Entrants submit their original work (e.g. photo, video, essay, recipe, t-shirt design, etc.) and wait to find out whether it’s a winner. Even better, most contests contain a voting element, where the entrant is incentivized to rally his friends and family to vote on his submission (sometimes daily!) to increase his chances of winning.

The best part of running a contest is that the sharing opportunities are fourfold: the public can submit entries, vote on other entries, comment on submissions and share their favorite entries to their friends; all of these activities generate individual newsfeed items and help to spread the word about the promotion to that user's friends. Newsfeed items are particularly important to consider, since not all newsfeed items are shared equally! Facebook uses an algorithm to determine which updates and stories will appear in a given person’s newsfeed. While no one knows exactly what this algorithm is (besides Mark Zuckerberg!), it largely depends on how much engagement a particular story receives. So, if you send an update out to your fans and it receives a lot of ‘Likes’ or ‘Comments’, it will be exposed to a much higher percentage of your fans in their Top News stream. So sending out posts that are highly engaging is extremely important to the success of your Facebook marketing strategy.

Check out the example below for a super social contest that encouraged sharing through user generated content and audience voting.



Rethink traditional sweepstakes— make it a socially motivated sweepstakes!
Sure, traditional sweepstakes don’t seem to be inherently social...when you think about the setup, there is one pool of potential winners, and the more people that enter their names into the pool, the less a chance any one of them has to win. Because of this, there is no built in reason for entrants to share news of the promotion to their friends. But what if you threw in a social element? As with the example below, you could set up the prize so that it is awarded to a group— one in which the winner and three of her friends ALL win an all-expenses-paid girls' night on the town. The only catch is that in order to win, all three of the girlfriends’ names need to be on the entrant list too. If any one of the girls gets chosen, then, the entire group gets the prize! Now, every entrant has a built in incentive to share, because if they don’t, they’re less likely to win the prize.



Drive sales, in groups!
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 its product or service in a socially engaging way on Facebook or on its website. You have probably heard of the awesome success of companies like Groupon that make buying fun and social by tying activation of hugely discounted deals to the amount of people who claim them. You can launch your own Wildfire Group Deals promotion within minutes and publish it on your fan page and/or website. Group deals are the ideal way to make buying both fun and social! Better yet, with Wildfire Group Deals, merchants keep all the revenue they make from user purchases— no need to give a portion away to anyone.



 

Next time you run a promotion for your fans, consider whether you’ve crafted it to be as social as possible. You’ve seen with the tips above that even traditional promotion types can be jazzed up with extra social elements that you can control when you build your promotion! Do you have other ways of building in more sharing incentives to your promotions? Share them in the comments!

 

 

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How to Optimize your Contests for the Highest Entry Rates!

While video, photo, and essay contests are the most inherently social promotion apps you can run for your fans, not all contests perform equally. We’ve analyzed the entry rates of thousands of contests run on the Wildfire social media management platform, and extracted some of the most successful practices for optimizing your entry and share rates, as well as 3 things you definitely shouldn’t do!
To improve your contest entry rate:

1. Tell users how easy it is!
Sometimes, a simple statement about how easy it is to participate in your contest is all the push a user needs to feel confidence to proceed. As an example, use clear, called out text that says “It’s easy to enter! Simply upload a photo that depicts the way you enjoy your morning coffee.” Then provide an example of the type of photo you’re expecting in your contest, included as part of the design of your contest.



2. When you’re asking users to provide a written entry, keep it simple.
Unless your goal is to get little to no response rate, don't ask entrants to write a 500 word statement about an issue or your brand. A better example of a “simple” essay request would be, “Let 2011 be the year you actually get it done! Share your resolution with SwimOutlet.com for a chance to be one of four random winners".  A contest like this is successful because asking for a simple resolution is much more manageable for a user than being asked to write an essay about his or her diet and health philosophy. The less time and effort it takes to enter your contest, the more entries you’ll get.

 



3. Ask questions that are aspirational.
If you’re searching for ideas of what kind of questions to ask, we’ve found that aspirational questions tend to inspire users to submit their entries. Typically, aspirational questions can be answered almost instantly— “What would you do if you were debt-free?” or “If you won a free round-trip ticket to anywhere on the planet, where would you want to go?” Most users can imagine answers to these questions as soon as they read them, which leads to higher entry rates over essay questions that require complex analysis.



4. Remember that not all photos are created equal.
Everyone knows that when creating a photo contest, not all types of photo requests will result in the same entry rates, but there are some very clear outliers that tend to be significantly more successful. Two such outliers are pets and kids. Now that you know this, doesn’t it seem obvious? Think about all the people you know who either have pets or kids...don’t they all just love to share photos with you? Capitalize on that!



What not to do with your contests!

1. Don't ask people to write an essay about your product.

We know a lot of brands like to do this, but if you’re looking for a well performing contest, don’t! An example of a recent poorly performing promotion asked users to submit a response in 100 words or less that explained their health or fitness resolution for the New Year AND how the brand’s product (specifically) would help the users reach their goals. The analytics behind the contest revealed that it received 577 views...but only 3 resulted in entries! While asking for the resolution might have been a great and easy question for many users to answer on its own, adding the requirement that users also discuss the brand’s product resulted in a very low entry rate, despite the analytics showing a very high view rate.

2. Don’t ask your entrants to get too outlandish with their responses.
This goes hand in hand with keeping it simple, but even with a short essay question and request for a 3-4 sentence response, asking users to “tell us what you were doing when the world as we know it blinked out of existence, assuming you were one of the survivors,” usually doesn’t go over so well. The particular example noted (company specific details have been omitted) showed 503 views for the contest...and 0 entries!

3. Don’t ask entrants to post items that they may not want to share with the public.

It may sound like a no-brainer, but we’ve seen several examples of contests asking for some pretty private and potentially embarrassing information! We recently saw a promotion for a sports cream that you apply to your body before training to prevent chafing. The promotion asked users to submit a video explaining how they would use the cream for themselves. To many, this might be an embarrassing video, explaining to all your friends how you prefer to prevent chafing! Why not ask participants to enter a video showing them performing their favorite sport? Performing a sport is something users can be proud of…talking about chafing? Not so much.

Now that you’ve thought about some best practices for your contests to ensure optimal entry rates, its time to launch your Wildfire powered promotions! As always, we’re here to help, so if you have any questions or ideas you’d like to share, let us know in the comments!

 

 




 

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Facebook's Promotion Policy Changes

On May 11, Facebook revised its promotions policy. This evolving set of legal guidelines govern all promotions run on Facebook, and outline what Page owners can and can not do when running promotions on Facebook to remain compliant with Facebook policy.

The primary change to the Facebook promotions policy is the removal of some specific prohibitions on certain types of promotions, as well as guidelines around minor participation in promotions. Major items that have not changed include that all promotions must be run within 3rd party apps on Facebook.

What does the policy mean for your promotions plans? Here is a breakdown of the details:

What has changed for Facebook Promotions

• The primary change in this update is that Facebook has removed some specific prohibitions on certain types of promotions, such as promotions involving alcohol, dairy, firearms, gambling, and gasoline. While this does mean that promotions can now offer alcohol or dairy as a prize, for example,  the new guidelines also strongly maintain that all promotions must comply with all laws and regulations of the jurisdictions where the promotion is open. This means that the burden of responsibility for checking that a promotion can legally offer a specific prize remains in the hands of the promotion administrator and page owner, and that by running such a promotion on Facebook, he or she is affirming that the promotion complies with all applicable laws and regulations.

• There is no longer any explicit prohibition of minor (13-17 years of age) entry to Facebook promotions. Similar to the changes above, the removal of age related guidelines still implies that the promotion administrator is running the promotion in compliance with all of the applicable age related laws and regulations wherever his promotion is running.

• Facebook has included a very clear definition of what constitutes a promotion: "a contest, competition, sweepstakes or other similar offering," where "by 'contest' or 'competition' [Facebook means] a promotion that includes a prize of monetary value and a winner determined on the basis of skill (i.e., through judging based on specific criteria)" and "by 'sweepstakes' [Facebook means] a promotion that includes a prize of monetary value and a winner selected on the basis of chance."

What has not changed for Facebook Promotions

• All promotions still need to be run within 3rd party Apps (like Wildfire Promotion Builder) on Facebook.com, and can be run either on a Canvas page or as an app on a Page Tab.

• You still may not use Facebook features or functionality as a way of entering or registering for a promotion. In other words, you cannot have users simply "Like" your page to enter into a contest— the entry process must be contained within the 3rd party app environment, and include a registration (like a form) separate of the act of "Liking" a page.

• You may not use Facebook features or functionality such as the Like button as a method of voting for a promotion. Again, because promotions must be run within 3rd party apps on Facebook, this regulation maintains that promotion elements like voting be contained in apps, and not within Facebook simply by using the "Like" button.

• You still cannot use Facebook to notify winners, such as by sending them a message, chat, or wall post alerting them to their win.

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 compliant with Facebook’s promotions guidelines, even in the occasion that they change (like yesterday!).

While you will still need to be aware of and in compliance with the applicable rules and regulations for running promotions in your jurisdiction, we do work with some excellent promotions agencies who are knowledgable of all relevant legal standards and guidelines.

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!

The complete updated guidelines can be found here.

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Wildfire Wins a Spot Among the "Top 50 Startups in the World!"

The TiE50 awards have just been published— and Wildfire has won placement among the "Top 50 Startups in the World!" This is no small feat, either, as every year, hundreds of technology startups from over 13 countries apply to be recognized. This year, 291 finalists were selected, and out of those came the top 50 winners.

This year, 10 of the top 50 companies were in the Internet/social space. Another reason we're so psyched is that we're the only company in our space (social marketing) to win the award! We're all set to receive the award on stage in front of an audience of entrepreneurs, press, and Silicon Valley influencers. It's humbling and gratifying to be recognized as among the best of the best, and by such a huge conference! TiE is a not-for-profit global network of entrepreneurs and professionals and its annual event, TiECon, is the largest professional conference for entrepreneurs!

It's always exciting when other organizations recognize that Wildfire indeed has some "secret sauce," from our founders to our technology, team and customer base. From the TiE50 website:

"TiE50 track record since inception in May 2009 shows that 94% of the winners and finalists have been funded, attracting over $20 Billion in investments! 42 companies have been acquired, merged or went public. TiE50 awards are announced each year at TiEcon, the world’s largest conference for entrepreneurs. Participating technology startups benefit from a vast ecosystem of venture capitalists, angels, and entrepreneurs. Other participant privileges include significant investor exposure, online virtual showcasing and technology and business partnering/networking."

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Wildfire Named One of the "Top 10 Best Places to Work"

The Wildfire team is excited about the news that the San Francisco Business Times has named our company one of the “Top 10 Best Places to Work!” (employees <100). When Matt and I attended the recognition ceremony in San Francisco and accepted our celebratory trophy, we had to make a speech, like at the Oscars, but this one could only be 10 words. Of course, we mentioned how excited we were, and that we were hiring! But given the opportunity to say more than 10 words, we’d like to share some thoughts from Wildfire employees:

“Working at Wildfire is an incredibly engaging experience.  Honestly, I've never been in an office where people are so happy to be there.  Without exception, the staff at Wildfire is intelligent, positive, and passionate about what we're doing here.  I won't lie, people here work hard, but you get the genuine sense it's because they want to.  Management is amazing, and really values the opinions of employees, seeming to take special notice of every individual person, even as we've grown.  Now, it sounds like I've pretty much exclusively talked about the people, but that's because that's really what makes Wildfire such an awesome place to spend time.” — Meredith

 

 

At Wildfire, our team is a family, complete with inside jokes, favorite foods, and company parties. In the past year, we’ve grown from 7 people in March to just over 100 people this April. We still have a weekly all-hands team meeting, which is becoming an exercise in efficient space usage, as more and more people crowd into the room to listen to the discussions of the week. There is 100% transparency, where any person can find an answer to any question, needing only the capability of asking.

 

“It’s a very distinct feeling, and you encounter it the first time you walk into a Wildfire office and look around at the rows of cheery faces going about their work— there’s something in the air at Wildfire, a certain enthusiasm and sense of purpose, that invigorates visitors and employees alike.” — Maya

 

We work together and we play together, literally. At least a portion of the reason we’re so ecstatic this week (in addition to the amazing award) is because we just won our first team softball game this season, in a local co-ed adult league. 16-7, baby!

 

“Coming in to work doesn’t feel like coming in to work, but more like moving from one of your houses to the other, complete with snack-tastic kitchens and a pet fish. His name is Frank, and he has a Facebook page. Everyone in the office is his friend.” — Mike

Over the past year, we’ve managed to maintain our streak of hiring bubbly, intelligent, well-spoken, confident, and witty team mates. We thought it was beginners luck initially, but at 100 and counting, it seems we’re on to something. Next time you’re in the neighborhood, drop by and say hey yourself!

 

 

“Working at Wildfire is one of the most exciting and rewarding job experiences imaginable.” — Jason

 

Read the full press release here.

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