Wildfire launches first brand marketing app for Facebook pages thatties in with Sponsored Stories

Shortly after we launched the Wildfire Social Marketing Suite, our friends at Facebook asked us to create the first ever app designed to work with Facebook’s Sponsored Stories. There’s been a lot of discussion among social media marketers about the power of Sponsored Stories to enhance a brand’s reach on Facebook through ads and the newsfeed, and Wildfire created the Storyteller app (or as we call it, plug-in) to make Sponsored Stories even more effective because it encourages the creation of authentic user generated feedback about brands (e.g. “I love my Audi because it has the most beautiful design of any car in the world”) as opposed to the more formulaic stories (e.g. “Jane Doe liked the Audi Page”) that are typically generated by Sponsored Stories ads. We’ve already worked with several major brands to run campaigns powered by our Storyteller app, including a major auto company, an entertainment company and a professional sports franchise and the results have been impressive. In this post, we’ll explain what Facebook Sponsored Stories are, how the Wildfire Storyteller app works in conjunction with Sponsored Stories, and we’ll share the success we had when we tested our Storyteller app on our own Facebook page.

In case you’re not aware, Sponsored Stories are a Facebook advertising format—Facebook defines them as stories that are “eligible to appear in your News Feed.”  Sponsored Stories show up, like traditional ads, on the right column of pages on Facebook. Companies can choose different user actions — such as posts, likes, check-ins or actions within Facebook apps — and feature them in their ad campaign. Facebook says that unlike traditional ads, “Sponsored Stories help to drive authentic and scalable word of mouth,” because the ads stem from real user interactions and are shown to all of that user’s friends. Here are some examples of Sponsored Stories you’ve probably already seen in your Facebook account:

• “App Share” Stories are created when a user starts using a Facebook app


• Page Post Like” Stories are created when a user “Likes” one of the posts made by your page

The current Sponsored Stories formats produce content that follows a template – for example “Jane Doe likes the Wildfire Page” or “Jane Doe used Farmville”, so although the content is personalized it does not allow for the generation of highly unique and personalized content. Given this, Facebook and Wildfire thought it would be powerful to create an app that inherently encourages users to create unique, personalized content that can then be turned into newsfeed stories and ads. The Wildfire Storyteller app, available exclusively to Wildfire Social Suite customers, enables brands to ask their users for feedback and opinions and the responses get posted as a newsfeed story to their wall, to their friends’ newsfeeds and in Sponsored Stories targeted toward their friends.

Using the Wildfire Storyteller app, you can create a tab in your Facebook Page to ask your users fun and engaging questions about your brand. You can then set up an entire customized Facebook Feed Story that gets published alongside that user’s generated response. This feed story is especially powerful in that you can included a branded video or image with the story and you can also customize the feed story title, URL and description. So, for example, a movie brand could use our Storyteller app to ask fans “What was your favorite scene from the Hangover II movie trailer?” and the ad generated from a user’s response could include the movie trailer, a link to buy tickets for the movie, and a description of the movie.

We tried it with one of our own Facebook Fan Pages, to measure just how effective the Wildfire Storyteller app could be in generating word of mouth. Behind the scenes, this is how easy setup of the Storyteller app is — you can configure it right from your Wildfire Social Suite Page Manager!

And this is what it looks like in action!

As long as you’ve created a Sponsored Stories ad campaign, all of these newsfeed posts create ads targeted to your users’ friends. We wanted to test for ourselves the difference made by using the Wildfire Storyteller app with Facebook Sponsored Stories ads against traditional Facebook ads. We tested the entry rate from traditional ads against that of our Sponsored Stories ad and newsfeed posts using our Storyteller app. We found that the Storyteller app generated content was over 4x more effective than traditional ads in getting people to convert!

• Traditional Facebook Ad: 3.3% conversion rate!


• Facebook Sponsored Story with Storyteller app: 17% conversion rate!

To control for negative or offensive content our Storyteller app enables a brand to apply word filters so they can control which kind of content gets distributed as Sponsored Stories and newsfeeds. Consumers who write stories that include these filtered words will still be able to submit their story but the story will not be distributed as a newsfeed or a Sponsored Story. Interestingly, however, of the campaigns that we have already run using our Storyteller app, the overwhelming majority of comments were highly positive.

One interesting thing we observed while testing and learning about Sponsored Stories is that they might be best suited for brands with larger fan bases. Because an ad only gets displayed to friends of your fans, brands with much bigger fan bases will likely see more significant results than smaller brands simply because smaller brands most likely can’t reach enough users to make it worthwhile. If you’re a larger brand, Sponsored Stories in conjunction with the Storyteller app can be an exciting new tool in your arsenal to generate authentic and scalable word of mouth in the form of user generated recommendations.

We’re excited to be the first Facebook developer to ignite the potential of Sponsored Stories ads! To find out more about how you can use Wildfire Social Marketing Suite, including Page Manager and the new Storyteller app, check out the details here.

read more...

SXSW Panel 2012: Help Wildfire Land a Solo Panel and Expose the Big Data Behind Social Media Use!

Help Wildfire secure a speaking presentation at the 2012 SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, by voting for CEO Victoria Ransom's panel application:

In 2012 more and more companies will move beyond the “trial and error” stage of social media to truly embrace it but still the question lingers – does social media benefit all companies? All industries? What makes some social media campaigns successful and others not? How can a company know if it is doing well in social? Wildfire, the only social media marketing startup to receive an investment from Facebook’s fbFund, has the answer to all these questions and more – and has real data to back it up. Using exclusive data collected from more than 100,000 campaigns run via Wildfire’s social marketing platform and billions of data points collected from Wildfire’s detailed tracking of more than 30 million Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, co-founder and CEO Victoria Ransom will unveil in-depth data, segmented by industry, company size, geography and more, on how customers engage with Facebook pages, company Twitter profiles and Facebook check-ins.

If this sounds like a panel you'd love to watch, help us make it happen by voting it into existence! SXSW chooses panels partially by popular vote (a whopping 30%!) so we can't make this happen without your help!

VOTE HERE: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/13036 Thanks so much, in advance, for your help!

read more...

Mind the Statistics: Creating Engaging Fan Pages for your Brand onFacebook

In this post, we will cover the reason that maintaining an engaging Facebook Fan Page is important to growing your fan community; reasons that fans abandon brand pages; and ways that you can engage fans so that they remain interactive, using real examples of pages as case studies.

What is the value of an engaging fan page? Creating an engaged and interactive community on your brand’s Facebook Fan Page is about more than capturing a population of “likes” and leaving it at that. We know why you want to build a sizable fan base: 51% of Facebook users say they are more likely to buy from a brand that they like on Facebook, and 60% of users say they’re more likely to recommend a brand to their friends if they like it on Facebook (CMB 2011). The promising message of these statistics spur marketers to build fan communities, and try to do it fast. However, users can be fickle about maintaining this commitment to a brand, and will unfollow brands for many reasons, such as posting too frequently or with uninteresting content.

Because disinterested fans are nearly as good as non-fans, a static fan page is of little value to your brand without continued engagement. This blog post will introduce a number of goals you can set that are supported by industry statistics about user behavior. Each goal will be accompanied by methods of accomplishment as well as several examples of real-life case studies that exemplify these achievements. These goals, when set as part of a complete social media marketing strategy, help brands create and maintain “sexy” and engaging Brand Pages on Facebook.

Why does engagement fall over time?

What reasons do fans give for unfollowing brands? (source: ExactTarget 2011)



Now that you know the top causes of the fan “break-up,” avoid them! Don’t rely solely on an automated messaging stream to send out uninteresting posts at a predetermined rate. Create engagement on your page, giving visitors a reason to stick around and interact. Most interactions lead directly to an activity update being posted to the fan’s wall displaying their interaction with your brand, which can be seen by their friends.

How to increase engagement?

Now, lets consider the marketing goals you can set for your page, and how to achieve them:

Go beyond the newsfeed

To avoid having your fans unlike your brand because your page posts became “repetitive and boring”, create reasons for your fans to interact with your page, including applications that encourage participation and activity from users. For example, Wildfire Page Manager can be used to create pages with limitless plugin capabilities. Use these plugins to get beyond the wall, creating engaging interaction scenarios for your users on multiple tabs across your fan page. Let’s take a look at ideeli, whose fan page is demonstrating great success with this challenge:

• ideeli frequently switches up their profile picture, effectively using the valuable bottom half to point out a new feature to engage with.


• ideeli also seeks to attract new users with consistently running promotions. Recently they gave away “3 fabulous getaways”. Running promotions like this allows ideeli to draw in existing and new fans via advertising which promotes the giveaway.


• ideeli plans for the future: what happens to a user after they’ve entered into a promotion, for example? Typically, the user wonders what they can do next, and looks around for interesting items on your page that might keep them there.


• ideeli has created constantly rotating engaging plugins on the other tabs within the fan page, where users can spend time browsing and interacting.
  In particular, notice the “Shoes” tab, where users are encouraged to voice their opinion about whether the flat shoes pictured are “Dainty or Glam?” In addition to voting, which yields an immediate poll count, they are encouraged to be more specific in a comments plugin right below the shoes box. The comments they leave can also be shared straight to their newsfeed, an example of a great way to create social sharing.


• Also within the shoes tab, ideeli captures eyeballs on the same page by prompting users to become a member of the retail merchandise club, in a plug-in right below the comments.


• If that weren’t enough, ideeli also includes an element of e-commerce in a creative but unobtrusive way, by including a small photo carousel that displays one image of a shoe available for sale at a time, including a button that links right to it. Users could browse through all the photos in the carousel, and always have the option to complete a sale, all while spending time on the ideeli Facebook fan page.


• Finally, just on that page ideeli makes sure to capture the very last of the lingering eyes with an RSS plugin, drawing users in to various other content they’d enjoy with short descriptions and links to it, such as the post featuring Jessica Simpson.

Create social sharing.

18% of users become a fan of a brand on Facebook because they “want to show others that I like and support this brand.” (eMarketer). What can your brand do to drive this kind of social sharing?

• Give your users something to share! What do users love to share? Interesting or funny content, jokes, comic strips, pictures, and video. Here is an example of an entire tab on Infiniti’s Facebook page dedicated to just videos: four newly produced commercials for their cars. Each one is included with its own Facebook “Share” button, which is programmed to send the video straight to the user’s newsfeed, where all his friends can see it too.

Create brand affinity.

8% of users become a fan of a brand on Facebook to be the first to know information about it, and 6% do so to gain access to exclusive content (eMarketer). Treating your users like insider VIPs, and creating an environment which expresses this relationship, can help to create brand affinity. Look at how Infiniti is using pages on its Facebook Fan Page to create brand affinity:

• In advance of the reveal of the Infiniti JX Concept car in August, the Infiniti page has a timed photo carousel plugin installed to a page on its profile: this plugin reveals exclusive, never-before-seen photos of the concept car, only to the Facebook users of the page. To add fuel to the fire, Infiniti reminds users of the exclusivity of the content and stokes anticipation by including a countdown to the time the next picture becomes revealed on the fan page and is added to the carousel.

In addition to Infiniti, the fan page for EA Sports SSX video game has interesting exclusive content for its fans as well:

• To engage with its gaming fans, EA Sports is releasing a series of character comic strips, one at a time, at different dates. This encourages users to come back and view them as they are released, but it also reinforces the user’s affinity with the brand, as each comic that is released is a piece of exclusive content that only visitors to the fan page can access.

How else can you foster interactions with your fans that go beyond the wall on your page? Show fans how else you’re being social, and where else they can interact with you.

• Insert a plug-in to your tab that pulls in the Twitter feed for your brand, as Infiniti does in its Welcome page.


• Note that on the same content page, Infiniti takes care to draw attention to where else users can “Stay Inspired” with buttons that showcase its other social identities on Flickr, Youtube, and Twitter.

Use the wall for nurturing fans over time.

Now that you’re armed with a set of goals and the strategies to achieve them, messaging your users continuously over time should remain top of mind. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that not all posts are created equally, nor are they treated that way by Facebook. So how can you optimize your messaging strategies to reach the most people, and remain engaging and interactive?

Stay tuned for the next post from Wildfire where we’ll analyze the efficacy of different types of Facebook posts, and outline a strategy for creating engaging posts for your page.

What did you think of the strategies outlined in this post about creating and maintaining engaging Facebook pages? Are you already implementing these strategies on your own Pages? Leave us a note in the comments; we’d love to hear from you!

read more...

International Social Media Marketing: An Outlook

This post is adapted from a recent article authored by Wildfire CEO Victoria Ransom and published in the July 25, 2011 Wedbush Securities Report.

There’s been lots of mention in the press about Facebook’s exploding popularity outside the U.S. – currently there are over 500 million international Facebook users! But we haven’t seen any coverage about how this growth impacts the way multi-national brands think about social media marketing –until now. Based on the data we pulled from over 100,000+ promotions run on our platform, it’s clear that international users are not just using Facebook to interact with friends; they’re also on Facebook to engage with brands. This represents an enormous opportunity for global and regional brands to create targeted and relatively inexpensive viral marketing campaigns for fans throughout the world. In this post we’ll discuss the demographic trends you should be aware of, we’ll highlight some best practices for international social media marketing and we’ll showcase a very cool global campaign from Qatar Airways.

According to Inside Facebook, the U.S. represents 22% of global Facebook users, but international growth dwarfs that of the U.S. Specifically, markets in Asia, South America and Europe are experiencing high double-digit and even triple-digit increases in Facebook users. This growth is seen across the board, from developed European countries such as Germany and Spain, to developing countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas.

Top 20 Facebook Markets by Country  
(as of June 01, 2011, Source: InsideFacebook)



Social promotions aren’t just for U.S. Consumers

Wildfire’s promotion entry data shows similar strong trends in international growth. Facebook users in Europe, Asia and Africa (particularly the Middle East) have entered Wildfire’s customers’ promotions in droves as brands launched marketing campaigns specifically targeted to them.

Wildfire's Year over Year Promotion Entry Growth by Continent



While the rest of the world is still lagging the U.S. in terms of social media sophistication and adoption of social marketing tools, Wildfire believes international brands are quickly catching up as they see the return on their Facebook marketing dollars.

Qatar Airways: A multi-country social media innovator

Recently, Wildfire worked with Qatar Airways media agency, the Internet Success Hub, to create a global Facebook campaign that simultaneously ran in Arabic, English, French, Spanish and German. Fans were automatically routed to the appropriate entry page based on their language preference.



The results were extremely impressive, with Qatar Airways gaining 150,000 Facebook fans in 30 days! For a relatively small investment, Qatar Airways was able to achieve global reach in an extremely short timeframe. Although it may seem daunting to try to simultaneously reach a global audience, brands and agencies can take advantage of Facebook’s strong international growth by using tools such as Wildfire’s Social Marketing Suite. These marketing tools allow companies to:

• Create one custom, attractive landing page whose content can be easily translated, modified and targeted to users based on the user’s country and language


• Send messages to multiple pages that are targeted by a user’s geographic location and language preference


• Run promotions simultaneously in multiple languages – and automatically ensure users see the campaign in their language


• Easily translate promotions into the most common foreign languages

Now we want to hear from you! Are you thinking about or have you already implemented an international social media marketing strategy? Tell us below.

read more...