Facebook Launched Its Mobile Platform


On October 10, Facebook rolled out its long awaited native iOS application and an HTML 5 web application. Part of Facebook’s first efforts in extending its full Platform to the mobile market, both apps not only provide a slick new user experience, but also bring social app discovery to mobile. Users can now discover and interact with apps on their mobile devices through three new channels: bookmarks, requests and newsfeed links. In addition to the three social channels, Facebook has also introduced Authenticated Referrals, which take users from the Facebook application to a native or web app without having to reauthenticate with their Facebook credentials.

Taken together, the new apps (currently available for third-party native apps on iOS devices and via m.facebook.com, and coming soon to Android) significantly reduce the need to manually authenticate with Facebook connect and make it easier for friends to interact with and discover apps.

Here’s a rundown of each of these new features:


Bookmarks



  • When a user interacts with an app on any computer or device, a short-link to the app is automatically added to the user’s Facebook Mobile sidebar.

  • If the user launches the app from this sidebar menu, she will automatically be taken to either the native iOS application or the web application.

Requests



  • An invitation to check out an app from a friend using a desktop browser can be received and acted on all within the mobile device.

  • Users who open the invitation to interact with an app will be taken straight to the mobile version of the app--either a native iOS or a mobile web app.

Newsfeed Links



  • Links in newsfeed posts can now also take users automatically to the mobile version of an app.

Authenticated Referrals



  • Users who navigate to your app and are already logged in to Facebook do not need to re-authenticate.

  • First time users of your app and those who have not previously used the mobile version of your app will be prompted to log in with their Facebook credentials and allow the app.

What are your thoughts on the introduction of social channels and authentication referrals to the mobile Facebook environment? What are you most excited about? Share your comments with us below, we love to hear from you!

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Wildfire and LinkedIn Bring Social Media Marketing to B2B World



Initial results show 60% reduction in cost per lead when combining Wildfire with LinkedIn ads


We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with LinkedIn to bring our Social Media Marketing Suite to the LinkedIn platform! With Wildfire, companies on LinkedIn can create and manage social promotions to generate leads and grow their followers. Coming soon, they will also be able to publish messages to continually engage their audience and measure indepth analytics about the performance of their LinkedIn company page. We have gained extensive experience building a comprehensive social marketing product on Facebook and Twitter, and are now excited to bring these tools to the LinkedIn platform.

For all marketers, but especially B2B marketers, this is exciting news! Our initial tests show that running a Wildfire promotion in connection with a LinkedIn advertising campaign can double ad click-through rates and decrease cost per lead by more than 60%. Additionally, our tests have shown that the viral sharing rate for LinkedIn users can be up to several times higher than on other leading social networks.

With its over 120 million worldwide users, LinkedIn serves as a powerful venue for companies seeking to interact with customers and prospects, build positive brand awareness, and drive revenue. Consider the latest statistics:

  • Approximately two professionals sign up to join LinkedIn every second

  • Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members

  • More than 2 million companies have LinkedIn Company Pages.

As Adweek recently noted, “Attracting followers now, while the feature is still relatively new, will cost much less than courting them down the road, when brands might have to lure them away from rival companies they’ve already decided to follow.”




We will be hosting a FREE LinkedIn Marketing Webinar to chat about what our partnership means for marketers and how B2B companies can best use LinkedIn for social media marketing.

Webinar: Register Now!




Now is the time to for you to incorporate LinkedIn into your social marketing strategy, and Wildfire is uniquely positioned to help you do so. To get started, here are three tips to help your company get the most out of LinkedIn:

Tip #1: Build Your Presence


A fast and easy way to build a large, active follower base is to create incentives through promotions. Create brand awareness, solicit product reviews and encourage attendance at professional conferences by running sweepstakes, contests, and discount campaigns that entice users.

Wildfire allows you to get up and running quickly with a turnkey marketing platform. When your promotion is ready, simultaneously publish it across multiple channels, now including LinkedIn, to reach your audience wherever they engage. Your branded promotion turns your LinkedIn page into a communication hub for followers.

Tip #2: Tap into Viral Sharing


Wildfire promotions seamlessly integrate with LinkedIn’s platform and allow you to tap into the network’s viral power. Users can share your company’s promotion with their LinkedIn networks, newsfeed, groups and specific users. Beyond promotions, use LinkedIn’s inherent sharing functions to spread news about your brand, upcoming product launches, to crowdsource new feature ideas, and more.

Tip #3: Follow & Learn From Your Results


Most successful promotions are supported by marketing efforts within and outside of social networks; track the most effective referral sources--advertisements, newsletters, your company page, etc.--for your campaign with Wildfire Analytics.

Our tests show that running a Wildfire powered promotion in connection with a LinkedIn advertising campaign significantly improves click-through rates and reduces cost per lead. With promotions and analytics, you can easily determine how to get the most out of your advertising dollars! Finally, the LinkedIn profiles gathered from promotion entrants provide high quality lead generation and insights. Use these metrics to find new clients, new employees and to build an engaged base of followers.

What is your company’s LinkedIn marketing strategy? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below! Also, please don’t forget to sign-up for our FREE LinkedIn Marketing Webinar.

Webinar: Register Now!




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Wildfire Launches New Way to Measure Brand Engagement on Facebook.

Wildfire Integrates with Facebook’s new Insights Data to provide Brands with a richer understanding of Engagement.

We're very excited to announce big news for social media marketers and especially those of you (this should be all of you!) who are interested in better measuring and understanding your social media reach. Several weeks ago, Facebook selected Wildfire to help advise them on the development of some new metrics for Facebook Pages. These metrics are being launched today by Facebook and we've integrated them into our analytics dashboard to not only provide our clients with an easy way to digest and track the new Insights metrics, but to go deeper by providing additional insights, including the ability to aggregate the new analytics across multiple Facebook pages and tabs. This blog post will explain in simple terms what these new Facebook metrics mean for you and how Wildfire is enhancing them for our clients.

Some of the most notable new data points Facebook launched today include Friends of Fans, Reach, Engaged Users, and People Talking About This. Before delving into the details of the metrics themselves, it’s worth taking a moment to consider how these new Insights impact you as a social media marketer.

To understand the true value of your communications, you need to know how many users have been exposed to your messaging, and what proportion of your audience is actively responding to that messaging through the means available to the end consumer. In other words, how many people are viewing, Liking, sharing, commenting on, consuming or otherwise engaging with your content? A thorough understanding of how visible your messaging is and the extent of viral activity around it is crucial to optimizing your brand’s impact on Facebook.




Webinar: Register Now!



What do these new metrics do?


Think of it as a funnel: when you broadcast a message on Facebook, a portion of your fan base will see that post in their news feed. Of those users who are initially exposed—let’s call them your Organic Reach—a subset of them will respond positively by consuming content (e.g., watching a video, clicking on a link, etc.), Liking it, commenting on it, or taking other actions. These interactions constitute engagement of some kind. Facebook now counts the unique users who interact in one or more of these ways and labels them Engaged Users.

Some Engaged Users are special in that they take actions that cause others to see your brand name and content as well! For example, if one of your fans (let’s call her Mary) comments on your post, her friends will see it in their news feed, too. By commenting on your post, Mary is Talking About you to a broader audience. We refer to the size of this broad audience as your Viral Reach, i.e., the number of people you reached because of people Talking About your brand. By “talking about” your brand, Mary is counted both as an Engaged User and in the more specific People Talking About This metric.

Seeing that some of your fans are Talking About your brand leads to the notion that you could potentially reach many or all of their friends virally. To address this, Facebook also introduced a new metric called Friends of Fans, which is exactly that: the number of unique users who are friends of your Page’s fans, any of whom you could potentially reach with engaging content. For most Pages, Friends of Fans represent a significant multiplier over their direct fan base. Ultimately, the more captivating your message, the more likely you are to reach a larger proportion of the friends of your fans.

Analytics Cheat Sheet: Download Now!



Wildfire Analytics Give You All This, and More!


Wildfire was selected by Facebook to help advise them on their new Insights and we are therefore in a unique position to enable our clients to benefit from these new metrics on day one of the new Insights launch. In addition to providing our clients with an easy way to digest and track the new Insights metrics, Wildfire has gone beyond Facebook's new metrics to provide additional insight, including the ability to aggregate the Insights across all of your Facebook pages and all tabs published through our Social Marketing Suite.



So, for example, if you manage multiple Facebook Pages Wildfire will enable you to see at a glance your aggregate performance across all these pages, and to then drill down deeper to see the analytics for your individual pages. Even if you only manage one Facebook page but you have multiple tabs associated with this page our aggregation of the Insights data is helpful to you because you can see at a glance how you're performing, in aggregate, across all your tabs. These metrics allow you to evaluate engagement comprehensively across your social properties, compare your properties side-by-side, and drill down for further details. In this way you can readily identify which of your properties and tabs are generating the greatest engagement and you can learn from them in order to optimize your lower performing pages and tabs.


Our new analytics offerings help you understand your Page’s reach and the size of the audience responding to your message, so you can unlock the potential of your social media presence. With our tools, you’ll be able to optimize your broadcasts to reach a wider audience, engage a broader community, and effectively spread the word about your brand, product, or service.

We will be hosting a free Facebook Insights webinar on October 18. Register now and tune in to learn all you need to know about these new analytics.

Analytics Webinar: Register Now!


We’re excited about Facebook’s new analytics and our own. What do you think? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below!
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Facebook Revealed Massive Changes Last Week, But What Do They Mean?

Last week, Facebook revealed some of its biggest changes yet. You’ve probably heard the terms Timeline, Ticker and Open Graph floating around, so let’s take a look at what these terms mean, and what implications they have for brands’ and agencies’ social media marketing.

Timeline
Very soon (if you haven’t hacked it already), your profile will be completely overhauled into a sleek new page with large cover pictures, featured actions, certain aggregated information and more. At its core, this Timeline is a chronology of a user’s life on Facebook, with items automatically appearing based on an algorithm intended to capture a user’s most important life events. A few things to keep in mind:

  • Some things are grouped together, such as all things a user Liked in a given month.

  • The more engaging an action, the more prominently it will appear and remain in the Timeline.

  • Users can edit to manually add, remove, feature or de-emphasize Timeline events. In his keynote address at f8, Mark Zuckerberg enthusiastically demonstrated how a user can go back to the year of his birth and upload a baby picture.

  • Although historically, major profile changes have often followed similar brand page changes, there is no official word yet on whether brand pages will also be redesigned.


Open Graph and Custom Actions
Last year, Facebook rolled out Open Graph, allowing brands to connect to a user’s Facebook social graph. This year, it rolled out significant changes, allowing app developers to create custom actions using any verb and object related to the activity taking place on the app. These so-called “lightweight” activities can be defined by the app creator and pushed throughout the Facebook experience. Here are the highlights:

  • The Open Graph integrates with the Newsfeed, Ticker (described below) and Timeline, making the app a key part of users’ and their friends’ Facebook experiences.

  • As users engage, the custom action appears on Facebook. Ex: Jane cooked a recipe from Best Recipes App.

  • Changes to the structure of permissions allow a user to give permission one time for an app to post about that user’s activity on the app thereafter.

  • Custom actions improve Sponsored Stories in that they can now include more interesting information about an action a user has taken, and similarly improve ad targeting in that brands can direct ads to users who have taken certain kinds of actions. See our previous blog post for more information on how Sponsored Stories work.


Newsfeed and Ticker
Closely related to the Open Graph changes are the Newsfeed redesign and introduction of the Ticker. According to Facebook, ensure that the overall concept behind these changes is to make sure users don’t miss important events, regardless of how often they log in.

  • The flow of information to users has been revamped to feature higher quality engagement in a single Newsfeed, a real-time feed of all activity in the Ticker, and improved photo album display.

  • The Newsfeed now appears as one continuous feed, with “Top Stories” usually appearing first and the remaining “Recent Stories” appearing below. This adjusts based on how often a user checks Facebook.

  • Likes and more minor actions are removed from the Newsfeed but still appear in the Ticker.


What’s a marketer to do?
Now that we know what changes Facebook has made, brands and marketers need to figure out what they mean for social media marketing. Based on our extensive experience running over 150,000 social media campaigns, here’s our take:

  • “Likes” are still very important. This is the way brands build their audiences, to whom they can communicate directly, and promotions are the best way to build a fanbase. Sweepstakes and instant win campaigns are best for generating “Likes,” while contests, trivia, group deals and engaging pages are best for fostering engagement.

  • Newsfeed vs. Brand Pages. There had been recent talk of apps/tabs/pages decreasing in significance. The f8 changes turn that around, in that deeper, more engaging actions are the ones that will appear in Top Stories and Timelines and are therefore more persistent within the social graph. Prior to f8, to the extent that they appeared in a newsfeed or profile wall, more minor actions had the same real estate as more engaging actions, whereas they are now moved to the fast-moving Ticker.

  • Reevaluate your brand’s strategy. Many brands will be able to capitalize on the increased engagement necessary to produce frequent appearances in the Ticker and lasting impressions in the Newsfeed and Timeline, but that won’t work for everyone. If your brand is one where engaging actions aren’t obvious, think about what activities your fans regularly take, and what partnerships or co-marketing could help turn those activities into engaging custom actions on Facebook.


In light of Facebook’s recent changes, Wildfire will enhance our existing Facebook application offerings to take advantage of the new opportunities. Over the coming months, we will work to integrate Open Graph actions into our applications so they will start sending lightweight feeds to Facebook’s new Ticker, and adapt existing applications and develop new ones that will encourage consumers to place apps on their timeline on a regular basis.

What Facebook changes are you most looking forward to exploring? Share your thoughts in the comments, we love to hear from you!
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