November 2011

Top 3 Must-Have Qualities of a Good Signup Form

The significance of online forms can’t be understated; effective forms are a way for users to communicate with brands, and a way for brands to acquire customers, grow communities, accumulate data and drive sales. To ensure that the forms you’re creating are effective, be sure that they align with these three best practices:

Use big, bold typefaces. Keep in mind that you have roughly 8-10 seconds to get a conversion, so it’s important to capture users’ attention immediately with your logo and branded message in bold type that is tough to miss.

Make sure your forms have a clear purpose. Users are much more inclined to complete your form when they know what they’re getting in return, and when they’re getting it. To achieve this, make sure that the forms you create answer five key questions for the user:

What is this?

Why should I sign up? (i.e., What is the end result?)

Who else is using this?

How do I sign up?

When will I receive the emails, prize, or other follow-up in return?

By answering these questions, you help set realistic user expectations, which promotes the development of an honest relationship your audience and your brand. An honest relationship is key to nurturing brand loyalty and encouraging your audience to speak positively of your brand to others.

Incorporate calls to action on your buttons. Buttons are included on online forms to compel a user to do something. By incorporating custom calls to action into your buttons, such as “Sign-Up for Our Newsletter,” “Get Product Updates,” and “Download Our Free E-Book,” they become inherently more enticing to users than a simple “Submit” button. Keep this in mind when you design forms, and give users a reason to click!

What are your plans for using Wildfire’s signup form plugin? Weigh in with your own creative ideas in the comments below. We love hearing from you!

17 Creative Ways to Get Users to Sign Up

We’ve all seen signup forms used for email lists, but why stop there? Our new Signup Form Plugin is so flexible, we had a hard time even naming it! It’s much more than a traditional signup form app, and the possibilities for use are endless. Below are just a few of the creative ways to use the tool, from essay contests to surveys to virtual scavenger hunts.

Lead Capture

Make a beautiful, creative newsletter signup form and publish it to Facebook, your website and your mobile site.

Make a special deal, gift, coupon code, video, whitepaper, ebook or other valuable piece of content available only to users who submit the form.

Create flash sales, where a special deal is revealed only after a certain number of people have completed the signup form. This encourages social sharing and lets you promote products or services, all while capturing leads.

Remember all those bottle-top promotions? Integrate online and offline promotions by printing coupon or other codes on your products, and allowing users to enter those, along with their contact information, in your online form.

Integrate your website and Facebook page with LinkedIn’s network, by putting up a page for users to sign-in with their LinkedIn accounts and drop “virtual business cards” into a fishbowl for prize entry.

Engagement

Create a virtual treasure hunt, where fans get clues and answer questions through your form. Keep your fans coming back day after day and give a prize to winners at the end.

Incorporate SMS messaging! Let users sign up for an SMS message, voicemail or phone call with a premium deal or unique content to be sent directly to their phones, integrating with a service such as Twilio.

Run a contest with user-generated content. Let users submit testimonials, essays or product reviews, or even run a caption contest, and pick the winner at the end!

Create a fun Mad Libs-style form, letting users fill in blanks to create unique stories about your brand or promotion.

Run a true scavenger hunt by publishing your form to your mobile site and letting users gather clues at physical locations, input them and submit the completed form to win!

Provide targeted deals to certain geographic, age or other groups. With advanced code verification functionality, you can require that users submit a certain code that you have predefined--such as a zip code or birthdate--in order to proceed. You can vary the deal according to the answer that users provide.

Surveys and Support

Use it to survey and poll your users. Find out their favorite products, interests and more, and include Name and Email fields to build your leads.

Provide a forum for product feedback, and incorporate a Storyteller plugin to encourage conversation and social sharing about your products.

Use it to gather support tickets. Include dropdown and text fields in your form, and integrate it with your company’s support site provider, such as Zendesk.

User Registration

Tie the signup form into your own account registration, so that when users fill out the signup form on Facebook, they are also automatically signed up for an account with your company. This works well for member-only shopping sites.

Are you targeting businesses? Allow professionals to sign up for webinars, conferences and other events directly from your page, and even integrate with services like GoToWebinar or Eventbrite.

Let users register for events, and give registrants exclusive content access, such as event-specific deals or information.

To chat with one of our social media experts about using forms to maximize your marketing, click here!

4 Ways to Drive Holiday Sales through Social Media

Here’s a trend that should give you a bit of holiday cheer: the average holiday shopper plans to do 36% of their shopping—up from 32.7% last year— online this year. If you get your holiday themed social marketing campaigns right, you could see that sales increase hit your bottom line. Try these 5 holiday marketing strategies to give your season’s sales a boost:

1. Dedicate page real estate to the holidays and your products.

Create a seasonal activity hub on your Facebook page for visitors and fans. Whether you make a new tab with rotating seasonal content (like our Wildfire Page Manager Paypal Storefront template featuring adorable dinosaur sweaters by the Sisters Oberth), or you create an entire mini-website within a tab (like Denizen America), showcase special holiday products that make your fans feel festive.

Combine continuously updating products, special offers, messages, or the ability to shop for seasonal products (see below), and you’ll give your fans the message that your page is a fun place to hang out, and buy, this season!

2. Build buzz with a well-timed reveal of sales or special products.

Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) is the biggest shopping day of the year. In fact, ShopperTrak reported that $10.69 billion was spent on Black Friday 2010, with 212 million shoppers visiting their favorite retailers offline and online! Additionally, Cyber Monday 2010 saw $1.028 billion of online sales from 9 million shoppers.

Consumers are primed to expect sales and juicy discounts as merchants try to drive them into a pre-Christmas buying frenzy. Take advantage of this expectation by creating a specially themed Black Friday or Cyber Monday coupon, product offering, group deal or sale, that reveals in connection with the holidays or when your page reaches a certain fan threshold.

In the example below, a Wildfire Social Marketing Suite Page Manager template is configured to do a Black Friday Countdown. It can be customized to any brand’s design or formatting guidelines.

3. Run a holiday-themed promotion that incorporates your product.

Based on numerous research reports, it’s clear that Facebook fans get especially excited about fun, holiday-themed promotions. In fact, In 2010, 21% of Cyber Monday shoppers heard about a promotion through someone in their online social network. Also, Media Post states that, in 2010, social media and mobile capabilities were the key drivers of Black Friday sales with consumers using mobile devices for product reviews, promotions, price checks and to check-in while shopping at various stores.

The holiday season is the time to put your product front-and-center with a promotion. When crafting your promotion, consider including your product in the entry process (such as asking the user to take a picture of himself with a branded item), or as part of the prize. For example, both Silk and Luster Premium Whitening included a supply of their product as part of the ultimate prize, aligning the interest of the entrants with these products specifically.

4. Reinforce your product’s holiday uses through specific and targeted messaging.

When messaging your audience, see if you can address a holiday theme as well as advertise your product in the same message. When you fit these two pieces together, your messages ride the existing wave of holiday cheer and get extra attention. In the examples below, HP consistently posts updates to Facebook fans that feature HP products, but with an appealing holiday slant (an incentive to “like” the post for a special deal). One way to automate the messaging process in advance of the holiday season is to plan out a posting schedule, like for an editorial calendar, and schedule your messages to go live using a page posting tool like Wildfire Messenger. This way, once you plan the messages, you can sit back and watch them publish themselves!

Now you have four strategies you can use this holiday season to promote your products: dedicating page real estate to the holidays, running holiday promotions, timing special sales events, and targeting holiday-themed messaging. Want more holiday-themed strategies, tips, success stories, and advice? Join us for our November 15th webinar, “Perfecting your Holiday Social Media Strategy!” Register here for the recording.

Do you have additional ideas about how to promote your brand during the holiday season? Share them with us in the comments below, so we can learn from you, too!

10 Tips for a Sharp Facebook Messaging Strategy for the Holidays

Recent studies about the amount of time users spend reading the Facebook newsfeed, the subsequent redesign of the front page of Facebook, and the findings that branded fan pages — and the updates that users see on them — are vastly more successful than other forms of Facebook advertising, make one thing clear:

Engagement is king.

In fact, there’s no better time to engage with fans than the holiday season. If you’re behind on planning your holiday social strategy (Thanksgiving is less than two weeks away!), we’ve got you covered with ten proven, holiday-themed social messaging ideas that will ignite holiday cheer.

(If you want to see these great holiday marketing strategies in action, join us for a webinar on Tuesday, November 15. Click here to watch the recording.)

1. Create a branded calendar with an engagement initiative that spans a series of days. Reveal something appealing each day. Then message your fans about each reveal.

12 Days of Christmas? 8 Days of Hannukah? 31 Days of Social Media? Have you ever seen an advent calendar, where windows open daily thru Christmas, each revealing a gift or special treat? We smell a great marketing opportunity here; one that doesn’t have to be limited to Christmas! Use the advent calendar idea and apply it to any holiday, enticing fans to come back and click on your page every single day. Here are some creative ways to use the calendar to maximize engagement:

provide a new tip or trick each day

give fans the chance to win a special prize on random days

reveal a great coupon each day

publish clues for a contest or other competition

Wildfire’s Page Manager - one of the tools in our complete social media marketing suite - offers several customizable, “advent-like” templates like one we used to greet November with a bang. We launched this winter-themed calendar with 31 days of social media advice.

2. Ask simple questions related to the holidays, but also related to your brand or its personality.

Spark a chat with your audience by asking simple, relatable questions that tie back to your brand and the holidays. In the examples below, Kraft Foods and Geico roused fan response by asking about activities already on fans’ minds.

3. If you’re running holiday-themed promotions, keep reminding fans to enter.

Holiday-themed promotions are a fantastic way to give your fans to an exciting and engaging treat, yet we sometimes see brands launch promotions to much fanfare and then...crickets.

Silence.

Instead, reach out and nudge your audience to enter, and get them to take action by reminding them when the sweepstakes will end. Reminders also give users additional opportunities to re-post and share with friends.

4. The holidays are full of nostalgia: engage your fans with messages that encourage them to reminisce and share their stories on your page. They’ll connect the warm emotions they feel with your brand as well.

Every holiday has its own associated traditions. Take advantage of this commonality between the brand and the audience by asking your fans to reflect on their associated memories. Bonus branding points go to companies that tie in the memory prompt with the brand personality, as Nestle Toll House does below.

5. Highlight any limited-time or seasonal products or services you offer.

The holidays provide a great reason to run a seasonal promotion. Most brands release seasonal items or plan limited production runs around specific dates — use your Facebook messages to highlight these limited-time items, as Keurig does with a message about the three seasonal coffee flavors being released for the fall.

6. Help your fans out.

People love to feel like insiders, getting access to exclusive tips or strategic advice. The holidays are a great time to offer season-specific advice, especially if your brand strives to be a thought leader in its industry. Consider the example from HP below. They’ve isolated a customer group (those that take photos and might be interested in HP camera or picture editing technology) and written a helpful, holiday-themed article.

7. Surprise your fans with a special treat.

Break out of a ho-hum messaging routine by occasionally offering a surprise treat on your wall, like Vevo did by putting together a Halloween-themed playlist and sharing it with fans.

8. Reveal the people behind the brand, and how they celebrate the holidays.

One of the most successful ways to encourage and grow engagement is to humanize your brand. How? Reveal the people behind the brand, allowing users a glimpse at the folks who make your company great. In the example below, Levi’s tied in the Halloween holiday with a peek at employees in their costumes.

9. Provide holiday-themed uses for your brand’s products.

No matter what product (or service) you sell, if you can spin a holiday twist to its use, share the twist in a message! Though apple sauce can be used to make brownies any time of year, the Musselman’s page administrator takes advantage of Halloween as a chance to highlight one way to use its product.

10. Have fun with your audience!

You may be a serious marketer, but that doesn’t mean you have to take your brand so seriously. Any holiday is a chance to spread joy, fun, and be full of cheer! Show how your brand cares for users and fans by sharing digital holiday card or a Facebook photo. Better yet, get funny and creative like Silk did, in the example below. Can you spot the clever Photoshop job in the picture? 444 fans got a kick out of it!

Want even more strategic advice about how to conquer your social media marketing this holiday season? Sign up for our November 15 webinar recording, “Perfecting your Holiday Social Media Strategy!”

What You Should Know about Google+ Pages for Brands

Did you see Google’s announcement yesterday about opening up Google+ Pages for businesses and brands? If you’ve been waiting and watching Google+ from the wings, you’ve now been given a place to stage your brand entrance. Learn our ideas about the possibilities for brands on the 40-million-user Google+ social network, and how you can get involved with Google+ Pages in this post.

(Note: Tom, one of our fantastic product managers, channeled these predictions after a very close assessment of Google+ coupled with his attention to trends in social media marketing. They don’t represent the perspective or plans of the Google+ team.)

1. Move your brand up the search engine listings, and spend less on ads by increasing Google+ user engagement.

Google has already begun to incorporate a company’s social engagement levels into its search rankings. Now that users can +1 your brand (the equivalent of a “like” on Facebook), your +1 count could figure into the popularity and relevance rating of your brand in search results. Google could adjust search results based on even more types of social engagement the future.

Creating an engaging brand experience on your Google+ Page will help improve your search rankings and your paid Google ad performance on Google.com, as well as across Google's ad networks. Your social presence matters now more than ever in both consumer engagement and your marketing bottom line.

2. Pull in a potentially huge mobile audience.

Google+ comes standard on most Android phones and will immediately provide brands with access to a massive mobile audience. Imagine consumers seeing a message in their “Nearby” stream from a brand they assigned to one of their Circles. The message announces a flash sale on ladies winter boots over the next 3 hours, and includes driving directions to the store via Google Maps. Coupled with the astronomically rising popularity of the Android mobile platform, we’re seeing a serious opportunity for you to engage your audience on the run.

3. Target messaging to audience segments more easily than on other social networks.

Now businesses can use Circles to segment their social media audience in order to target content and maximize engagement. For example, you might have circles of users who took a brand survey, so you would add them to an “Engaged Responders” Circle. Another circle may include those who seem “Slow to Warm up.” Or maybe everyone would start in the “Slow to Warm up” Circle only to be moved to a more niche circle as they engage with your brand.

Brands could even host live video chats with a “Focus Group” Circle of power users (via Hangouts) to get feedback on new products, and generate “the love” with early adopters.

4. Tap into the massive audience using Google’s other apps.

Google+ will also help you reach and engage with the vast, existing audience of Google consumer app users (Gmail, Maps, Chrome, YouTube etc). First, you’ll see opportunities to bring your branded content to users inside of Google+ and enable them to easily share it with friends. Take YouTube, for example. Google has now added a YouTube search tab along the top right edge of each Google+ screen. When users search for a video, they now see a pop-up video player and playlist of related videos, and each one can be +1’ed and shared with the user’s Circles.

In the future, we can imagine Google enabling users to create user generated content (UGC) from a YouTube experience inside of Google+ as part of a brand-sponsored promotion.

Google has already implemented additional integrations with Chrome and Google Reader, and with each integration comes the opportunity for brands to hook audiences and draw them back to social experiences on Google+ Pages.

5. Collaborate with your internal and external customers.

We see the potential for Google+ to be an excellent internal company information sharing and collaboration too.

Google already has experience delivering products with the security and reliability necessary for enterprise solutions, as it offers with the popular Google Apps platform (used to create shared work documents, spreadsheets and presentations). Now that employees can create Google+ accounts with their corporate email addresses, it’s not hard to imagine companies using Google+ as an internal social network for workplace collaboration.

Using Circles, companies could allow secure sharing of selective information with customers inside and outside of an organization to easily enable focus groups and crowdsourcing. With these potential uses, Google+ could even provide services similar to Jive or Salesforce.com's Chatter, which also offer social collaboration tools.

So What’s Your Game Plan for Google+?

With the launch of Pages, Google+ has finally opened its doors to brands looking to build an audience on the network—a network that is, like it or not, intimately tied to Google search and massively popular consumer applications like YouTube and Chrome. Now is the time to get your Google+ game on, so you can rise above competitors at the onset and attract a valuable audience. Here are some ways we suggest you do it:

Drive as many +1’s as possible

Devise criteria for how you would segment your users into Circles and how you would customize content for each Circle

Continue to build up your audience on other social networks using Wildfire’s Social Marketing Suite, in order to seed your Google+ presence

Plan for cross-promotion from your Facebook page, Twitter account, and website to help bootstrap your Google+ presence

Brainstorm now how you could leverage Google+’s interactive new features such as Hangouts to more deeply engage your users

What makes you most excited about using Google+ for your brand? Share your insights in the comments, we love hearing from you!

Measuring Social Media Success, Post by Post

We recognize that smart marketers and brands need to measure the results of their social media efforts; in fact, the pressure on brand marketers to prove the return on their social marketing spend is quickly increasing. We are continually innovating our analytics offerings, so check out our previous post on our Facebook Insights integration, and stay tuned for many exciting announcements over the coming weeks.

Today, we’re happy to announce a new collection of analytics in the Wildfire Social Media Marketing Suite: post metrics.This new report incorporates and enhances the metrics available through Facebook’s Insights, providing in-depth analysis of each post, powerful comparisons and aggregate views of post engagement across all your pages, allowing you to quickly refine and optimize your messaging.
Let’s look at how these tools can benefit you.
We track and score every post based on several engagement metrics including Organic Reach, Viral Reach, People Talking About This, Visibility, and Viral Growth Rate. The latter two metrics were formulated by Wildfire to provide marketers with actionable criteria for judging the success of a given post (and also for posts over any time period).

Visibility represents the proportion of your fan base that saw one or more impressions of your post (typically in their news feed). It’s a measure of how well you’re able to reach your audience organically and it can change over time, as more engaging content leads to better exposure. The interplay between engaging content and how broadly your posts are seen is driven by Facebook’s ranking system, and while the algorithms are closely guarded secrets, Visibility is a tangible way to measure and track the effects of your posting strategy over time.

Viral Growth Rate represents how effectively you’re able to move your message from your initial (organic) audience to a wider population via viral sharing. The more engaging your content, the more likely people will be to Like it or Comment on it, thus telling stories about it and spreading the word about your brand. A higher viral growth rate implies stronger viral activity and a broader audience reached in relation to your initial organic exposure.

Above and beyond Facebook’s own interface, our analytics tools allow you to see - in a single view - engagement by post across all of your pages, drill down for further detail on individual page performance, and zoom in to a particular time period to discover what specific factors impacted your social presence.

We’re excited to provide these tools, allowing you to optimize your social media efforts and make ROI-based decisions in ways never before possible.

Now that you’ve read what post metrics can show you about your messaging, how will you use these analytics to measure your success? Tell us below in the comments.

Hot Holiday Facebook Marketing Opportunity: Introducing the AdventCalendar!*

*that's not just for advent!

At Wildfire, we’ve been hard at work designing beautiful and functional Facebook page template designs so that our clients have the richest, most compelling and interactive choice of pages to build their marketing campaigns on top of. We look forward to showcasing our design library for you soon, but there is one new template we just couldn’t wait to debut! The advent calendar template allows page administrators the opportunity to create a calendar with any number of days up to 31, while programming each day to unlock a special treat, message, gift, or prize.

Wildfire’s Page Manager, one of the tools in the complete social marketing suite, has several “advent-like” templates that are ready for customization, such as the one in the example below. To start November off with a bang, and encourage Wildfire fans to return to the fan page daily, we launched a winter-themed social media advent calendar on our own fan page that offers 31 days of social media advice, all through the month of November.

When a user clicks on a day to reveal its secret contents, he or she will see one of two things: if the day has been unlocked, the user will see a box appear with the revealed content; if the day has not been unlocked, the user will see a box with a reminder to come back again later when the content is unlocked. Check out the tips revealed on our own calendar on November 1:

The advent calendar comes in several colors and themes, and can be easily customized to whatever theme best fits your brand using the easy-to-update Page Manager customization guidelines. Here is another example of a holiday-themed advent calendar that can be customized with branded content:

How creative can you get with your fully customizable social media advent calendar? The sky is the limit! Tell us what you would put behind each day in the comments below— we love to hear from you!