[REPORT] Why Social Marketing will Deliver a Positive ROI for your Brand

While most marketing channels have standardized methods for calculating ROI or value, other channels, like social media, can be harder to quantify. We compiled this report to help you better understand how social media delivers on real business objectives, and how to get the most value, and highest ROI, from your social marketing efforts.

[Download your free white paper here.]

According to a series of recent studies, “earned media,” which is the unpaid publicity created by users about your brand, is the unique benefit of social media marketing. It delivers incredibly high value to brands because it is based on a trusted recommendation between friends, and social marketing makes it possible for your brand to seed the creation of this media...at scale.

In fact, a recent study conducted by Facebook and ComScore determined that exposure to earned media had significant positive impact on purchasing behavior:

• Starbucks fans and friends of fans demonstrated a 38% lift in purchase behavior within 4 weeks of exposure to earned media

• Target fans and friends of fans were 19% more likely to purchase in Target in the four weeks following exposure








The facts are simple: the more earned media your brand generates through engaging with fans and followers in social media, the higher your ROI will be. Within this paper, we discuss the three- phase social media cycle for brands. We’ll focus on how to unlock the potential of earned media, extended reach, and higher conversions in social. We’ll also review the unique approaches six brands have taken to reaching a common outcome of positive ROI in social.

DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE COPY HERE.
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Wildfire Announces YouTube Brand Channel Management Solution

With more than 800 million unique monthly users, YouTube is the world’s second largest social network and the perfect channel to expose your brand’s video content and connect with an engaged audience. Video has a lasting impact, which makes it one of the most viral and engaging forms of branded content.  Video enables you to tell your story and showcase your products and services to convert viewers into fans and customers.

YouTube isn't simply a platform for advertising and promotional campaigns; it's also a permanent home for your brand.  A YouTube Brand Channel is the place to feature your brand and serve up custom, interactive content that reaches users who help it spread virally.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve extended our integration with YouTube’s platform to our best-in-class Page Manager application. This announcement comes a few months after we launched our turnkey YouTube video contest capability in March. By offering both Brand Channel management and a video contest application, we now provide the most complete social marketing solution for YouTube available in the marketplace. Read on to learn about how we’re celebrating this feat: by offering our clients a huge deal!

Our product’s latest capability allows you to design, publish and update custom content on your YouTube Brand Channel quickly and easily. Unlike the default tabs on your Brand Channel, the custom tab powered by Wildfire’s Social Marketing Suite gives you complete control over your channel’s layout, branding, content, and social sharing to provide visitors with a deeply engaging experience. Wildfire’s solution includes the following advanced capabilities:

  • Fully-customizable pre-built templates that can be easily updated with fresh content

  • Interactive plugins that maximize audience engagement

  • Full integration with all major social networks

  • Dedicated support throughout specifications, design, build and implementation process

  • Actionable insights on views, visits and plugin engagement



We specifically design our templates and plugins to optimize social engagement and provide you with an avenue to tell your brand’s story and build a loyal audience of supporters. As an expert on Facebook and other social networks, our software also helps you integrate your YouTube presence with your overall marketing strategy, tap into the virality of other platforms, and drive traffic to your Brand Channel.  YouTube Brand Channel content powered by Wildfire can also be mobile-optimized to extend the reach of your marketing campaigns to users visiting on their smartphone or tablet.





How can you utilize our Brand Channel management solution to improve your YouTube marketing strategy? Join us for a live webinar on Thursday, June 21, 2012 at 10:00 am PDT/2:00 pm EDT. Wildfire’s Director of Product Management, Tom Rikert, will share best practices and winning strategies for YouTube marketing. You can register for the webinar here.

To show how excited we are about today’s announcement and celebrate the fact that we deliver the most comprehensive social marketing solution for YouTube, we’re offering a huge discount to clients who want to take advantage of our Brand Channel management capabilities. Until June 30th, we’re offering all full-service Brand Channel templates at a two-for-one rate. So if you’re using Wildfire’s talented creative team to build a custom YouTube template for your Brand Channel, we’ll throw in a second template absolutely free. Call us today at 1-888-274-0929 x. 1 to find learn more about this exclusive, limited-time offer!
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3 Ways Marketers Can Win with Mobile Social Media Marketing

In the latest count, nearly 488 million users access Facebook using a mobile device. That's over 50% of the total 901 million users on the massive social network. What does that mean for brands? Facebook has planned a variety of mobile-centric products, including new advertising initiatives we've yet to see as well as the recent addition of Sponsored Stories to the mobile ecosystem.

These game-changing mobile usage trends mean that marketers need to get serious about mobile, and fast. Here are three new ways you can build mobile into your Facebook marketing plan.




1. Mobile-Optimize All Your Content.






The introduction of Timeline to the mobile Facebook ecosystem brought with it a host of opportunities for marketers. When you consider that brand pages on Facebook Mobile have had almost no functionality — custom apps haven’t worked without a complicated hack-job, tabs haven’t translated, etc. — it seems possible that Timeline for brands was launched specifically to enable brands’ mobile Facebook capabilities.

While Timeline for brands currently does not enable interaction with custom apps (created for the fan page), custom apps can be built to be mobile friendly. Where now users can access mobile-friendly custom apps just through specific links (not through the mobile Timeline) we will likely see a future update that enables the functionality.

Since nearly half of Facebook users access the site through a mobile device, your brand’s reach could effectively double if you mobile-optimize your social content. And because users will soon be able to experience the same workflow on their desktops as their smartphones, page managers will now be able to curate an identical experience for all users, regardless of viewing device.

Whether you’re building engagement applications in-house or with a social marketing software vendor, make sure the applications are seamlessly viewable across all platforms and devices. Ideally, you’ll be able to design once and deploy anywhere. That way, you’ll avoid messy synchronization issues, duplication of effort between creative teams, and working around multiple content channels.

Applications that use a “responsive design” framework are gaining popularity. The framework employs specific HTML5, CSS and Javascript technologies to ensure that the same content displays well on devices of any screen size. In the context of Facebook mobile pages, apps built within this framework can morph Facebook page tabs — for mobile, tablets and desktops — with one build.




2. Integrate Sponsored Stories Into Your Marketing.






Until early 2012, there had been no way to advertise to Facebook users on mobile devices. This has been an enormous lost opportunity for marketers — until now. Now, Sponsored Stories premium ad units appear in users’ news feeds (a huge announcement on its own), but also in mobile news feeds. Considering the many users who access Facebook from a mobile device, marketers now have a big opportunity to embed sponsored advertisements within mobile feeds. The challenge is how to make this work with your existing Facebook marketing program.

The most effective way to integrate Sponsored Stories into your marketing is to work them into an editorial calendar. Since Sponsored Stories stem from the activities of users on your brand’s Page, create a calendar of activities that translate well to the Sponsored Story format. For example, a local retail store could plan its weekly status updates, featuring in-store specials and colorful coupons as Sponsored Stories. Just make sure to use eye-catching images to help your promoted posts attract attention.




3. Use Facebook Mobile to Fuel Offline Campaigns.






Mobile-optimized social campaign marketing can also be used to enhance consumers’ in-store experiences. In fact, according to comScore, 36% of the U.S. smartphone population used their phones to perform retail research while inside a store in 2011. And Nielsen states that, by the end of 2011, nearly one in five smartphone users scanned product barcodes, and nearly one in eight compared prices while in a store.

There is a lot of room for creating social campaigns with seamless mobile components, such as unique codes for scanning, in addition to more traditional social campaign approaches like promotions and exclusive content.

When planning online and offline campaigns, include in-store signage. This is crucial to the success of a mobile campaign, and is a key driver of participation. Many brands will advertise promotions on their Pages, designed to drive activity in-store, but do not replicate this messaging in the store. Unfortunately, this misses the in-store consumers who haven’t interacted on your fan page beforehand. Capture their interest socially first, then reinforce your message in-store to create a deeper, longer-term connection with the consumer.

The next thing to keep in mind is simplicity, which is the key to a successful social-to-in-store campaign. That multi-step scavenger hunt, which extends from your Page all the way into the shelves of your store may sound like a creative idea, but it will most certainly narrow engagement. Keep the proposition simple so users can easily get involved.

For example, Sprinkles Cupcakes consistently posts messages to its Page, encouraging fans to check in daily for a “secret word.” Fans who discover the secret word on Sprinkles’ Facebook Timeline can whisper it, in-store, to get a free cupcake. Sprinkles’ approach yields continuous check-ins on its Page, where other marketing messages appear alongside the secret word.

Marketers cannot ignore the staggering growth of users who access the Internet and social networks via mobile. Get mobile right and you’ve effectively doubled your social network reach. Start by mobile-optimizing your content, testing mobile Sponsored Stories, and linking mobile to your in-store campaigns. And please, share more mobile marketing strategies in the comments below.



(These tips were originally published in a contributed post to Mashable.)
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Facebook Asks the World its Opinion with Second Privacy PolicyGovernance Vote

...and they're using Wildfire to do it. For the second time in the history of the network, Facebook is opening up their proposal of policy changes for a vote...to the entire world. Starting today and through June 08th, users all over the world can submit their thoughts on mobile privacy, personalized ads, data retention, and information shared with apps (among other updates.) Beside the fact that the vote is open to a forum of over 900 million users, what's incredibly exciting is that the entire process is being powered by technology developed by Wildfire.

We've been here before— in 2009, when Facebook announced the first site-wide governance vote, the Wildfire platform was also utilized as the vehicle to collect users' input.




To read more about the proposed updates and what they mean for users, check out these write-ups on AllFacebook and TechCrunch. Then, of course, go out and make your voice heard by voting before June 08th!

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Come See Wildfire all over the World in June and July!

Wildfire is all over the place this month and next!

Social Media Camp— Victoria, British Columbia

Our Social Media Manager Maya Grinberg is presenting at Social Media Camp on June 08-09, in Victoria, BC. Her presentation and following workshop will make sense of the social media marketing machine, and how it can be used to elevate brands and drive positive ROI. If you happen to be in Canada and want to meet her there, we even have a special "friends of the speaker" discount you can use to save 25% off: Just enter the code SPEAKER25 when you register here.

Social Media Strategies Summit— Miami, Florida

Not on the West Coast? Not to worry! We're sending Maya across the country to GSMI's Social Media Strategies Summit in Miami, FL on June 12-14. While there, Maya will be presenting a workshop about how to choose social media technology vendors (because we've all been through that!) as well as a speech making the case for social media marketing— including case studies demonstrating positive ROI drawn from social initiatives by brands across 5 different industries. We've got the hookup for you here as well— if you use the code WF25 when you register, you will save 25% off the ticket price.

Le Web— London, UK

Our European Director of Strategy, Rebecca Quinn, will be talking about "the power of tools" in a panel moderated by Jeremiah Owyang. Join her in London to learn all about software to handle social media marketing.

Facebook for Business— La Sorbonne, Paris, France

Just the week after, Rebecca Quinn sets off for Paris, to discuss Facebook pages and "how to build your presence" at the iconic Sorbonne! Registration happens here.

Social Media Breakfast— Auckland, New Zealand

Not on either North American coast, nor Europe? What about around the world, in New Zealand? On July 4th, our Senior Director of Integrated Marketing Jessica Gilmartin will be presenting alongside Randi Zuckerberg at a Social Media Breakfast presented by Air New Zealand. Registration happens here.

Advanced Facebook Advertising Conference—Everywhere

Finally, want to stay home, wherever home is, and learn from there? We've got that covered too.

The folks at SocialFresh have organized an entire conference around Facebook advertising mastery, and the coolest part is that it's entirely online! Our social media manager, Maya Grinberg, will be presenting a webinar about users' experience after the click. Her webinar will cover how to tie ad copy in with custom content to qualify users before they click, best practices for clear calls-to-action and landing page layout, and techniques for optimizing your campaign to different engagement metrics. We've even been given a special discount code for friends of Wildfire— just use the code WILDFIRE when you register to save $300 off the ticket rate.



Will we see you then? Make sure to leave a comment if the answer is yes, to any or all of these!
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