Facebook Is Your Life

Holiday Facebook Marketing Tip: Launch an Advent Calendar!

At Wildfire, we are always hard at work designing beautiful and functional Facebook page template designs so that our clients have the richest and most compelling choice of interactive pages to offer users. We have over 100 different options, including apps that are optimized for mobile, and every type of rich media. Last year, we introduced a countdown format “Advent Calendar” template, and it’s back for the holidays! The advent calendar template lets clients 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 Pages application, one of the tools in our social marketing Suite, has several “advent-like” templates that are ready for customization, such as the one in the example below. 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.

We launched our own “social media education advent calendar” on the Wildfire Facebook page so you can see the advent template in action. Check out the tips revealed on our own calendar on Day 1:

The advent calendar can be launched at any time of year (countdown to Valentines anyone?), and easily customized to the theme of your choice using the easy-to-update Page Manager customization guidelines, or you can publish it entirely “out of the box” as we’ve done above.

How creative can you get with your 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!

[VIDEO] Social Media Best Practices for a Successful Holiday Season

There's no better time to engage with your social media audience than the holiday season (winter or otherwise). If you're behind on planning your holiday social strategy (Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday are nearly here!), we've got you covered with ten proven, holiday-themed social media strategies that will ignite holiday cheer, while engaging fans and followers of your brand. Watch the webinar replay below, hosted by Wildfire and Learn with Google, to get the scoop on the 10 holiday social strategies you can utilize today.

6 Social Media Marketing Tips to Ace the Holidays

The holiday season is the perfect time to rev up your brand’s social media marketing strategy. Consumers are buzzing with holiday spirit (especially the spirit of giving and receiving...and the shopping that goes with it). They’re lighting up social networks with talk and opinions about the season, and thinking about what they’d like to buy.

Social media is playing a significant role in holiday consumer journeys. 44% of shoppers surveyed said that they’ll consult social media as part of their holiday shopping process, and they’ve already started—54% of consumers are shopping before Black Friday. To capitalize on this surge of activity, here are six holiday social media ideas you can use to turn up your social media marketing:

1. Launch promotional campaigns that reference common pop-culture holiday themes

Jingle bells anyone? As many holiday-themed pop culture references as you can imagine, is how many you can use to create a clever spin on creative holiday promotion ideas. For example, TomTom launched a holiday-themed sweepstakes giveaway and called it “TomTom’s 12 Days of Giveaways.” The most savvy part of the campaign was that users couldn’t enter to win all of the prizes at once— they had to check in with the TomTom page on Facebook on a daily basis to read about the current day’s prize offering and enter to win it. These repeat trips reinforce a user’s affinity with the TomTom page, leading to increased views and more earned media, or user-created social word of mouth about your brand.

2. Tie a charitable cause to a holiday occasion

The holidays are a time for giving. By tying a cause to a social marketing campaign, your brand is simultaneously demonstrating a sense of corporate social responsibility and social savvy. Also, don’t forget: the holidays aren’t limited to the classic winter majors like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, or New Years. In fact, the entire calendar year is chock-full of events to commemorate, from federal holidays like Memorial Day and Independence Day to more niche, created holidays, like Administrative Professionals Day or even National Taco Day.

The Company Store, for example, grows its community by tying a charitable cause to “National Family Pajama Night” (November 17), donating money to the Ronald McDonald House for every new follower of its social profiles during the length of the campaign.

3. Create seasonal engagement across social networks

Users don’t take a break from social networks during the holidays, so neither can your engagement initiatives across these platforms. Build a seasonal-themed promotional activity into your editorial plans for your brand presence across social networks. For example, Rack Room Shoes grows its fan and follower communities by creating seasonal engagement across social networks, launching an autumn-themed “Pin it to Win It!” contest on Pinterest and Facebook, and publicizing it via Google+ and Twitter.

4. Put a holiday-themed spin on existing promotional campaigns

You’ve put a lot of time and effort into your existing marketing campaigns. Consider how you can extend their lives by re-skinning them to a holiday theme, thereby getting more mileage out of your existing assets. PopChips, for example, recreated an existing promotional campaign that utilized their current sponsored celebrity partner, Katy Perry, for Halloween. The campaign, called “Pop ‘n Pose,” encourages users to take their picture with Katy Perry, making creative use of fans’ webcams and a well-framed photo of the popular singer. With Halloween approaching, PopChips released a holiday themed version of the same promotion, but this time Katy Perry looked like a scary vampire with pointy red nails and fangs.

5. Create tutorials and holiday related how-tos using your products

Create an opportunity to showcase your products by strategizing about how they might fit into a consumer’s holiday plans. For example, Napoleon Perdis, a popular makeup brand, created a series of “How To” tutorials demonstrating how a customer could apply Napoleon Perdis makeup to create classic Halloween looks. The brand released a handful of tutorials, teaching fans how to create a variety of looks— from scary to fairy— all the while showcasing a deep-dive look into how to optimally use Napoleon Perdis products.

6. Ask users for their holiday-inspired opinions

The holiday season presents a series of questions for each of us. What costume to choose? What meals to prepare? What gifts to give, or where to shop for them? Inspire and empower your fans and followers by asking them for their input on choices like these. Allowing user input to drive the ultimate outcome of a brand’s social activity shows fans that users’ opinions count, and that engaging in dialogue with your brand is a worthwhile endeavor.

For example, The Washington Redskins allowed their fans to weigh in on what costume running back Alfred Morris should wear on his trip to the Pediatric Halloween Party at the Georgetown University Hospital. In allowing the community to choose its favorite from among options like Popeye, Angry Birds, Batman, or Captain America, the Redskins demonstrated the power of people’s choice in driving engagement, as well as publicized a feel-good initiative to which the Redskins are committed.

The holiday season sends consumers into a social frenzy of searching, sharing, and shopping. Which of the tactics mentioned here will you implement for your brand first? Share with us in the comments, we’d love to hear from you.

[We recently recorded a Learn with Google webinar all about “Social Media Best Practices for a Successful Holiday Season. Watch it here.]

Wildfire Likes Likeable! Announcing Likeable Media as a Preferred Channel Partner

Did you catch the news? We recently announced that we have selected Likeable as a preferred channel partner. Likeable, a full-service social media and word of mouth marketing firm, will now resell Wildfire’s Social Marketing Suite to its brand clients.

In case you weren't already familiar with it, Wildfire’s Preferred Channel Partner Program enables agencies to expand their offering and provide brands with more comprehensive solutions to meet their social media marketing needs. As a Wildfire preferred channel partner, Likeable can now easily integrate Wildfire’s Suite into its current offerings, enabling the agency to focus on creative development while scaling its business.

In choosing Likeable for the Preferred Channel Partner Program, our CEO Victoria Ransom said, “Likeable is well known for its innovative social campaigns and the agency’s accolades speak to level of creativity and excellence that we look for in a channel partner. Partnering with a market leader such as Likeable addresses Wildfire’s goal to provide agencies across the globe with dynamic social media marketing solutions so they can engage their audience and efficiently scale their business.”

Want to learn more about the partner programs at Wildfire? Find more information here.

[WEBINAR] 7 Things Every Marketer Needs to be Doing on LinkedIn

With over 161 million members, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social network. And it’s also an amazing place for innovative marketers to connect with their audience. We asked 2 experts on the professional social network to join us for a live webinar on August 30th, and you're invited!

Register to attend, and you'll learn:

The inside scoop on LinkedIn advertising best practices—so you can drive excellent marketing results

A clear understanding of LinkedIn’s free and paid features—so you can grow your brand’s presence on the site

Valuable insight into LinkedIn’s hypertargeting capabilities—so you can pinpoint your audience by title, geography, industry, company or other characteristics

Lana Khavinson, Senior Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn, and Brian Carter, social media consultant and author of the new book LinkedIn for Business, will share best practices and success secrets from some of the top advertisers, marketers, and salespeople on LinkedIn.

Are you coming? Tell us in the comments, and feel free to drop in any questions you'd like to have answered, we'll make sure they get onto the list!

Wildfire's New Look and Feel

At Wildfire, we work hard to make our powerful tools simple and easy to use. Sometimes this means being revolutionary rather than evolutionary, so we are changing our platform’s look and feel from the ground up. The new interface design is just one step along the way to fulfill the overall vision of Wildfire 2.0, which is to help enterprises optimize their social media engagement.

While we’re sure you’ll appreciate the streamlined design and more intuitive user interface, what we're most excited about is that this foundation makes us even faster when it comes to developing new features. And with our acquisition by Google, the most innovative technology company in the world, we're ready to continue building the industry's best social media marketing platform.

We plan to launch the new user interface on August 15th. When you log in to the Suite you will be provided with a written guide and video tutorial to lead you through the changes.

The switch to Wildfire 2.0 is a fully automated process and does not require you to take any actions, so all of your account settings and content will be waiting for you upon login.

We think that the new, streamlined application layout and consistent design enhance the user experience and make social media management more intuitive than ever. We know you will enjoy these improvements and we look forward to getting your feedback!

[VIDEO] Wondering how the Wildfire team found out about the Google news?

...by watching an amazing video. What started as a typical Tuesday morning changed when the team received an email inviting them to an impromptu all-hands meeting taking place in 15 minutes. As a flood of people shuffled into their auditorium-style seats, Victoria and Alain played a short video that promised to answer the question on everyone's mind. The conclusion, where the news is revealed, is the best part. But we think the lead-up could touch your heart as it did ours.

The video below is a view of the team watching the announcement. And below that is the actual presentation that revealed the announcement!

Want to see the full clip? That video is below: