I spend an obscene amount of time on Facebook, both for personal and vocational purposes. I am a fan/connection of a bazillion brands, and maybe half-a-bazillion social media agencies and social platform technology companies. Given my line of work, investigative research is part of my daily routine. As you might know from reading my past articles, I have a voracious appetite to discover the latest technologies and strategies to harness Facebook as a marketing channel.
Since 2007, brands have been trying to unlock the formula for marketing success at Facebook. From a brand marketing perspective, Facebook is not an easy platform to work in. It's closed, the customer service is non-existent for companies that don't advertise heavily, and broad functional changes are made regularly with little-to-no notice. It's staggering to think of how successful Facebook has become given how difficult it is for us brand marketers to not only figure it out, but also to leverage on a consistent basis.
With all that brand marketers have on their plates, the last thing they want to focus on is trying to manage their Facebook brands on their own. Plus, with Facebook adding new game-changing features like "Places" and "Questions," it's a big challenge simply keeping up with the innovation. As a result, companies large and small are turning to third-party platform solutions for help.
Whether you are a small brand with zero social head count or a large brand with a social army, utilizing one or more Facebook marketing platforms is a wise move. The solutions they provide can help you maximize awareness, interaction, and reach at Facebook. These solutions can range from the template driven, self-service model to the fully functional and customizable model. In reviewing dozens of these platforms, four stand out for their depth and breadth.
Buddy Media
The Buddy Media Platform is a Facebook management system for some of the world's largest brands and agencies. The platform offers the only solution that allows marketers to launch, maintain, and measure their Facebook presence in any country and in any language. Additionally, the platform has a powerful analytics engine to track metrics far beyond what Facebook Insights can deliver.
Central to the Buddy Media technology is a rich and robust tab management system with incredibly flexible administrative tools. With the Buddy Media Platform, you can create a multi-feature, highly interactive, custom Facebook tab in minutes. The platform features 30-plus social applications (sapplets) such as polls, gifts, email opt-ins, Q&As, Twitter and YouTube feeds, and more. These sapplets can be interchanged by simply dropping and dragging them into the tab.
In addition to their tab management features, Buddy Media has recently added robust new filtering, labeling, and search features to its platform, which allows brand marketers to manage the flow of incoming messages to their Facebook wall. Page administrators can now identify and label incoming wall posts to gain a better understanding of sentiment, tone, and frequency as well as identify customer support inquiries or complaints. This is especially helpful for larger brands that might have hundreds, even thousands, of comments to sift through each day.
Buddy Media is geared more toward established brands and the agencies that serve them than it is toward the small business. Its fee structure is set up as an ongoing license that allows a company access to the tab management, comments filter, and metrics engine. Each license includes a dedicated account management team to help with ongoing strategy, technical support, and custom solutions.
Wildfire Interactive
Wildfire Interactive delivers technology that allows brands to create and manage a wide range of campaigns, including sweepstakes, user-generated video, image and essay contests, e-coupon campaigns, product giveaways, and incentive-based surveys. The Wildfire app includes powerful viral features, such as newsfeeds, friend invites, notifications, share buttons, and comment boards. Campaign data can be accessed at any time via Wildfire's online admin interface.
Unlike Buddy Media's ongoing page management solution, the Wildfire app is geared more toward one-off promotional campaigns. The central element of its promotions engine is a sweepstakes management tool. According to Forrester Research, nearly 50 percent of online users like to enter sweepstakes at least once a month, and businesses that offer contests have twice as many social network fans as those that don't. Where Facebook is concerned, sweepstakes can be a very effective way to gain new fans, as they offer the kind of incentives many consumers want before making a commitment to "like" a brand.
Anyone who has tried to run a sweepstakes on Facebook knows that it can be a complex process, as Facebook's approval regulations are confusing and inconsistent. Wildfire takes a lot of the guess work out of the equation, providing tools that are smart, simple, and Facebook-compliant. Once your Wildfire promotion is set up, it can be accessed via a tab on your Facebook page. You can link directly to the promotion tab via your website, email, and other marketing communications.
Nearly all of Wildfire's solutions are self-service. Its campaign wizard enables companies to set up campaigns quickly and easily. Its fee structure is based on a modest flat fee, plus a small daily licensing fee during the term of your promotion. Wildfire doesn't offer strategy or account management services for its self-serve customers, though it does offer white-label apps and custom solutions for larger brands, which does include some strategic services.
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