Facebook is hot-hot-hot and the name of the game is to attract fans! Promotions are one way to fan the flame...
The Right Kindling
Facebook's promotions guidelines are restrictive and tricky. They pretty much point you in the direction of a third party application to facilitate any contest, sweepstakes, or coupon promotion on Facebook.
Enter Wildfire App!
There are a good number of application choices to choose from, but Wildfire App seems to offer a good bang for your buck.
Stacking The Wood
Wildfire App markets themselves as "the Promotion Builder for Brand Marketing on the Social Web," to get more leads:
- Facebook Fans.
- Twitter Followers.
- Email Signups.
Some of the companies boasting their use of Wildfire App:
- Pepsi.
- Sony.
- Universal.
- AT&T.
So for small businesses and marketers looking to attract new customers with social media marketing, those mentions can really light your fire!
Striking The Match
As I described in a previous post, I was jumping through fire rings - so anxious to give Wildfire App a whirl!
During January and February I ran a Facebook promotion for Romantic Endeavors - A young company active on Facebook.
The goal was to grow their fan base and increase subscribers to their email list.
The plan was to engage the Facebook Fans, Twitter followers, and email subscribers to encourage their friends and family to Like the Romantic Endeavors' Facebook Page, and to attract new fans that new group of fans as well. A desired snowball effect.
The Grand Prize? A $100.00 Victoria's Secret Gift Card - Awarded on Valentine's Day, 2011.
Igniting The Flame
Sign-up was very easy and inexpensive -- Less than $40.00 for about a month's time of service!
Groovy features that lit my fire:
- A custom tab to utilize right on the Facebook Page.
- Specific links & mini-pages for Facebook, Twitter, & Email to help promote.
- Real-time Stats - daily, weekly, etc.
- Awareness of brand ambassadors.
- Exportable contact information.
Feel The Heat
At the end of the promotion, Romantic Endeavors was quite pleased! Results:
- Almost doubled their Facebook Fans.
- Twitter followers increased, as well as klout score.
- Email subscribers went from 280 to over 2000.
Due to Facebook's promotion guidelines, notifying our winner took a bit longer than we had hoped, but the Victoria's Secret gift card went to a wonderful person. See who won here.
Fueling The Fire
Would I use Wildfire App again? Yes!
Why? Ease of use and good results. Also the ability to utilize branding features that may bring greater results in the future.
Have you used Wildfire App?
Have you used other third party applications?
Tell me your experiences below!
2 Replies
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Having used Wildfire App since early 2012 and developed custom contests and sweepstakes for a good number of clients, thought I’d just briefly add my 2 cents. Overall, we’ve found it to be a brilliant platform for quickly creating, running and monitoring social promotions via FB. Even some of the simplest campaigns have generated excellent ROI for clients in terms of increased Likes and mailing lists but…… 1. If you need to customize the basic campaign templates, then Wildfire’s charges increase quite substantially to enable the necessary technical features. 2. Creating a fully customized promotion page can involve a lot of coding using the Liquid scripting language as well as HTML and Javascript, so that tends to make it very difficult/expensive for end-users to be creative. Other vendors in the same marketplace have much “friendlier” drag & drop facilities for custom-building FB promotions. However, there seem to be some signs that things might be changing for the better both commercially and technically following Wildfire’s acquisition by Google – presumably in a bid to gain a more firmly established position in the social marketing arena vis-a-vis Wildfire’s original sponsor – Facebook.
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Ian, Thank you for visiting my site and sharing your thoughts! I have to agree – Since I wrote this post, contests and contest apps have evolved quite a bit. Today, I find myself reaching out to other sources due to interface technicalities and platform options. Someday, I’ll have to get around to a really sound comparison post. For now, I’m appreciative that you’ve offered your findings and experiences. Hope we bump into each other again in the future, ~Keri
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By Ian Hope on