Marketing in Social Streams: Driving Product Discovery, Engagement and Advocacy

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction, download now to read all 13 pages!

Introduction

If you are a consumer marketer and you’ve been doing social media marketing for some time, you’ve learned a lot about how your consumers discover and engage with your brand in their social streams.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

You’ve likely heard that (or worse, tried) promoting your business with Groupon or similar deal sites only to fall victim to their enormous fees. Well, North Social’s Deal Share app enabled the California Wine Club to soak up 100% of the revenue from their group buying promo. They generated over 50 new monthly customers and 5,000 targeted, new fans.

Curated online shopping destination The Vermont Country Store knows that providing value is key when asking your customers to like your page – no empty fan requests here. Using North Social Sweepstakes app , the Store doubled their fanbase to over 20,000 fans in less than four months. The prize? Vermont Country Store gift cards to help inspire page engagement around customer wish lists and drive future purchases.

North Social provides a buffet-style suite of 18 apps designed to launch promotions, push out exclusive content, and drive meaningful fan engagement.

To help kick start your efforts, North Social has launched a special promotion for AllFacebook readers. For a limited time, sign up for a Premium, Pro, or Enterprise subscription to their apps using promo code AFBTABPROMO and they’ll design a custom branded landing tab for your new Facebook destination for free!

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It’s hard not to be jaded by the countless opinions on whether these changes are for better or worse. The truth is what many bloggers and ‘experts’ are labeling as obstacles will actually be opportunities for you to better connect with your end consumer. Yep, it’s a glass half-empty/half-full thing.

While we all wait for the dust to settle, the fact remains that pages aren’t going away. A custom Facebook page is still the cornerstone of any effective Facebook marketing plan. So, if you’ve been putting it off altogether, or just need to spruce things up, it’s time to give your page a makeover with apps from North Social. Achieving brand visibility means providing your fans with compelling branded content and experiences and North Social’s suite of 18 apps enable you to quickly activate sweepstakes, group deals, digital downloads, collect customer data, and more.

Before you propose any updates to your brand’s strategy, make sure that your page is ready to rock and capture your visitors attention. No matter how enticing your messaging is or how impressive your ad budget; if your own page isn’t sticky, your social strategy will fail.

So start out-thinking your competition by not over-thinking these changes. Visit North Social and spend your time and energy dialing in those factors you actually have control over. Quit speculating. Start doing.

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Open up your brand’s treasure chest and treat your fans with downloadable goods using North Social’s Exclusive app. This powerful app allows you to upload any digital file (audio, video, document, or image), which is unlocked when the fan posts an update into their personal stream. Whether you’re a realtor, rockstar, or restauranteur, there’s no shortage of ways you can inspire your fan base to like, share, and interact with your content.

To make things easier, we’ve laid out the A to Z’s of handing out digital goods, offline traffic drivers, and brand experiences that will help boost your fan count without having to call Ms. Winfrey.

What are you waiting for? Take one of these 26 ideas, add your brand’s secret sauce, and activate the Exclusive app from North Social to start sharing your branded content today.

See the Exclusive app in action on Facebook now.

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Running Facebook ads can be a great strategy to increase the reach of your brand, and drive traffic to your pages. However, unless you know which ads work well for your demographic, and which ads fall flat, you may be tossing money into the wind. By A/B testing your ads throughout the campaign process, you can determine what works for your users, and what doesn’t. In this post, we will explain in an easy way how you can effectively test, measure and optimize your ads (what many call ‘A/B testing’) to ensure that you get maximum results.

What is A/B testing and how can it help your Facebook ad performance?

A/B testing is the process of comparing two ads against each other, one slightly different than the other, and seeing which one gets the best results then testing the ‘winning’ ad against a new variation and so on until you’ve optimized your ad. So, for example, you might run two ads that have identical copy and targeting but one has a photo of a cupcake and the other has a photo of a burger. You measure which has the best results and find that the burger is the most successful image. Then you test the ad with the burger image against a new variation – perhaps you test another image to see if it beats the burger image or you keep the burger constant in both variations of your ad and you instead try adding different copy to your ad to see what works best. You keep testing ads against each other in this way until you find the optimal combination of images, text and audience targeting for your ad. Anyone can do this – you don’t need to be an expert to optimize your ad.

How do you use A/B testing to increase the performance of your Facebook ads?

Step # 1: First decide what you are going to measure to determine success
Before running two variations of an ad to determine which is more successful, you first have to decide how you’ll measure success. Below are a few possible success questions:Is the winning ad the one that:

• gets the most clicks?
• leads to the most fans?
• produces the most signups?
• yields the most coupon redemptions?

Common practice is to measure and optimize for click-thru rate but you should be aware that this isn’t necessarily the best metric for your business. For example, you may have created an advertisement that is great at getting people to click, but terrible at getting people to complete your sign-up form, become a fan or browse your website. In other words, your click-through rate is high but your conversion rate is low. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) takes both the click through rate and conversion rate into account, so it’s generally the strongest indicator of advertising success.

CPA Example 1: If your goal is to generate fans, you could measure the effectiveness of each of your ads in terms of generating fans.

CPA Example 2: If your goal is to generate email address, measure the cost per email address acquired by each version of your ad.

CPA Example 3: Of course the most powerful measurement would be the number of sales that each ad generates for your business, but realize that for most businesses there may be a delay of many weeks or months between when someone clicks on your ad and when they buy your product so you’d need to wait too long to test which of your ad variations is most successful in terms of sales.

The idea of A/B testing is that you test, measure and learn quickly, and not wait months to get results.

Hot Tip! Sometimes it may actually make sense to optimize your ad so that people do NOT click on it. This might seem odd, but you can actually remind users about your brand and pay very little in return because ultimately you only pay if someone clicks on your Facebook ad. So, for example, you may want to run ads for your existing fans to wish them a ‘Happy Holiday’. This will generate very different results from an ad that contains an explicit call-to-action (e.g. click here to get a free Holiday coupon) but if your goal is branding discouraging clicks can be highly cost effective.

Click here to sign up and view the full report.

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Simple things like the image you choose or the title you use can make the difference between success and failure when it comes to advertising. We’ve compiled a list of practical, easy-to-implement and highly effective tips to help you maximize the performance of your Facebook ads.

Section One: What Image Should You Use?

Tip #1: Ads with people, and especially close ups of faces and eyes tend to get a higher click through rate. In other words, give your ad a human touch!

Tip #2: Use colors in your image that contrast with Facebook’s shades of blue – they command more attention and stand out from the rest of the website.

Tip #3: It’s best to upload horizontal (landscape) images to ensure you’re maximizing the space available, which is 110×80 pixels.

To sign up for the full report, including all 18 tips with illustrative examples, click here.

About Wildfire
Headquartered in Redwood City, California, Wildfire is the leader in social media marketing software and the only social media marketing company to have received an investment from Facebook’s fbFund. Our patent-pending technology allows large brands, small businesses and agencies to easily create their own attractive, branded social promotions (including sweepstakes, contests, giveaways, coupons and more), build and manage social pages, monitor and communicate with their social audience and measure the performance of their own and their competitors’ social media marketing.

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1. How do I increase my fan count?
2. How do I quickly add more punch to my Facebook page?
3. How can I become more effective at social media marketing without breaking my budget?

Clearly the hardest part about using Facebook to grow your brand is knowing where to begin. Sure, there are a ton of resources out there attempting (some even proclaiming) to help you get more impact out of your efforts, but they’re more than likely blowing smoke, unproven, or taking something relatively simple (building a custom Facebook page) and spinning it into something exceedingly complex.

Say hello to a page admin’s new best friend: Facebook app provider North Social. With an affordable buffet of 18 easy-to-install apps, North Social enables you to quickly activate fan-only promotions, showcase and sell products, distribute viral content, capture visitor contact info, and much more.

So, if you’re about to print out a lengthy PowerPoint for your boss or client detailing how you’re going to accelerate the growth of their Facebook page, do yourself a favor; abort mission.

Save a tree (and some face) by visiting North Social; you’ll find smart ideas on how to get more out of Facebook by browsing 150+ usage examples across 20+ industry categories.

Although North Social apps have consistently proven to enhance the performance of Facebook pages, they are approved for use by Facebook, have not caused Page Admin health problems, or ever had to face a Congressional panel.

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