What 3 Types of Facebook Marketing Apps Drive the Most Viral Sharing?

Everyone business or marketer has a secret desire that their marketing goes “viral”.

It is the holy grail of marketing. Firstly because it generates high velocity sharing and secondly because its often seen as free.

It can accelerate a brand from relative obscurity to nearly famous.

It is “word of mouth” marketing enhanced and supercharged by the internet and social networks.

This “earned” media sharing that is seen as totally free is often initially sparked by paid media (such as banner ads, paid search marketing on search  engines or mass media such as television).

Viral Marketing is Often Not Free

Marketing that fits this ultimate marketing profile are campaigns such as “Old Spice“.

This campaign was sparked by a 30 second advertising spot during the Superbowl and then driven further by paid advertising on digital and mass media

Paid is often the catalyst to create the powerful free earned media that is seen in friends sharing on Facebook and  Twitter.

7 Facebook Marketing Campaign Types

Marketing on Facebook is one of the main social networking platforms that are employed by business marketers.

So what types of marketing campaigns can you design for Facebook and what are their strengths?
Wildfire (a social networking marketing platform with 200,00 users) looked at 10,000 campaigns that were run over 9 months.It looked at 7 major campaign types that companies and brands used to market on Facebook.



Each type of campaign has its advantages. Some campaigns will achieve greater participation rates (entries). Other types will result in more sharing and earned media. This is the powerful viral marketing that you don’t have to pay for. Also known as crowd sourced marketing.

The Top 3 Types of Facebook Apps to Drive Sharing

If your main marketing goal is to encourage Facebook fans to share then you need to use these three types of marketing campaigns and apps to drive Facebook sharing of content via the Facebook news feed .

• Favourites is the top app type at over 37%
• Quiz ranks second at 30%
• Trivia comes third at 27%

The Top 3 Types of Facebook Campaigns for Participation

Coupons are used frequently in marketing to provide an incentive for people to participate.Everyone loves a discount!

These three application types are the ones to implement if you are looking to have thousands of participants.

• Coupons rank clearly as the top performer with an average of over 3,000 entries per campaign
• Giveaways comes a distant second at 1,888 entries
• Sweepstakes is not far behind at 1,630to

Case Study

In looking at these results from the study then you need to provide a variety of marketing tactics and choices to appeal to the greatest audience. Just like people prefer different social networks and also will consume a variety of media depending on whether they will read an article or watch a video.

Delta Airlines is a great example of offering a range of tactics to create the highest level of participation and sharing.



In the example above, Delta has more than six custom content applications available for users to interact with. Each tab does something different, and while the activity offered on one tab will perform better at enticing user signups, another tab will be best for inspiring user-generated content submissions and sharing.

Takeaways

A strong social media marketing strategy is one that approaches the creation of branded content and applications for users from multiple angles

• Designing some owned media to achieve high consumption and participation rates
• Designing other owned media to influence high sharing activity (to generate the earned media that grows communities so successfully).
• Use paid media to amplify your owned content even further, and you’ll reach new users outside of the existing network, thereby generating many more opportunities for earned media.

What About You?

Are you implemeting these tactics for your Facebook marketing campaigns?

Are your goals to motivate sharing, participation or both?

What has worked for you? What hasn’t worked?

Look forward to hearing your Facebook marketing stories




































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Facebook Is Exploring Options for Kids

Facebook may be preparing a membership option for children under 13, allowing them to access the social network under parental supervision, according to a report.

The new option will allow children under 13 to have accounts linked to those of their parents, the Wall Street Journal says. Parents will be able to control who their children add as friends and which apps they use. The new features may also allow Facebook to charge parents for games and entertainment their children access.

Facebook told Mashable it is currently exploring options for younger users, but did not confirm or deny the WSJ report.

“Many recent reports have highlighted just how difficult it is to enforce age restrictions on the Internet, especially when parents want their children to access online content and services,” the statement said. “We are in continuous dialogue with stakeholders, regulators and other policymakers about how best to help parents keep their kids safe in an evolving online environment.”

Though Facebook currently restricts users under 13, studies have shown that as much as 38% of children on Facebook are under 12. If Facebook opens its digital doors to youth, it could significantly increase its user base of 900 million.

Speaking at the All Things Digital conference last week, Federal Trade Commission chair Jon Leibowitz said the organization is looking to update the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule for the first time in years. The changes may include an option for parents to track their children’s online activities and requiring parental consent for geolocation services.

Acknowledging that many children under 13 create Facebook accounts, Leibowitz said parents can be the ones to ensure the social network is used safely.

“If a parent lets their child on at age 12, at least the parent is the gatekeeper,” said Leibowitz.

Given the risks presented by cyberbulling, child predators and trolling, Facebook will need to be careful as it prepares a youth option. What precautions do you think are most important for Facebook to take as it explores options for youth?
































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Managing Facebook Pages Just Got a Lot Easier

Part of what I do as a social media coach is help businesses large and small manage their Facebook pages.Our social media management team is frequently asked to go to a client’s event and help live-tweet, take photos or video and post them live during the event to share with their fans. Most of us have iPhones, so we get good pictures, but we can’t upload in batches to a Facebook page from the phone.


Frankly, Facebook’s iPhone app simply sucks at photo management. We can only upload images one by one, which is seriously painful when you’ve got 20-30 images to upload. Besides, it’s just not good practice to flood your Facebook page with too many photos at once. No matter how great the event is, people just don’t want to see them all in their news feed if they’re not in them. Better to wait until you can create an album and then post.


Until now, the only option was to download images to a laptop during the event and frantically upload them to Facebook through the website so you could get back and take more. Ugh. Sometimes the photos don’t get up for days if the client doesn’t have time to deal with it after the event. Ah, but no more. Weaver Mobile has built on their first iPhone app, PhotoBox! to offer a version that allows you to create n

Manage Facebook photos from your iPhone

You can create new albums on Facebook from your iPhone and upload the whole batch at once to Facebook. With PhotoBox! Pro, you can upload to your profile or any page you manage. You can also batch download entire albums and archive them on the spot, edit and re-upload too.

Did I mention editing?

Both versions of the PhotoBox! app offer a nice set of filters you can apply to your Facebook photos including cropping rotation and annotation. The filters are intuitive to use and save you from having to edit them later.

Browse liked pages

The “My Likes” tab now allows you to view all of the photos the pages you’ve liked have uploaded. View them on your iPhone and download the ones you want to save to a folder on your phone, your iPhone album, or a private album on Facebook with a collection of all the photos you’ve liked through PhotoBox!. Download is super-fast and you can view several thousand images, pick the ones you like and download with a click.

Recent Feed

Another feature I like is the ability to view all the images posted recently in my news feed. I have quite a few friends and things fly by in the news feed. Being a visual kind of girl it’s fun to scan the recent uploads from my friends, and then I can save them to a private “liked photos” album on Facebook to view them later, or download them.

Un tagging

With all the uproar in the last few weeks about employers viewing Facebook pages and demanding passwords, it’s good to be able to view all the photos you are tagged in and un tag them easily. Both PhotoBox! apps allow you to easily scan them all on one tab and un-tag with a click.


Weaver Mobile has two great apps here, and I’m not saying that just because they’re a client. I’m thrilled  they are listening to what us page admins really want to see in a Facebook photo management app. This is an app built for people who use Facebook a lot, take lots of photos on their iPhones, and want to work efficiently in the field.


Download the apps and give them a spin. PhotoBox! and PhotoBox! Pro are both available in the iTunes store (sorry, no Android yet, but soon!) Then come back and let me know what you thought!











































































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Getting real engagement on your Facebook page

Many Facebook page owners are disappointed with the results they are getting from their Facebook pages. Why? Sometimes because they think they’ll put up a page and their fan base will flock to the site, dynamically post content on their own and discuss it with their peers, all without much effort from the community manager (if there is one).


Hooey. This just doesn’t happen unless you’ve got a vibrant community and are expanding it to Facebook.


So what do you do?

1. Quit broadcasting

If you tell me everything I need to know through your Facebook page, and it reads like your email newsletter, then that’s all I’m going to do. Scan it, extract information and move on.

 2.   Quit marketing

If I feel like you’re streaming ads to me and calling it interaction I’m going to tune you out. I may scan the headline in my newsfeed, but unless there’s a hook to something for me, I’m not going to read further. I want to be talked TO not AT.

 3.   Find out who I am

Did you ever go look to see who someone was after they fanned your Facebook page? I’m guessing that less than 5%  of page owners, and maybe 50% of community managers would answer yes. What a missed opportunity to learn more about your market, what they like, and what value they might be able to add to your Facebook community!

 4.   Like me back

Let’s say you sell photography equipment. Wouldn’t it be useful to you to know if your fans are photographers? What if you not only liked my Facebook page but shared my work on your page? What if you made a comment on my photo about how beautiful it was? I’d be grateful. I’d tell my friends. I might even buy something.

 5.   Give me something to do

Photos and videos make us think, or laugh, encourage us to add a comment and share with our friends. Give me a poll (that isn’t a focus group question and I’ll give you my opinion.

 6.   Gimme respect

Show enough respect to your fans to say please and thank you. To ask opinions and respect the answers. To feature case studies or examples of real people who have impacted you, your product or the world.

 7.   Rinse, repeat

Doing all of the above once is not enough. You’ve got to do it over and over until it’s a part of your natural work-flow. The miracle happens when it’s no longer “work” but fun!
























































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Facebook in Talks to Acquire Face.com for ‘Tens of Millions’ [REPORT]

Facebook may be about to acquire facial recognition tool Face.com, according to multiple reports.


Israeli business publication Calcalist, which has accurately leaked acquisitions of a number of Israeli companies in the past (including Apple’s acquisition of flash storage company Anobit), says that Facebook is in talks to purchase the startup for “tens of millions of dollars.”


Face.com already powers two photo apps on Facebook’s platform, Photo Finder and Photo Tagger. The company also has a public API, which it updated in March to enable third-party apps to estimates the ages and moods of people in photos.


Rumors that Facebook was interested in acquiring Face.com have appeared before, but the two companies disagreed over price, TheNextWeb reports.


Should the latest rumor be true, this will be Facebook’s first major acquisition since going public earlier this month — unless last week’s rumor about Facebook’s interest in acquiring Opera happens to be true.


A Facebook spokesperson said the company does not comment on rumors.






























































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