We recognize that smart marketers and brands need to measure the results of their social media efforts; in fact, the pressure on brand marketers to prove the return on their social marketing spend is quickly increasing. We are continually innovating our analytics offerings, so check out our previous post on our Facebook Insights integration, and stay tuned for many exciting announcements over the coming weeks.

Today, we’re happy to announce a new collection of analytics in the Wildfire Social Media Marketing Suite: post metrics.This new report incorporates and enhances the metrics available through Facebook’s Insights, providing in-depth analysis of each post, powerful comparisons and aggregate views of post engagement across all your pages, allowing you to quickly refine and optimize your messaging.

Let’s look at how these tools can benefit you.

We track and score every post based on several engagement metrics including Organic Reach, Viral Reach, People Talking About This, Visibility, and Viral Growth Rate. The latter two metrics were formulated by Wildfire to provide marketers with actionable criteria for judging the success of a given post (and also for posts over any time period).

We’ve added three new, exciting features to Promotion Builder: Entry Form Likes and Followers, Entrant Demographics, and User Generated Content Categories.

User Generated Content Categories
With the updates to Promotion Builder, you can now create multiple categories within your user-generated contests, allowing you to run several sub-contests within a larger single contest. For example, if you were running a user-generated photo contest that asked your Fans to submit the cutest picture of their pet, you could create groupings of the photos based on the type of pet. From there, you can apply Promotion Builder’s existing features to your categories; you can apply one of our four winner selection formats and control when and how the users vote for each one.

What does this mean for you and your users? First and foremost, the feature gives you increased flexibility and control over your contest. For example, you can create a gallery featuring the pictures in each category for easy separation and a specified voting process. It also provides your users with additional chances to win the contest, and gives you the chance to further specialize the prizes to increase relevance and value for your consumers.

Check out the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum promotion below for a great example of how a brand used UGC categories to allow more tailored entries to their contest.

Warning! The next two awesome features are only available on our white label product!

Entry Form Likes and Followers

Our platform now allows you to track how many new Likes and Followers your Fanpage and Twitter receive from the Like and Follow buttons in the campaign itself. This means that, in addition to seeing how many Likes you have received since your promotion began (using our Monitor product), you can also see how many of those new Likes came directly from the campaign user interface. (In other words, you’re able to see return on investment in action.) The same works for new Twitter followers and the Twitter integration feature in a campaign. Whenever you run a White Label campaign that includes a Like button on the entry form or Twitter integration, the advanced Like and Follower analytics, respectively, will automatically be included in your campaign analytics. If your campaign includes both an entry form Like button and Twitter integration, both the Like and Follower analytics will be available to you.

This screenshot shows how these data appear within your campaign analytics:

Entrant Demographics

This new feature allows you to gather the age, gender, education, and location data for entrants throughout the lifetime of your campaign. You can have access to our advanced Entrant Demographic analytics simply by running a campaign which asks users for extended Facebook permissions. Unlike Facebook insights for a given application, these demographics show you who has actually entered the promotion; Facebook insights demographics relate to any user who has interacted with the application, which could include users who dropped off and did not enter.

Demographic data will be visible in a given category once your campaign has at least 25 entrants with Facebook profile details in that category. For example, once your campaign has 25 entrants who have defined their location in Facebook, the location demographic data will appear.

This screenshot shows how these data appear within your campaign analytics:

Standard vs. Extended Permissions

Worried that extended permissions will hurt your entries? We have conducted tests on the rate at which users grant permissions when presented with the requests for permission box shown below. In our tests, the grant rate dropped between 1 to 3% when using extended instead of standard permissions, depending on the type of contest format used. As the campaign administrator, you always have the option to use standard permissions if you prefer the more streamlined user experience over the demographic data that extended permissions provide.

These two screenshots show the difference between standard and extended Facebook permissions from a user’s perspective:

Given the very slight drop off in grant rate, we highly recommend that our customers use this extended permissioning to get to know their entrants better.

We’re excited about all the new features that will make your promotions even more effective! If you’ve already used any of these features, tell us what you think.

We talk to hundreds of marketers every week and we hear that same concerns over and again when it comes to social marketing:

• social marketing is complicated, there are so many different tools; why can’t I have everything I need in one easy place?
• I need results! How can I generate measurable, meaningful results?
• How do I know if I am doing well? I need to be able to benchmark against my competitors and my industry.

We’ve spent the past year working on a product that specifically addresses these concerns and are excited to officially unveil today what we believe will be the gold standard in social media marketing software.

We’re very excited about the early interest in our suite. Facebook’s marketing team has chosen to use Wildfire’s new suite to manage ten different fan pages; Electronic Arts and Virgin Atlantic are also using us to manage multiple social properties and we’re already getting great feedback from them:

“We have used Wildfire for marketing campaigns in the past and were very impressed. With the release of Wildfire’s new Social Marketing Suite we are looking forward to going way beyond campaign management. It’s a powerful, easy-to-use tool for social marketing and we’ve seen great results.” Kyle Thorne, Social Relations Manager at Virgin Atlantic

“At EA SPORTS, we use social media as another platform to connect with our passionate fan base. Wildfire has helped us to deliver engaging, new experiences that create deeper relationships with our consumers.” Craig Malanka, Director Digital Communications

So what exactly is Social Marketing Suite, bit by bit? Here’s the breakdown:

Promotion Builder

• Promotions are the #1 reason people become fans or followers of brands*. Promotion Builder allows marketers to easily execute social promotions with a step-by-step wizard for sweepstakes, contests, coupons, giveaways, group deals, and many other formats. Wildfire is known for not only offering the widest range of promotion types but also for delivering the best results in our industry when it comes to social promotions.

Page Manager

• Provides easy and powerful page management for Facebook pages and other social properties.
• Marketers can create, in minutes, beautiful, custom-looking fan pages, – everything from welcome, news and customer service tabs to product display, events, holiday-themed tabs.
• We offer two options. For marketers with limited time and/or resources we offer a wide range of pre-designed templates so attractive pages can be up and running in minutes. For marketers looking for full creative flexibility, we offer a design toolkit that provides extensive creative control.
• Our library of plug-and-play social applications make it easy for marketers to create whatever social experience they like.
• Companies that operate in multiple regions can easily localize their pages to different geographies and languages.

Messenger

• Allows brands to keep track of what their fans are saying about them and easily respond to their audience, all in one view.
• Messages can be scheduled for specific dates and time to save administrators time and effort.
• Messages are seamlessly deployed to one page or hundreds of pages, an efficient way for brands and agencies to manage messaging across their multiple properties.

Dashboard

• At a glance tracking of the performance of a brand’s social media marketing.
• Tracks the viral spread and performance of promotions with sophisticated analytics.
• Benchmark a brand’s performance versus competitors thanks to data we collect from over 30 million Facebook and Twitter pages.

Exciting stuff, right? Social Marketing Suite is available now. To find out more about it, and inquire about signing up, please see here: www.wildfireapp.com/suite

*Razorfish.

On the surface, we’ve created a new user interface for every published campaign that provides at-a-glance access to vital campaign stats.  Under the hood, we put a lot of effort into building the robust analytics engine that powers the data in real-time. We’re proud of the scalability this affords us, as we’ll be able to provide the most up-to-date information even as the number of campaigns we support grows dramatically.

The tool that our clients can use to view their campaign data is aptly named the Campaign Analytics Dashboard, and here’s a screenshot of what it looks like for many clients.  In fact, this image was taken from our very own promotion! It’s cliché, I know, but we’re eating our own dog food.

When you first visit the dashboard, the entire lifetime of the campaign is displayed by default, giving you the entire picture of what’s been going on.  At the top of the dashboard are the key performance metrics including visits, entries, and entry rate, accompanied by useful reference statistics like daily average or best-to-date.  Below that, we provide an interactive time chart that lets you see the activity on your campaign day-by-day.

Beneath the graph we display the key metrics broken out by whatever channels the campaign is published to.  As you probably know, a Wildfire campaign can be hosted on Facebook, on a microsite, or even as a widget on a client’s website.  In all cases, we provide visibility into user participation on each channel.

For our most sophisticated clients, we also offer the ability to create custom referral sources, a powerful tool that allows you to identify where engagement is coming from down to the narrowest segments.  Using referral sources, clients can effectively optimize their campaigns by discovering and nurturing the most efficient distribution channels.

For example, you could A/B test different marketing copy for your email newsletters to see which version drives the most entries.  Similarly, you can optimize ad spend on a campaign by associating each ad creative with a different referral source.  All the tools of the trade for online marketing are now available for social.  We think that’s pretty powerful.

We’re determined to offer the most comprehensive and up-to-date reporting platform for social media marketing.  Analytics Dashboard is a great step forward, but it’s only the beginning.  Stay tuned for more improvements.

Next time you log-in, check out the “Questions about Wildfire?” box in the lower right corner of your screen to chat with us in real-time! We’re happy to help you brainstorm campaign ideas, navigate the campaign set-up process or discuss any suggestions that you have for making our Campaign Builder better for you. We are ready to start chatting with you right now!