Wildfire Social Media Marketing Blog » News & Updates

Get Romantic with New Valentine’s Day Engagement Templates

Maya Grinberg — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:00:43 +0000

Now that December’s holiday cheer has faded, and those green and red decorations are back in storage, what’s next? Valentine’s Day, with all of its pink, white, chocolate and cellophane glory. This is a perfect time to reach users —at just the moment they are contemplating romantic plans —through specialized content, promotions, messaging, and branded media. Wildfire has created a special Valentine’s Day “Virtual Gift” Template that allows your fans to give virtual Valentine’s gifts to their friends, right from your brand’s page!

This Valentine’s Day template allows you to insert customized images for each virtual gift. When a gift is sent, it displays on the giver’s news feed and the recipient’s Timeline. Along with the gift image, you can also customize a description and include a link back to any page on Facebook or the Internet. The gift headline, description, and specialized link will display together on the recipient’s Timeline after the gift is sent. Sharing virtual gifts on users’ walls is a good vehicle for enhanced earned media!

The Virtual Gift template is currently available to all Wildfire Social Marketing Suite clients. Every element of the template is customizable to reflect your brand’s personality. Administrators can choose how many gifts are available on the page, what each gift looks like, the gift headline, a descriptive gift message, and even a destination URL that gift-clickers will get taken to.

The default Valentine’s Day template has a classic theme with flowers in shades of red and pink. However, like the puppy example demonstrates above, the template can be skinned or redesigned in infinite ways— no matter how it’s customized to look, fans will delight in being able to send gifts to their friends’ walls, and the recipient friends will delight in receiving them. Below, you can see an adorable customization of one of our testing templates— it’s hard to resist sending one of these little guys to every one of your friends’ walls!

How would you use the Virtual Gift template? What sorts of virtual gifts would you like to receive and post on your Timeline? Leave us a note with your comment—we love hearing your ideas; they inspire us to create more new templates of our own!

Measuring the Business Impact of Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC]

Maya Grinberg — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:05:13 +0000

Social media is no longer a stop-and-go investment, but rather a long term strategic channel that, when integrated with other marketing efforts, allows brands to connect with users over time. Results of a recent survey we conducted find social media efforts valuable in their ability to grow brand awareness and increase dialogue with customers. In addition to spending more time thinking about how to engage audiences, marketers will soon begin to measure social media’s impact on the business through a more traditional ROI definition: attributable sales and costs.

In November 2011, we conducted an ROI survey of over 700 marketers from all around the World. The results were compiled into an easy-to-digest infographic, found below.

What do you think of the results? Where does your brand fall in line with these alignments?

Facebook to Place Sponsored Stories Ads into Users’ Newsfeeds

Maya Grinberg — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:31:57 +0000

A big change was announced for Facebook advertisers today: starting in January, Facebook will be featuring “Sponsored Story” ads in users’ news feeds. Until now, all advertising on Facebook was limited to display only within the right panel of the interface. This change will greatly increase the marketing presence of brands advertising Facebook, expanding the exposure of these “organic interactions” ad units (as Facebook refers to Sponsored Stories).

In case you’re not aware, Sponsored Stories are a Facebook advertising format—Facebook defines them as stories that are “eligible to appear in your News Feed.” Sponsored Stories show up, like traditional ads, on the right column of pages on Facebook. Companies can choose different user actions — such as posts, likes, check-ins or actions within Facebook apps — and feature them in their ad campaign. Facebook says that unlike traditional ads, “Sponsored Stories help to drive authentic and scalable word of mouth,” because the ads stem from real user interactions and are shown to all of that user’s friends. Here are some examples of Sponsored Stories you’ve probably already seen in your Facebook account:

“App Share” Stories are created when a user starts using a Facebook app
“Page Post Like” Stories are created when a user “Likes” one of the posts made by your page

Sponsored stories in the news feed will be the same size as other items that feature on it and will be displayed with a link that reads “Sponsored” underneath the post. Users who mouse over the link will see the text: “This was already shared with you. A sponsor paid to feature it here.”

This is great news for marketers, and for Wildfire. Earlier this year, we announced the Wildfire Storyteller application, a utility available to all Wildfire Social Marketing Suite clients which allows page administrators to create a place on the page for branded interactions that easily create and encourage feed stories. Using the Wildfire Storyteller app, you can create a tab in your Facebook Page to ask your users fun and engaging questions about your brand. You can then set up an entire customized Facebook Feed Story that gets published alongside that user’s generated response. This feed story is especially powerful in that you can included a branded video or image with the story and you can also customize the feed story title, URL and description. So, for example, a movie brand could use our Storyteller app to ask fans “What was your favorite scene from the Hangover II movie trailer?” and the ad generated from a user’s response could include the movie trailer, a link to buy tickets for the movie, and a description of the movie. As long as you’ve created a Sponsored Stories ad campaign, all of these newsfeed posts create ads targeted to your users’ friends.

Since 27% of all users’ time on Facebook is spent looking through the newsfeed, Wildfire is excited about this new opportunity for marketers to further leverage the viral power of Sponsored Stories.

What do you think of the news that Sponsored Stories will be displayed in user news feeds? Tell us in the comments, we’re excited to hear your opinions!

What You Should Know about Google+ Pages for Brands

Maya Grinberg — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 21:19:45 +0000

Did you see Google’s announcement yesterday about opening up Google+ Pages for businesses and brands? If you’ve been waiting and watching Google+ from the wings, you’ve now been given a place to stage your brand entrance. Learn our ideas about the possibilities for brands on the 40-million-user Google+ social network, and how you can get involved with Google+ Pages in this post.

(Note: Tom, one of our fantastic product managers, channeled these predictions after a very close assessment of Google+ coupled with his attention to trends in social media marketing. They don’t represent the perspective or plans of the Google+ team.)

1. Move your brand up the search engine listings, and spend less on ads by increasing Google+ user engagement.

Google has already begun to incorporate a company’s social engagement levels into its search rankings. Now that users can +1 your brand (the equivalent of a “like” on Facebook), your +1 count could figure into the popularity and relevance rating of your brand in search results. Google could adjust search results based on even more types of social engagement the future.

Creating an engaging brand experience on your Google+ Page will help improve your search rankings and your paid Google ad performance on Google.com, as well as across Google’s ad networks. Your social presence matters now more than ever in both consumer engagement and your marketing bottom line.

2. Pull in a potentially huge mobile audience.

Google+ comes standard on most Android phones and will immediately provide brands with access to a massive mobile audience. Imagine consumers seeing a message in their “Nearby” stream from a brand they assigned to one of their Circles. The message announces a flash sale on ladies winter boots over the next 3 hours, and includes driving directions to the store via Google Maps. Coupled with the astronomically rising popularity of the Android mobile platform, we’re seeing a serious opportunity for you to engage your audience on the run.

3. Target messaging to audience segments more easily than on other social networks.

Now businesses can use Circles to segment their social media audience in order to target content and maximize engagement. For example, you might have circles of users who took a brand survey, so you would add them to an “Engaged Responders” Circle. Another circle may include those who seem “Slow to Warm up.” Or maybe everyone would start in the “Slow to Warm up” Circle only to be moved to a more niche circle as they engage with your brand.

Brands could even host live video chats with a “Focus Group” Circle of power users (via Hangouts) to get feedback on new products, and generate “the love” with early adopters.

4. Tap into the massive audience using Google’s other apps.

Google+ will also help you reach and engage with the vast, existing audience of Google consumer app users (Gmail, Maps, Chrome, YouTube etc). First, you’ll see opportunities to bring your branded content to users inside of Google+ and enable them to easily share it with friends. Take YouTube, for example. Google has now added a YouTube search tab along the top right edge of each Google+ screen. When users search for a video, they now see a pop-up video player and playlist of related videos, and each one can be +1’ed and shared with the user’s Circles.

In the future, we can imagine Google enabling users to create user generated content (UGC) from a YouTube experience inside of Google+ as part of a brand-sponsored promotion.

Google has already implemented additional integrations with Chrome and Google Reader, and with each integration comes the opportunity for brands to hook audiences and draw them back to social experiences on Google+ Pages.

5. Collaborate with your internal and external customers.

We see the potential for Google+ to be an excellent internal company information sharing and collaboration too.

Google already has experience delivering products with the security and reliability necessary for enterprise solutions, as it offers with the popular Google Apps platform (used to create shared work documents, spreadsheets and presentations). Now that employees can create Google+ accounts with their corporate email addresses, it’s not hard to imagine companies using Google+ as an internal social network for workplace collaboration.

Using Circles, companies could allow secure sharing of selective information with customers inside and outside of an organization to easily enable focus groups and crowdsourcing. With these potential uses, Google+ could even provide services similar to Jive or Salesforce.com’s Chatter, which also offer social collaboration tools.

So What’s Your Game Plan for Google+?

With the launch of Pages, Google+ has finally opened its doors to brands looking to build an audience on the network—a network that is, like it or not, intimately tied to Google search and massively popular consumer applications like YouTube and Chrome. Now is the time to get your Google+ game on, so you can rise above competitors at the onset and attract a valuable audience. Here are some ways we suggest you do it:

Drive as many +1’s as possible
Devise criteria for how you would segment your users into Circles and how you would customize content for each Circle
Continue to build up your audience on other social networks using Wildfire’s Social Marketing Suite, in order to seed your Google+ presence
Plan for cross-promotion from your Facebook page, Twitter account, and website to help bootstrap your Google+ presence
Brainstorm now how you could leverage Google+’s interactive new features such as Hangouts to more deeply engage your users

What makes you most excited about using Google+ for your brand? Share your insights in the comments, we love hearing from you!

Measuring Social Media Success, Post by Post

Maya Grinberg — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 14:00:45 +0000

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).

Visibility represents the proportion of your fan base that saw one or more impressions of your post (typically in their news feed). It’s a measure of how well you’re able to reach your audience organically and it can change over time, as more engaging content leads to better exposure. The interplay between engaging content and how broadly your posts are seen is driven by Facebook’s ranking system, and while the algorithms are closely guarded secrets, Visibility is a tangible way to measure and track the effects of your posting strategy over time.

Viral Growth Rate represents how effectively you’re able to move your message from your initial (organic) audience to a wider population via viral sharing. The more engaging your content, the more likely people will be to Like it or Comment on it, thus telling stories about it and spreading the word about your brand. A higher viral growth rate implies stronger viral activity and a broader audience reached in relation to your initial organic exposure.

Above and beyond Facebook’s own interface, our analytics tools allow you to see – in a single view – engagement by post across all of your pages, drill down for further detail on individual page performance, and zoom in to a particular time period to discover what specific factors impacted your social presence.

We’re excited to provide these tools, allowing you to optimize your social media efforts and make ROI-based decisions in ways never before possible.

Now that you’ve read what post metrics can show you about your messaging, how will you use these analytics to measure your success? Tell us below in the comments.

Hot Holiday Facebook Marketing Opportunity: Introducing the Advent Calendar!*

Maya Grinberg — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 21:25:19 +0000

*that’s not just for advent!

At Wildfire, we’ve been hard at work designing beautiful and functional Facebook page template designs so that our clients have the richest, most compelling and interactive choice of pages to build their marketing campaigns on top of. We look forward to showcasing our design library for you soon, but there is one new template we just couldn’t wait to debut! The advent calendar template allows page administrators the opportunity to create a calendar with any number of days up to 31, while programming each day to unlock a special treat, message, gift, or prize.

Wildfire’s Page Manager, one of the tools in the complete social marketing suite, has several “advent-like” templates that are ready for customization, such as the one in the example below. To start November off with a bang, and encourage Wildfire fans to return to the fan page daily, we launched a winter-themed social media advent calendar on our own fan page that offers 31 days of social media advice, all through the month of November.

When a user clicks on a day to reveal its secret contents, he or she will see one of two things: if the day has been unlocked, the user will see a box appear with the revealed content; if the day has not been unlocked, the user will see a box with a reminder to come back again later when the content is unlocked. Check out the tips revealed on our own calendar on November 1:

The advent calendar comes in several colors and themes, and can be easily customized to whatever theme best fits your brand using the easy-to-update Page Manager customization guidelines. Here is another example of a holiday-themed advent calendar that can be customized with branded content:

How creative can you get with your fully customizable social media advent calendar? The sky is the limit! Tell us what you would put behind each day in the comments below— we love to hear from you!

Facebook Launched Its Mobile Platform

Maya Grinberg — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 06:31:44 +0000

On October 10, Facebook rolled out its long awaited native iOS application and an HTML 5 web application. Part of Facebook’s first efforts in extending its full Platform to the mobile market, both apps not only provide a slick new user experience, but also bring social app discovery to mobile. Users can now discover and interact with apps on their mobile devices through three new channels: bookmarks, requests and newsfeed links. In addition to the three social channels, Facebook has also introduced Authenticated Referrals, which take users from the Facebook application to a native or web app without having to reauthenticate with their Facebook credentials.

Taken together, the new apps (currently available for third-party native apps on iOS devices and via m.facebook.com, and coming soon to Android) significantly reduce the need to manually authenticate with Facebook connect and make it easier for friends to interact with and discover apps.

Here’s a rundown of each of these new features:

Bookmarks

When a user interacts with an app on any computer or device, a short-link to the app is automatically added to the user’s Facebook Mobile sidebar.
If the user launches the app from this sidebar menu, she will automatically be taken to either the native iOS application or the web application.

Requests

An invitation to check out an app from a friend using a desktop browser can be received and acted on all within the mobile device.
Users who open the invitation to interact with an app will be taken straight to the mobile version of the app–either a native iOS or a mobile web app.

Newsfeed Links

Links in newsfeed posts can now also take users automatically to the mobile version of an app.

Authenticated Referrals

Users who navigate to your app and are already logged in to Facebook do not need to re-authenticate.
First time users of your app and those who have not previously used the mobile version of your app will be prompted to log in with their Facebook credentials and allow the app.

What are your thoughts on the introduction of social channels and authentication referrals to the mobile Facebook environment? What are you most excited about? Share your comments with us below, we love to hear from you!

Wildfire and LinkedIn Bring Social Media Marketing to B2B World

Maya Grinberg — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:00:12 +0000

Initial results show 60% reduction in cost per lead when combining Wildfire with LinkedIn ads

We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with LinkedIn to bring our Social Media Marketing Suite to the LinkedIn platform! With Wildfire, companies on LinkedIn can create and manage social promotions to generate leads and grow their followers. Coming soon, they will also be able to publish messages to continually engage their audience and measure indepth analytics about the performance of their LinkedIn company page. We have gained extensive experience building a comprehensive social marketing product on Facebook and Twitter, and are now excited to bring these tools to the LinkedIn platform.

For all marketers, but especially B2B marketers, this is exciting news! Our initial tests show that running a Wildfire promotion in connection with a LinkedIn advertising campaign can double ad click-through rates and decrease cost per lead by more than 60%. Additionally, our tests have shown that the viral sharing rate for LinkedIn users can be up to several times higher than on other leading social networks.

With its over 120 million worldwide users, LinkedIn serves as a powerful venue for companies seeking to interact with customers and prospects, build positive brand awareness, and drive revenue. Consider the latest statistics:

Approximately two professionals sign up to join LinkedIn every second
Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members
More than 2 million companies have LinkedIn Company Pages.

As Adweek recently noted, “Attracting followers now, while the feature is still relatively new, will cost much less than courting them down the road, when brands might have to lure them away from rival companies they’ve already decided to follow.”

We will be hosting a FREE LinkedIn Marketing Webinar to chat about what our partnership means for marketers and how B2B companies can best use LinkedIn for social media marketing.

Webinar: Register Now!

Now is the time to for you to incorporate LinkedIn into your social marketing strategy, and Wildfire is uniquely positioned to help you do so. To get started, here are three tips to help your company get the most out of LinkedIn:

Tip #1: Build Your Presence

A fast and easy way to build a large, active follower base is to create incentives through promotions. Create brand awareness, solicit product reviews and encourage attendance at professional conferences by running sweepstakes, contests, and discount campaigns that entice users.

Wildfire allows you to get up and running quickly with a turnkey marketing platform. When your promotion is ready, simultaneously publish it across multiple channels, now including LinkedIn, to reach your audience wherever they engage. Your branded promotion turns your LinkedIn page into a communication hub for followers.

Tip #2: Tap into Viral Sharing

Wildfire promotions seamlessly integrate with LinkedIn’s platform and allow you to tap into the network’s viral power. Users can share your company’s promotion with their LinkedIn networks, newsfeed, groups and specific users. Beyond promotions, use LinkedIn’s inherent sharing functions to spread news about your brand, upcoming product launches, to crowdsource new feature ideas, and more.

Tip #3: Follow & Learn From Your Results

Most successful promotions are supported by marketing efforts within and outside of social networks; track the most effective referral sources–advertisements, newsletters, your company page, etc.–for your campaign with Wildfire Analytics.

Our tests show that running a Wildfire powered promotion in connection with a LinkedIn advertising campaign significantly improves click-through rates and reduces cost per lead. With promotions and analytics, you can easily determine how to get the most out of your advertising dollars! Finally, the LinkedIn profiles gathered from promotion entrants provide high quality lead generation and insights. Use these metrics to find new clients, new employees and to build an engaged base of followers.

What is your company’s LinkedIn marketing strategy? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below! Also, please don’t forget to sign-up for our FREE LinkedIn Marketing Webinar.

Webinar: Register Now!

Wildfire Launches New Way to Measure Brand Engagement on Facebook.

Maya Grinberg — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 13:00:39 +0000

Wildfire Integrates with Facebook’s new Insights Data to provide Brands with a richer understanding of Engagement.

We’re very excited to announce big news for social media marketers and especially those of you (this should be all of you!) who are interested in better measuring and understanding your social media reach. Several weeks ago, Facebook selected Wildfire to help advise them on the development of some new metrics for Facebook Pages. These metrics are being launched today by Facebook and we’ve integrated them into our analytics dashboard to not only provide our clients with an easy way to digest and track the new Insights metrics, but to go deeper by providing additional insights, including the ability to aggregate the new analytics across multiple Facebook pages and tabs. This blog post will explain in simple terms what these new Facebook metrics mean for you and how Wildfire is enhancing them for our clients.

Some of the most notable new data points Facebook launched today include Friends of Fans, Reach, Engaged Users, and People Talking About This. Before delving into the details of the metrics themselves, it’s worth taking a moment to consider how these new Insights impact you as a social media marketer.

To understand the true value of your communications, you need to know how many users have been exposed to your messaging, and what proportion of your audience is actively responding to that messaging through the means available to the end consumer. In other words, how many people are viewing, Liking, sharing, commenting on, consuming or otherwise engaging with your content? A thorough understanding of how visible your messaging is and the extent of viral activity around it is crucial to optimizing your brand’s impact on Facebook.

Webinar: Register Now!

What do these new metrics do?

Think of it as a funnel: when you broadcast a message on Facebook, a portion of your fan base will see that post in their news feed. Of those users who are initially exposed—let’s call them your Organic Reach—a subset of them will respond positively by consuming content (e.g., watching a video, clicking on a link, etc.), Liking it, commenting on it, or taking other actions. These interactions constitute engagement of some kind. Facebook now counts the unique users who interact in one or more of these ways and labels them Engaged Users.

Some Engaged Users are special in that they take actions that cause others to see your brand name and content as well! For example, if one of your fans (let’s call her Mary) comments on your post, her friends will see it in their news feed, too. By commenting on your post, Mary is Talking About you to a broader audience. We refer to the size of this broad audience as your Viral Reach, i.e., the number of people you reached because of people Talking About your brand. By “talking about” your brand, Mary is counted both as an Engaged User and in the more specific People Talking About This metric.

Seeing that some of your fans are Talking About your brand leads to the notion that you could potentially reach many or all of their friends virally. To address this, Facebook also introduced a new metric called Friends of Fans, which is exactly that: the number of unique users who are friends of your Page’s fans, any of whom you could potentially reach with engaging content. For most Pages, Friends of Fans represent a significant multiplier over their direct fan base. Ultimately, the more captivating your message, the more likely you are to reach a larger proportion of the friends of your fans.

Analytics Cheat Sheet: Download Now!

Wildfire Analytics Give You All This, and More!

Wildfire was selected by Facebook to help advise them on their new Insights and we are therefore in a unique position to enable our clients to benefit from these new metrics on day one of the new Insights launch. In addition to providing our clients with an easy way to digest and track the new Insights metrics, Wildfire has gone beyond Facebook’s new metrics to provide additional insight, including the ability to aggregate the Insights across all of your Facebook pages and all tabs published through our Social Marketing Suite.

So, for example, if you manage multiple Facebook Pages Wildfire will enable you to see at a glance your aggregate performance across all these pages, and to then drill down deeper to see the analytics for your individual pages. Even if you only manage one Facebook page but you have multiple tabs associated with this page our aggregation of the Insights data is helpful to you because you can see at a glance how you’re performing, in aggregate, across all your tabs. These metrics allow you to evaluate engagement comprehensively across your social properties, compare your properties side-by-side, and drill down for further details. In this way you can readily identify which of your properties and tabs are generating the greatest engagement and you can learn from them in order to optimize your lower performing pages and tabs.

Our new analytics offerings help you understand your Page’s reach and the size of the audience responding to your message, so you can unlock the potential of your social media presence. With our tools, you’ll be able to optimize your broadcasts to reach a wider audience, engage a broader community, and effectively spread the word about your brand, product, or service.

We will be hosting a free Facebook Insights webinar on October 18. Register now and tune in to learn all you need to know about these new analytics.

Analytics Webinar: Register Now!

We’re excited about Facebook’s new analytics and our own. What do you think? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below!

Facebook will Turn Off all FBML on June 01, 2012. Transition to iFrames Now!

Maya Grinberg — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 19:00:47 +0000

Last year, Facebook announced its plan to deprecate FBML as a Facebook page administration platform over time. This March, it followed up this statement with the announcement of a full transition to iFrames, phasing out FBML. Since March, page admins have not been able to create any new FBML apps, but apps which were already in existence remained functional until the deprecation was scheduled to begin. Facebook announced at f8 the official deprecation date of all FBML endpoints: June 1, 2012. This is the date when any remaining FBML modules inside of Facebook will cease to function. As the time has come to fully transition to iFrames and depart from the FBML standard completely, this tutorial will explain how to transition your Facebook pages to iFrames from FBML.

Background: How FBML and iFrame Apps Work

FBML
FBML is Facebook’s legacy framework for serving custom content on canvas pages as well as tab pages. This content is effectively proxied by Facebook, which is to say that the user’s browser never hits the app developer’s server directly. Instead, Facebook requests the content from the app developer’s server, parses and filters it, and returns it to the browser.

As part of this filter process, Facebook evaluates FBML tags that are used to personalize the content. The functionality of FBML tags ranges from simple tasks like displaying the user’s name (fb:name) to rendering feeds or comment boxes, customizing content based on the user’s age or country, whether they’ve liked the page, etc.

Static FBML App
The Static FBML app was an application provided by Facebook that enabled the easy creation of FBML based Facebook page tabs. To use the application, page admins simply added the app to their page, and then customize the content. Along with FBML, the Static FBML app will be deprecated on June 1, 2012.

iFrame Apps
iFrame Apps are Facebook’s accepted framework for serving content on canvas pages as well as tabs. Content is served directly by the application developer’s server, rather than being proxied by Facebook’s servers. Because the page is hosted externally of Facebook, it can render HTML, CSS and even Javascript just like any external web page does, which was not the same with FBML. This is a big improvement as developers now have more possibilities for building customized apps in a way which is more familiar than learning new systems (a prior necessity with FBML and FBJS.) iFrames are often used in conjunction with the Facebook Javascript SDK (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/).

Wildfire iFrame App for Facebook Pages
Wildfire’s iFrames App for Pages is an app that allows Facebook brand page admins to easily create iFrame based Facebook page tabs. Content can be customized to display differently for fans and non-fans of the page. As a disclaimer, while there are similar third party apps in existence by other developers, the Wildfire iFrames App for Pages is among most popular free landing page tools, with over 7.6 million monthly active users.

Making the Transition

To understand how to transition existing FBML applications into iFrame apps, we need to look at ways page administrators have been using FBML to date, and suggest options for an easy transition:

Example scenarios of existing FBML use:

SCENARIO #1 – Static FBML app with static HTML content:

To transition to iFrames, either build your own iFrame app, or use one of several third party apps that can be used to host your static content, such as Wildfire’s iFrames App for Pages.

SCENARIO #2 – Static FBML app with minimal FBML use for personalization purposes (Examples include using the fb:name tag to render the name of the user.):

In extremely simple cases like this, you may be able to get away with using the Facebook Javascript SDK to retrieve the necessary data using the Graph API and write it to the DOM. See http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web/ (“Personalization” section). Note that this will require authenticating the user first and prompting for basic permissions (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/), most simply using the FB JS SDK.

SCENARIO #3 – Static FBML app with conditional rendering based on the user’s demographics (age / country) or whether they “Like” the page:

This could be transitioned using a similar client side JS SDK approach, but the downside is that both content variations would have to be included in the HTML source, so savvy users would be able to see the restricted content by viewing the source.
A better approach is to handle this server side. The signed_request parameter includes demographic information as well as a flag that indicates whether the user “Likes” the current page, which can be used to select the appropriate content. More information about these parameters can be found within Facebook documentation here.

SCENARIO #4 – Static FBML app with complex FBML content:

A transition will likely require implementing a custom iFrame app, or using one of the sophisticated third party page management applications, such as Wildfire’s Page Manager.

SCENARIO #5 – Custom FBML app:

Implement a custom iFrame app.

Special note: Some FBML tags can be replaced with Facebook Social Plugins (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/), such as the Comments box.

Next Steps and Important Tips for your Custom iFrames App

Choosing to use a page management product like Wildfire’s Page Manager means you can skip all of the technically detailed setup process outlined throughout this post.

To deploy an iFrame app of your own, you will need to set up your own server. Developers can pick any web development stack they’re comfortable with (such as PHP, Ruby on Rails, Django, J2EE, or others), and are responsible for picking a hosting environment. Heroku provides a great solution for Facebook apps.

When writing your HTML, remember that the main character

is 520 pixels wide for optimal Facebook viewing on Facebook page tabs and full width for Facebook canvas.

To launch an iFrames app, you must first create the Facebook page as an app within Facebook. The setup of this app involves tying it to the external web address of the pages you’re iFraming. This app will be run in both secure and non-secure browsing environments, and you will be able to set it up for equal accessibility within these developer settings as well.

After registering as a developer at http://developers.facebook.com, click to “Create new app.” When adjusting “Settings; Basic,” you will need to provide both Regular and Secure URLs. Note that starting October 1, 2011 all Facebook apps will need to support https, so you will need to obtain an SSL certificate and configure your server and application appropriately. With this setup, you’ll quickly be ready to add your newly created app to a fan page!

Now is the Time

Remember, now is the time to carefully comb the applications you’ve installed to your Facebook brand page over time to make sure none of them were built incorporating FBML modules or endpoints. On June 1, 2012 Facebook will flip the switch on FBML, and any applications or pages still employing the page management framework will go dark. The good news is, iFrames is an excellent alternative framework, allowing for greater developer flexibility and more creative programming options! For those that would prefer ready-made, easy to use, and FREE tools that require no technical skill to install, Wildfire’s got you covered.