Summing up social marketing in 2011 and making predictions for the coming year is a daunting task! 2011 saw more industry growth than any other year; we saw the widespread acceptance of social marketing for B2B companies, and we witnessed moments that are likely to echo beyond 2011: the debut of Google+, the introduction of Facebook Timelines, and an amusing concession to social media silliness by the White House, via the now infamous rickroll.

* This post was originally published in the Huffington Post.

On the local front, we asked our Account Strategists about their observations of trends over the year. Our team of strategists works every day with the biggest brands in the world, hands-on in helping to craft and maintain the strongest social marketing strategies on the web. Our marketing strategists noted a dramatic rise in clients’ needs to set specific marketing objectives for each social campaign. Objectives fell into three key areas:

1. Growth of the brand presence (fans, likes, follows, and subscriptions)
2. Engagement of the brand audience (comments, shares, and user generated content)
3. Monetization of fans (qualified leads, or sales driven from social pages)

Before 2011, social marketing efforts focused almost exclusively on growth – in a recent Wildfire survey, social media marketers noted “growth of fans or followers” as the top measurement of success, and the primary definition of positive ROI. We predict a shift from the emphasis on growth in the coming year as engagement becomes the most buzzed-about measurement of 2012. The generalized category of “social media marketing” will break apart too, with more specific business objective-based goals and models to achieve those goals.

In 2011, we saw little integration between branded social campaigns and the brand’s other marketing activities. You might have seen one editorial campaign on a brand’s website, only to see something different on Facebook, with no mention of either initiative via the brand’s email, television or radio channels. Too often consumers found themselves on a brand’s Facebook page served with a message absent elsewhere. Progressive brands will approach their marketing plans with an integrated social channel— more than just a messaging strategy, or a page content calendar, or a promotions schedule, winning brands will need figure out how all the pieces of the social puzzle fit in with a complete marketing plan.

In 2012, Wildfire predicts that the industry will follow an integrated social campaign approach, following the example of savvy social marketers like So Delicious, who linked their “Change Your Milk, Change Your Life” efforts across TV, outdoor, online and print advertising. The campaign, centered around celebrity spokesperson Jillian Michaels, reflected the brand’s message about changing ones life and reached audiences on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, the company’s website, the company’s blog, Youtube, and in print.

The effort was worth it: the results from just one of the 3-month, Wildfire-powered campaigns, were enviable, as So Delicious grew its fan base from 5,200 to over 59,000 fans – an increase of over 1,000%! The brand received 322,664 total entries, averaging 3,226 entries per day. So Delicious recorded its two highest sales days ever, while unit sales increased by 74%, and category share increased by 60%.

In 2012, integrated marketing efforts will swallow standalone social media plans, and more companies will follow the approach that one major initiative should guide the objectives and editorial plans of each marketing channel.

In 2011, users got a lot more sophisticated in how they use social networks. In fact, we saw that a user’s initial interest in a brand socially was no indication of whether they would stick around for the long haul. Top reasons cited for “unliking” a brand on Facebook included: “they post too much” (44%), “my wall was becoming too crowded with marketing posts and I needed to remove some of them” (43%), and “the content became repetitive or boring over time” (38%).In 2012, brands that want to develop long-term relationships will make sure to deliver consistent value and entertainment to their audiences. “Likes” will be granted more selectively (as users increasingly get how liking a brand reflects their personal taste, for better or worse). We will see more unique, targeted content, and more sophistication in promotions as well, as those ubiquitous iPad giveaways lose their positive brand impact. In fact, our customers’ top 250 campaigns of 2011 prove it — none of the campaigns gave away an iPad. Prize giving was more strategic and audience relevant, and prizes reinforced the brand.

In addition, more descriptive and frictionless sharing of people’s actions beyond the “Like” is already underway with Facebook’s support for social applications. In this way, endorsements made by friends will extend further and further past just the “like,” to include any variety of enticing action words like “played,” “watched,” “shopped,” and “read.”

Finally, in 2011, Facebook and Twitter gave customer service a kick in the rear. Social media is supposed to be a two way street, and consumers are treating branded pages as message boards that go straight to the board room (two such fiascos—both unscripted “celebrity versus airline” disputes involving Kevin Smith and Alec Baldwin — made big waves this year, for example). In fact, 62% of consumers used social media for customer support! While most brands have a long way to go for true interaction (approximately 95% of fan-written wall posts go unanswered), more and more users are demanding (and businesses are responding) that any brand who asks for their affinity, had better be responsive to their requests as well.

While this post doesn’t cover all of 2011’s social media industry trends and predictions (find the complete report here), keep an eye out for more targeted social marketing objectives, integrated campaigns, increased user sophistication and preferences, and the rise of social for customer service in 2012. Download the complete report, including several marketing trends not mentioned in this article, here.

What do you think of the trends and predictions we mentioned? What would you add?

Do you have a pretty nice fan base, but you’re struggling to come up with ideas to engage them on a daily basis?

One proven approach is to help your fans.

Here are 3 techniques used by some of the most successful Facebook pages. Try them on your page to see how your fans respond!

This post was originally published for the Social Media Examiner blog.

#1: Become a resource

Despite the level of connection you think you have with your fans on Facebook, many still express pleasant surprise when you respond to them personally on the social network.

Use fan names when you can, and respond one-on-one to the comments they make. This proves to fans you are listening and are receptive to their commentary and feedback, making it more likely that they will post in the future.

Moreover, invite conversation by asking your fans’ opinions on topics, or asking them to tell you what sorts of content they’d appreciate.

Everybody likes being asked, and fans feel extra-appreciated when you fulfill these desires—so don’t ask them for input you never intend to use or incorporate.

In the example below, Time Warner Cable demonstrates an inconsistent response strategy toward different users. While “Sharon” got her request attended to by the page administrator, “Regina” reports frustration that her posts are being removed instead of replied to, indicating that she had posted additional comments earlier than the final post visible in the thread.

If your brand strategy is to be a resource to all fans, it is important that you treat all fan comments in the same way by responding to all of them, no matter the sentiment.

One example of this kind of open interaction strategy working very successfully is our own continued initiative to build out a Facebook fan page community of marketers, business owners and social media managers interested in sharing knowledge about social media (as well as Wildfire!).

We have found over time that our most engaging posts, which get the most feedback from our users, are consistently the ones where we invite people to post any question they have about social media or invite them to have their pages reviewed by social media professionals.

The key is to follow up (even for just an hour) with all of the questions and actually answer them. Because the promise to answer any question is not an empty promise, the users become confident that their questions can be answered and trust the brand for it.

An excellent example of a smaller business getting engagement right with great messaging strategies comes from the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company, an imported foods store in Pittsburgh.

As of this writing, the store had just under 1,100 fans. Their social media manager told me they regularly get over 1% engagement on their posts, a great figure for their size.

#2: Offer your services, free

What is your brand known for? What would you like it to be known for? If you provide a product or a particular service like consulting or advisement, consider offering your fans a taste of it every once in a while for free!

According to eMarketer, the #1 reason users become fans of a brand on Facebook is to gain access to exclusive content, events or sales. Your brand can capitalize on this desire while leveraging the brand’s capabilities by giving users an occasional exclusive pass to experience the business, free.

Here are several examples of companies doing this on Facebook, to the delight of their users:

Rue La La, an online boutique of designer merchandise and clothing, knows many of its fans are in tune with fashion trends and enjoy thinking about design, clothing and style. As such, one of their most popular fan page “events” is a weekly invitation for fans to join a stylist on the page for an hour of live interaction.

Because typically most people don’t have access to a personal stylist or advice from one, Rue La La creates an environment where fans can happily expect this recurring event.

Every week, these invitations to post are the most consistently popular updates! Even the users who don’t get their pages reviewed that week leave feedback that they enjoy watching the advice for other fan pages, and that the learning experience is valuable.

#3: Make your fan page a complete knowledge hub

When brainstorming how to entice users to join and interact with your brand, the challenge is to come up with ways to encourage them to interact with the page continuously over time and prevent disengagement.

For brands that have a rich background or require a fair amount of user education, creating a fan page containing valuable resources and information that benefit the user is essential. The goal is to capture users with an initial promotion, and to keep them returning to your page for information even after the promotion is over.

An example of a page that achieved this goal is Webroot, a software company that distributes security applications and programs.

The initial user pull is the promotion Webroot has set up on its landing page. Users visit the Facebook page for a chance to win high-value prizes such as airline tickets, electronics and kitchen appliances.

Recognizing that its promotion would drive considerable traffic to its page, Webroot created a powerful, resource-rich page about its products and services, including a tab with educational slide decks, a full customer support portal (“Ask Webroot”), an explanatory splash page about their mobile security products, and even a collection of YouTube videos about the software.

As a result, users who visited Webroot’s page to participate in the promotion were also exposed to the page’s valuable content, which gave them a reason to return. In turn, Webroot created a full-service, user-friendly community through its Facebook page, a place where fans go to access information about the company.

Now that you’ve seen several examples of companies helping their fans help themselves, what’s the first approach you are planning to take with your fan page? Putting together a library of resources? Testing the waters by giving away some free services? I’d love to hear from you! Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

Lead Capture

1. Make a beautiful, creative newsletter signup form and publish it to Facebook, your website and your mobile site.
2. Make a special deal, gift, coupon code, video, whitepaper, ebook or other valuable piece of content available only to users who submit the form.
3. Create flash sales, where a special deal is revealed only after a certain number of people have completed the signup form. This encourages social sharing and lets you promote products or services, all while capturing leads.
4. Remember all those bottle-top promotions? Integrate online and offline promotions by printing coupon or other codes on your products, and allowing users to enter those, along with their contact information, in your online form.
5. Integrate your website and Facebook page with LinkedIn’s network, by putting up a page for users to sign-in with their LinkedIn accounts and drop “virtual business cards” into a fishbowl for prize entry.

Engagement

6. Create a virtual treasure hunt, where fans get clues and answer questions through your form. Keep your fans coming back day after day and give a prize to winners at the end.
7. Incorporate SMS messaging! Let users sign up for an SMS message, voicemail or phone call with a premium deal or unique content to be sent directly to their phones, integrating with a service such as Twilio.
8. Run a contest with user-generated content. Let users submit testimonials, essays or product reviews, or even run a caption contest, and pick the winner at the end!
9. Create a fun Mad Libs-style form, letting users fill in blanks to create unique stories about your brand or promotion.
10. Run a true scavenger hunt by publishing your form to your mobile site and letting users gather clues at physical locations, input them and submit the completed form to win!
11. Provide targeted deals to certain geographic, age or other groups. With advanced code verification functionality, you can require that users submit a certain code that you have predefined–such as a zip code or birthdate–in order to proceed. You can vary the deal according to the answer that users provide.

Surveys and Support

12. Use it to survey and poll your users. Find out their favorite products, interests and more, and include Name and Email fields to build your leads.
13. Provide a forum for product feedback, and incorporate a Storyteller plugin to encourage conversation and social sharing about your products.
14. Use it to gather support tickets. Include dropdown and text fields in your form, and integrate it with your company’s support site provider, such as Zendesk.

User Registration

15. Tie the signup form into your own account registration, so that when users fill out the signup form on Facebook, they are also automatically signed up for an account with your company. This works well for member-only shopping sites.
16. Are you targeting businesses? Allow professionals to sign up for webinars, conferences and other events directly from your page, and even integrate with services like GoToWebinar or Eventbrite.
17. Let users register for events, and give registrants exclusive content access, such as event-specific deals or information.

To chat with one of our social media experts about using forms to maximize your marketing, click here!

Recent studies about the amount of time users spend reading the Facebook newsfeed, the subsequent redesign of the front page of Facebook, and the findings that branded fan pages — and the updates that users see on them — are vastly more successful than other forms of Facebook advertising, make one thing clear:

Engagement is king.

In fact, there’s no better time to engage with fans than the holiday season. If you’re behind on planning your holiday social strategy (Thanksgiving is less than two weeks away!), we’ve got you covered with ten proven, holiday-themed social messaging ideas that will ignite holiday cheer.

(If you want to see these great holiday marketing strategies in action, join us for a webinar on Tuesday, November 15. Click here to watch the recording.)

1. Create a branded calendar with an engagement initiative that spans a series of days. Reveal something appealing each day. Then message your fans about each reveal.

12 Days of Christmas? 8 Days of Hannukah? 31 Days of Social Media? Have you ever seen an advent calendar, where windows open daily thru Christmas, each revealing a gift or special treat? We smell a great marketing opportunity here; one that doesn’t have to be limited to Christmas! Use the advent calendar idea and apply it to any holiday, enticing fans to come back and click on your page every single day. Here are some creative ways to use the calendar to maximize engagement:

• provide a new tip or trick each day
• give fans the chance to win a special prize on random days
• reveal a great coupon each day
• publish clues for a contest or other competition

Wildfire’s Page Manager – one of the tools in our complete social media marketing suite – offers several customizable, “advent-like” templates like one we used to greet November with a bang. We launched this winter-themed calendar with 31 days of social media advice.

2. Ask simple questions related to the holidays, but also related to your brand or its personality.

Spark a chat with your audience by asking simple, relatable questions that tie back to your brand and the holidays. In the examples below, Kraft Foods and Geico roused fan response by asking about activities already on fans’ minds.

3. If you’re running holiday-themed promotions, keep reminding fans to enter.

Holiday-themed promotions are a fantastic way to give your fans to an exciting and engaging treat, yet we sometimes see brands launch promotions to much fanfare and then…crickets.

Silence.

Instead, reach out and nudge your audience to enter, and get them to take action by reminding them when the sweepstakes will end. Reminders also give users additional opportunities to re-post and share with friends.

4. The holidays are full of nostalgia: engage your fans with messages that encourage them to reminisce and share their stories on your page. They’ll connect the warm emotions they feel with your brand as well.

Every holiday has its own associated traditions. Take advantage of this commonality between the brand and the audience by asking your fans to reflect on their associated memories. Bonus branding points go to companies that tie in the memory prompt with the brand personality, as Nestle Toll House does below.

5. Highlight any limited-time or seasonal products or services you offer.

The holidays provide a great reason to run a seasonal promotion. Most brands release seasonal items or plan limited production runs around specific dates — use your Facebook messages to highlight these limited-time items, as Keurig does with a message about the three seasonal coffee flavors being released for the fall.

6. Help your fans out.

People love to feel like insiders, getting access to exclusive tips or strategic advice. The holidays are a great time to offer season-specific advice, especially if your brand strives to be a thought leader in its industry. Consider the example from HP below. They’ve isolated a customer group (those that take photos and might be interested in HP camera or picture editing technology) and written a helpful, holiday-themed article.

7. Surprise your fans with a special treat.

Break out of a ho-hum messaging routine by occasionally offering a surprise treat on your wall, like Vevo did by putting together a Halloween-themed playlist and sharing it with fans.

8. Reveal the people behind the brand, and how they celebrate the holidays.

One of the most successful ways to encourage and grow engagement is to humanize your brand. How? Reveal the people behind the brand, allowing users a glimpse at the folks who make your company great. In the example below, Levi’s tied in the Halloween holiday with a peek at employees in their costumes.

9. Provide holiday-themed uses for your brand’s products.

No matter what product (or service) you sell, if you can spin a holiday twist to its use, share the twist in a message! Though apple sauce can be used to make brownies any time of year, the Musselman’s page administrator takes advantage of Halloween as a chance to highlight one way to use its product.

10. Have fun with your audience!

You may be a serious marketer, but that doesn’t mean you have to take your brand so seriously. Any holiday is a chance to spread joy, fun, and be full of cheer! Show how your brand cares for users and fans by sharing digital holiday card or a Facebook photo. Better yet, get funny and creative like Silk did, in the example below. Can you spot the clever Photoshop job in the picture? 444 fans got a kick out of it!

Want even more strategic advice about how to conquer your social media marketing this holiday season? Sign up for our November 15 webinar recording, “Perfecting your Holiday Social Media Strategy!”

Here’s a trend that should give you a bit of holiday cheer: the average holiday shopper plans to do 36% of their shopping—up from 32.7% last year— online this year. If you get your holiday themed social marketing campaigns right, you could see that sales increase hit your bottom line. Try these 5 holiday marketing strategies to give your season’s sales a boost:

1. Dedicate page real estate to the holidays and your products.

Create a seasonal activity hub on your Facebook page for visitors and fans. Whether you make a new tab with rotating seasonal content (like our Wildfire Page Manager Paypal Storefront template featuring adorable dinosaur sweaters by the Sisters Oberth), or you create an entire mini-website within a tab (like Denizen America), showcase special holiday products that make your fans feel festive.

Combine continuously updating products, special offers, messages, or the ability to shop for seasonal products (see below), and you’ll give your fans the message that your page is a fun place to hang out, and buy, this season!

2. Build buzz with a well-timed reveal of sales or special products.

Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) is the biggest shopping day of the year. In fact, ShopperTrak reported that $10.69 billion was spent on Black Friday 2010, with 212 million shoppers visiting their favorite retailers offline and online! Additionally, Cyber Monday 2010 saw $1.028 billion of online sales from 9 million shoppers.

Consumers are primed to expect sales and juicy discounts as merchants try to drive them into a pre-Christmas buying frenzy. Take advantage of this expectation by creating a specially themed Black Friday or Cyber Monday coupon, product offering, group deal or sale, that reveals in connection with the holidays or when your page reaches a certain fan threshold.

In the example below, a Wildfire Social Marketing Suite Page Manager template is configured to do a Black Friday Countdown. It can be customized to any brand’s design or formatting guidelines.

3. Run a holiday-themed promotion that incorporates your product.

Based on numerous research reports, it’s clear that Facebook fans get especially excited about fun, holiday-themed promotions. In fact, In 2010, 21% of Cyber Monday shoppers heard about a promotion through someone in their online social network. Also, Media Post states that, in 2010, social media and mobile capabilities were the key drivers of Black Friday sales with consumers using mobile devices for product reviews, promotions, price checks and to check-in while shopping at various stores.

The holiday season is the time to put your product front-and-center with a promotion. When crafting your promotion, consider including your product in the entry process (such as asking the user to take a picture of himself with a branded item), or as part of the prize. For example, both Silk and Luster Premium Whitening included a supply of their product as part of the ultimate prize, aligning the interest of the entrants with these products specifically.

4. Reinforce your product’s holiday uses through specific and targeted messaging.

When messaging your audience, see if you can address a holiday theme as well as advertise your product in the same message. When you fit these two pieces together, your messages ride the existing wave of holiday cheer and get extra attention.  In the examples below, HP consistently posts updates to Facebook fans that feature HP products, but with an appealing holiday slant (an incentive to “like” the post for a special deal). One way to automate the messaging process in advance of the holiday season is to plan out a posting schedule, like for an editorial calendar, and schedule your messages to go live using a page posting tool like Wildfire Messenger. This way, once you plan the messages, you can sit back and watch them publish themselves!

Now you have four strategies you can use this holiday season to promote your products: dedicating page real estate to the holidays, running holiday promotions, timing special sales events, and targeting holiday-themed messaging. Want more holiday-themed strategies, tips, success stories, and advice? Join us for our November 15th webinar, “Perfecting your Holiday Social Media Strategy!” Register here for the recording.

Do you have additional ideas about how to promote your brand during the holiday season? Share them with us in the comments below, so we can learn from you, too!

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.

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. *This post has been updated from its original publication on the Wildfire blog. 

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.

Which ad will perform better? A/B Testing is one way to find out, accurately.

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 most signups?
• yields the most coupon redemptions?

Example for text ad #2: For the next set, keep the image and description the same but change the title in each ad.

Example for test ad #3: Finally test different descriptions, each with the same title and image.

You may also test the target audience for the ad by keeping the ad exactly the same but targeting different kinds of viewers e.g. 20-30 year old women versus 30-40 year old women (the Facebook ads tool provides you with this targeting feature). Altogether it’s not unusual to run through approximately 20-30 variations of your ad for one ad campaign.

Hot tip! Unlike A/B testing for Google ads, where titles and descriptions are extremely important, on Facebook graphics trump both of these characteristics. Spend more time testing different image variations, followed by title, and then, if time and budget permit, test your ad description.

Step # 4: Test a large number of images

When doing your image tests, focus on quantity – we’d recommend testing 5 images at a minimum, but testing 20 images is preferred. If you test many images you may find that several of them work well – which will provide you with a great base of images for your future ad campaigns. For some very effective tips and tricks about exactly what types of images to try, check out our previous blog post with “18 Super Easy, Highly Effective Tips to Grow your Fans via Facebook Ads.”

Hot tip! When testing images try to form a hypothesis about which ones will ‘win’ rather than simply waiting for the data to find the winner. This will help you to learn why one image is better than another, thus enabling you to become more and more adept at choosing appropriate images in the future.

Step # 5: Use A/B testing to identify the appropriate target audience

Facebook ads have very powerful targeting features. You can control which users see your ads based on very specific guidelines, such as age, gender, geographic location and even interests. Use A/B testing to identify what kind of audience is most receptive to your ads by displaying identical ads to users with different demographics or interests.

Example for targeting: You might try displaying your ad to American women aged 25-35 years who indicate they are married and then to American women aged 25-35 years who indicate they are unmarried. This will help you to determine if your ads resonate best with married or unmarried women. You might then wish to further refine your audience by running the ads for American married women aged 25-35 years who indicate ‘cooking’ as an interest versus those who don’t.

Step # 6: Run all the versions of your ad simultaneously

When you are testing different variations of an ad be sure to run them at the same time. If you run them at different times you won’t know if the reason for the different performance of the ads is the changes you made to the ad itself or differences relating to the timing of the ads. For example, if you’re testing two images and you run one on Friday and the other on Sunday, the Sunday ad might perform better because of the image or perhaps just because people have more time to click on ads on Sundays because they are not at work. Unless you run the ads simultaneously you won’t be able to isolate the true cause of performance differences.

Step # 7: Run your ads long enough to reach statistical significance

Be sure to run your ads so that they get enough clicks for your results to be statistically significant. You may find, for example, that in the early stages of your test one ad gets twice as many clicks as the other but if the number of clicks is very low (e.g. 10 clicks for ad A versus 5 clicks for ad B) you simply don’t have enough data to be sure that Ad A is performing better than Ad B. As a general rule of thumb, make sure you have at least 100 clicks for each ad.  Once you’ve run your ads long enough then pause the less effective ads and push your budget towards the successful ads, versus running the “losers” for longer and wasting your budget.

Step # 8: How to use Facebook’s ad tool for A/B testing

To run your A/B tests using the suggestions provided in this blog post, the following steps are necessary:

Part 1: Use the “Create a Similar Ad” feature in Facebook’s ad set-up wizard. This will enable you to quickly duplicate your ad in order to test small changes to it.

Part 2: In order to ensure your ads get displayed by Facebook an equal number of times (which is critical if you are to run an accurate test), you have to create a separate ‘campaign’ for each ad variation. This is because when multiple ads are running within a single campaign, Facebook’s system will allocate more of your daily budget to higher performing ads, and often ads that are added after the first two or three do not get run at all, which makes them useless from the point of view of A/B testing.

Step # 9: Don’t always assume that Facebook’s ‘suggested bid’ is the best

When setting up an ad Facebook will ask how much you are willing to pay per click for each ad.  You’ll notice Facebook offers a suggested bid but you should take this suggestion with a grain of salt.  You’ll notice in the image above, which is a real campaign, the suggested bid is between $1.06-2.03, yet we bid $0.65 and get a good amount of traffic. In other words, we pay almost half of what Facebook suggests and get good results. The point is – start low and then move your bids up until you start to get traffic. You might have to increase your bids as high as the suggested range, or even above. But it depends on many factors, so don’t be afraid to play around with bids until you get traffic at a decent price.  Be aware, however, that the more granular you get with your targeting, the more expensive your ads tend to be, i.e. you’ll pay more if your ad targets a very specific demographic (e.g. 30 year old women from California who are married) versus a broad demograhic (e.g. women from the United States).

Step # 10: Evaluate and improve upon your results

For each round of tests you run going forward, make the winner the new “control.” This way, your control ads will keep evolving with each ad campaign effort you undertake, and your ad strategies can continue to be refined over time.When you’re evaluating the results for the campaigns you run, remember to pause all ad variations that are producing a high Cost Per Acquisition or Cost Per Entry (i.e. if you are running a promotion). These campaigns are clearly not cost effective so you’ll want to save your precious ad budget for those that are and switch of your expensive ads as soon as you can.

Hot tip! Be aware that certain times of the year will be more competitive when it comes to running ads and thus more expensive. For example, around the holidays lots of companies are wanting to advertise their products so you may find that the cost of your ads increases. You should take this into account when you evaluate your campaign success during the holidays.

Step # 11: The most important lesson of all!

Lather, rinse, and repeat! There is no such thing as a perfect ad (at least, a perfect ad that you can run over and over, for any campaign or any purpose.) In our experience, by the time you’ve narrowed down a successful ad from your tester group of 30, you can run it for a few days or weeks (depending on how narrow your audience is) until it falls out of vogue. Call the Facebook audience fickle, picky, or quickly disinterested, but successful brand ad campaigns are those that evolve continuously. Logically, this makes sense. Once you have found the winning image, title, copy, and targeting info that’s generating you all the attention (with clicks and entries), you won’t be able to keep running it successfully because you’re basically showing it to the same people over and over again and once someone has clicked on your ad once they are unlikely to do it again unless you show them a new ad. So for better or for worse, you’ll need to keep developing new ads (and using our A/B testing techniques to enhance them) if you want to continue running successful ads on Facebook.

We hope the advice is helpful to make your ads perform better. Use the comments box below to provide us with your own advice and feedback!

Of particular note is that referral sources are also fully functional on Tabs, which is great for marketers who want to drive users to a promotion within a Tab. Basically, a promotion running inside a Facebook Tab can serve as the landing page and Wildfire will track user activity on the promotion against any new or existing referral source. What this really means is that marketers can perform advanced segmentation, ad optimization, A/B testing, etc. while retaining strong brand visibility because end consumers are landing on the brand’s Facebook Page directly.

Warning! This awesome feature is only available on our white label product!

How might a brand use this functionality? For instance, imagine you’re spreading the word about a promotion through an email newsletter, and you’d like to A/B test the content of the email to see which layout and language drives the most participation. Not just in terms of clicks, though; most email marketing tools provide that already. What you might want to know ultimately is which version drove the most promotion entries. In this case, you could create one referral source (a Wildfire-provided URL) for each email, which users would click on to reach the promotion on your tab. Then, as users visit and engage with the promotion, you can analyze in real time which version is driving the most visits, the most entries, or even which version is most effective in terms of conversions (entry rate).

Similarly, if you run ad campaigns that drive traffic to a promotion, you can now send users to a Tab directly and still benefit from all the granular reporting that comes from using referral sources, allowing you to optimize for the best-converting ad creative while ensuring that users still see the promotion in the context you intended — within your Facebook Page.

So go ahead, take advantage of the power of referral sources on your current or next white-label campaign, and let us know your success stories.