There has been a lot of big news from Facebook over the past few days and while the reaction from consumers and developers has been mixed, the news for Fan Page owners is exciting! To begin with, the action of ‘becoming a fan’ will now be dramatically more viral because every time someone becomes a fan of your brand a newsfeed will automatically be published (e.g. “Joe became a fan of XYZ Brand”). This means that for every person that fans your Page, potentially hundreds of their friends will be exposed to your brand and many of them may choose to become your fan also. For Fan page owners, this will result in even greater brand exposure and should make it easier to build your fan base. Of course, you still need to give Facebook users a reason to want to become a fan of your brand – that’s where Wildfire’s tools can be so powerful (FYI, last week we launched a campaign for a nationwide gifts company that generated 100K fans in just 4 days!).
Also positive are proposed changes to the friend invite (otherwise known as “Facebook Requests”) functionality of fan page applications. Currently, when users wish to invite their friends to engage with a Fan Page application they choose from an alphabetical list of all their friends. Given that the average Facebook user has 150 friends, this makes it very time consuming for users to carefully select relevant friends and many end up either not inviting their friends or randomly selecting friends (usually those with names beginning with ‘A’!). According to new changes proprosed by Facebook, the new friend selector will include better ways to categorize and sort friends so that users can more easily select those friends for whom a given invitation will be particularly relevant. We anticipate that this will result in a much higher response rate to friend invites.
Finally, Facebook also announced exciting plans with regard to Fan Page analytics. Details are limited at this stage, but according to Facebook they will soon be providing a richer analytics experience for Fan Page owners, which should make it easier for Page owners to evaluate the performance and value of their fan interactions.
We’re excited to announce a partnership with 
Facebook users love sharing content that enables them to express more about their hobbies, interests, likes and dislikes and one of the most popular ways to do this is via ’share your favorites’ campaigns (e.g. “
In one of our last posts we gave you tips on how to create engaging, viral campaigns. But creating an engaging campaign is just one piece of the puzzle; equally important is coming up with campaigns that meet your business goals. There are many easy ways you can do this – if your goal is to drive sales, consider combining a coupon with your campaign (e.g. after entrants have entered your sweepstakes, quiz or contest use our coupon solution to provide them with a discount voucher). If your goal is to educate consumers about your products, weave this into your sweepstakes entry process (e.g. Zappos ran a shopping spree sweepstakes with us which required entrants to choose the clothing items they’d want to win from zappos.com and then input the clothing SKU numbers into the sweepstakes entry form). User generated contests are also powerful ways to educate consumers about your brand (e.g. Facebook ran a contest with us that required entrants to submit stories about how Facebook is doing good in their community) and so too are quizzes (e.g. check out the 
We are excited to introduce a new, engaging promotion format: quizzes. No doubt you have seen quizzes showing up in your Facebook newsfeed; they can be highly engaging and viral because they allow for self-expression. While many of the quizzes that show up in the newsfeeds are trivial, when done right they can be both highly viral and highly relevant to brands. For example, if you’re a travel company you could run a quiz that tells users what kind of traveler they are and then present users with some suitable trip suggestions. If you’re a clothing retailer, a ‘what’s your style?’ quiz would be a fun way to spread the word about your company and present users with targeted clothing suggestions. Our quiz format is easy to use and enables you to create fully customized quizzes, upload custom graphics, custom newsfeeds, product information and more. We also enable you to combine quizzes with sweepstakes or coupons, which is a powerful way to create campaigns that are both highly viral (quizzes are a great way to encourage consumers to publish newsfeeds) and generate leads (via sweepstakes) or sales (via coupons). For example, you could run a quiz ‘what kind of bride are you?” and then direct people for the chance to win a dream honeymoon and/or a discount voucher for 20% off wedding invitations.
We’re excited to have moved into a new office! It’s nothing fancy but very functional – perfect for a lean start-up. If you’re ever in Palo Alto and feel like stopping by, our 
We’re excited that our CEO, Victoria Ransom, is among the speakers for the suggested Facebook Fan Pages panel at SXSW 2010. Find the bios of the panelists below and 
You don’t need to be a big brand with a huge marketing budget to run a user-generated contest that spreads like wildfire. Non-profits and small businesses are currently running contests with us that are generating thousands of submissions and are reaching tens and, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of consumers via newsfeeds, friend invites and sharing. Why are these contests doing so well? We’ve noticed a couple of important success factors:
Looking to add a newsletter signup to the wall tab of your Facebook fan page or a sign-up form that feeds data from your Facebook fan page to your website? If so, our latest tool, an easy signup/questonnaire builder is exactly what you need.
