[REPORT]: How top brands use technology to power their social media

Download your free white paper here.

If you’re an active social brand, you know how much time and effort it takes to create and maintain a successful social media marketing strategy. Content it took you weeks to brainstorm gets consumed in what seems like just a day, or hours. Fans want to engage in dialogue with your brand all the time, and they get bored when you don’t have new offers, messaging, or promotions available for them. How do big brands scale their social media efforts?

The answer is by using technology. We compiled a report about how top brands scale their social marketing efforts, and the systems they need to help them do it. Download your free copy here. You’ll learn how Mountain Dew, Esurance, Annie’s Homegrown, and the Washington Redskins use social marketing software to generate more content faster with lower costs and better results.

What’s in the paper? How these top brands are able to:

• Create content once, then launch it everywhere


• Target customers by region and language


• Assign secure user roles that turn social into a true team effort


• Test, measure, and analyze campaigns in real time

You’ll learn the best way to scale your social and create a nonstop stream of fresh content that will win and engage fans, followers and customers around the web and around the world. Did you enjoy the read? Tell us in the comments, below!

Five Best Practices for Effective and Efficient Social Messaging

Engaging in dialogue with your brand’s community of customers, fans, and prospects is what social media marketing is all about. The best way to create and foster lasting conversations is with effective messaging. You’re already spending time thinking about how to source, edit, create, and publish compelling content for your social media messages, but have you thought about how to make your messaging activities more efficient in general? Luckily, there are tools that are designed to make your life easier by streamlining the way messages are collected, routed, and published across the social networks your brand is communicating to. We’ve put together five tips for how you can effectively create, optimize, and manage your brand’s social media messages to fans and followers by using a platform tool like Wildfire’s Messages.

1. Create filters to accurately route messages that need certain priority
Want to get urgent messages to the right person as quickly as possible, or make sure that a user posting about a competitor is surfaced to the right resource immediately? Use Messages to filter content coming from users. Messages offers robust filtering on Facebook and - coming in Q1 - Google+ and Twitter. You can create as many keyword filters as you want, with the option to auto-flag, auto-route and auto-delete messages and tweets by filter.

Example: Setting up a filter for the words “where do I find” or “pricing” would immediately surface this post from a fan to our Facebook wall, and be automatically routed to a designated customer service person.



2. Send messages to the right groups of users every time with targeting presets
If you’re repeatedly running a special promotion or extending an offer to a cluster of regions, it can take a lot of time to hand-select each region from the list of cities and states whenever its time to post about the offer.

Using a tool like Messages, you can create preset message distribution lists on Facebook by attributes such as location, language, age, gender, relationship status and “interested in.” This way you can target your messages to the exact groups you want to reach, instead of thinking about each message as a long list of regions, languages, genders, or relationship statuses.

Example: An internet travel company could easily target its highly engaged “Married California Males” group for a special message announcing a limited time discount on a Romantic Weekend Getaway in Tahoe.



 3. Take your messages with you

Want to keep an active archive of all of your brand’s messaging activity without having to manually dig through your Timeline and tweet stream and waiting for them to load? If you’ve ever needed to track down a specific message your brand sent or received, you know it can be a tedious process without having an archival tool. You can use Wildfire Messages’ CSV Export tool to create a searchable file and track down messages by keyword, user, date, message type, link and content.

Example: If your B2B brand is trying to retroactively figure out how many times its social profiles were used to message about “white papers,” trying to manually find these mentions in the Timeline or tweet stream is nearly impossible. In an archived spreadsheet, however, it’s as simple as a “find” command.





4. Get down to details by organizing your messages
Tracking hundreds of social messages and posts can be overwhelming. Using Messages, you can categorize, label, and organize posts and messages across Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Search for a particular label (i.e. “follow up”), then take action on any of the messages that appear in the list with that label (just as you do with other messages in the Messages tool).

Example: Your beverage brand gets a variety of messages from consumers, typically falling into these thematic buckets:

• I love these beverages


• Where can I buy these in my region


• When is the next flavor being released


• Feedback about the purchase experience

Using Messages, you can set up labels for each broad theme so that sets of users can be addressed properly, and by the right resource on your team.





5. Manage messaging to your Google+ audience from the same place where you manage Facebook and Twitter
Create, schedule and comment on posts, reply to or delete comments, +1 comments or posts, and upload links, photos, albums or videos all via the Messages tool.

Example: Make your marketing initiatives go further by using the same creative assets in different messages across each major social network. When the women of Wildfire wanted to demonstrate their support for Men’s Health Awareness Month by donning furry mustaches on the last day of “Movember,” we made sure to spread the endearing photo far and wide by scheduling it across every major social network on which we communicate with fans.







One of the most consistent ways your brand creates dialogue opportunities with its communities is through messaging. This post contained five tips for ways to get more efficient and strategic with your brand’s messaging activities— which will you implement first? Happy Messaging!

Holiday Facebook Marketing Tip: Launch an Advent Calendar!

At Wildfire, we are always hard at work designing beautiful and functional Facebook page template designs so that our clients have the richest and most compelling choice of interactive pages to offer users. We have over 100 different options, including apps that are optimized for mobile, and every type of rich media.  Last year, we introduced a countdown format “Advent Calendar” template, and it’s back for the holidays! The advent calendar template lets clients 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 Pages application, one of the tools in our social marketing Suite, has several “advent-like” templates that are ready for customization, such as the one in the example below. 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.

We launched our own “social media education advent calendar” on the Wildfire Facebook page so you can see the advent template in action. Check out the tips revealed on our own calendar on Day 1:





The advent calendar can be launched at any time of year (countdown to Valentines anyone?), and easily customized to the theme of your choice using the easy-to-update Page Manager customization guidelines, or you can publish it entirely “out of the box” as we’ve done above.

How creative can you get with your 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!

[VIDEO] Social Media Best Practices for a Successful Holiday Season

There's no better time to engage with your social media audience than the holiday season (winter or otherwise). If you're behind on planning your holiday social strategy (Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday are nearly here!), we've got you covered with ten proven, holiday-themed social media strategies that will ignite holiday cheer, while engaging fans and followers of your brand. Watch the webinar replay below, hosted by Wildfire and Learn with Google, to get the scoop on the 10 holiday social strategies you can utilize today.

6 Social Media Marketing Tips to Ace the Holidays

The holiday season is the perfect time to rev up your brand’s social media marketing strategy. Consumers are buzzing with holiday spirit (especially the spirit of giving and receiving...and the shopping that goes with it). They’re lighting up social networks with talk and opinions about the season, and thinking about what they’d like to buy.

Social media is playing a significant role in holiday consumer journeys. 44% of shoppers surveyed said that they’ll consult social media as part of their holiday shopping process, and they’ve already started—54% of consumers are shopping before Black Friday. To capitalize on this surge of activity, here are six holiday social media ideas you can use to turn up your social media marketing:

1. Launch promotional campaigns that reference common pop-culture holiday themes

Jingle bells anyone? As many holiday-themed pop culture references as you can imagine, is how many you can use to create a clever spin on creative holiday promotion ideas. For example, TomTom launched a holiday-themed sweepstakes giveaway and called it “TomTom’s 12 Days of Giveaways.” The most savvy part of the campaign was that users couldn’t enter to win all of the prizes at once— they had to check in with the TomTom page on Facebook on a daily basis to read about the current day’s prize offering and enter to win it. These repeat trips reinforce a user’s affinity with the TomTom page, leading to increased views and more earned media, or user-created social word of mouth about your brand.

2. Tie a charitable cause to a holiday occasion

The holidays are a time for giving. By tying a cause to a social marketing campaign, your brand is simultaneously demonstrating a sense of corporate social responsibility and social savvy. Also, don’t forget: the holidays aren’t limited to the classic winter majors like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, or New Years. In fact, the entire calendar year is chock-full of events to commemorate, from federal holidays like Memorial Day and Independence Day to more niche, created holidays, like Administrative Professionals Day or even National Taco Day.

The Company Store, for example, grows its community by tying a charitable cause to “National Family Pajama Night” (November 17), donating money to the Ronald McDonald House for every new follower of its social profiles during the length of the campaign.

3. Create seasonal engagement across social networks

Users don’t take a break from social networks during the holidays, so neither can your engagement initiatives across these platforms. Build a seasonal-themed promotional activity into your editorial plans for your brand presence across social networks. For example, Rack Room Shoes grows its fan and follower communities by creating seasonal engagement across social networks, launching an autumn-themed “Pin it to Win It!” contest on Pinterest and Facebook, and publicizing it via Google+ and Twitter.

4. Put a holiday-themed spin on existing promotional campaigns

You’ve put a lot of time and effort into your existing marketing campaigns. Consider how you can extend their lives by re-skinning them to a holiday theme, thereby getting more mileage out of your existing assets. PopChips, for example, recreated an existing promotional campaign that utilized their current sponsored celebrity partner, Katy Perry, for Halloween. The campaign, called “Pop ‘n Pose,” encourages users to take their picture with Katy Perry, making creative use of fans’ webcams and a well-framed photo of the popular singer. With Halloween approaching, PopChips released a holiday themed version of the same promotion, but this time Katy Perry looked like a scary vampire with pointy red nails and fangs.

5. Create tutorials and holiday related how-tos using your products

Create an opportunity to showcase your products by strategizing about how they might fit into a consumer’s holiday plans. For example, Napoleon Perdis, a popular makeup brand, created a series of “How To” tutorials demonstrating how a customer could apply Napoleon Perdis makeup to create classic Halloween looks. The brand released a handful of tutorials, teaching fans how to create a variety of looks— from scary to fairy— all the while showcasing a deep-dive look into how to optimally use Napoleon Perdis products.

6. Ask users for their holiday-inspired opinions

The holiday season presents a series of questions for each of us. What costume to choose? What meals to prepare? What gifts to give, or where to shop for them? Inspire and empower your fans and followers by asking them for their input on choices like these. Allowing user input to drive the ultimate outcome of a brand’s social activity shows fans that users’ opinions count, and that engaging in dialogue with your brand is a worthwhile endeavor.

For example, The Washington Redskins allowed their fans to weigh in on what costume running back Alfred Morris should wear on his trip to the Pediatric Halloween Party at the Georgetown University Hospital. In allowing the community to choose its favorite from among options like Popeye, Angry Birds, Batman, or Captain America, the Redskins demonstrated the power of people’s choice in driving engagement, as well as publicized a feel-good initiative to which the Redskins are committed.

The holiday season sends consumers into a social frenzy of searching, sharing, and shopping. Which of the tactics mentioned here will you implement for your brand first? Share with us in the comments, we’d love to hear from you.

[We recently recorded a Learn with Google webinar all about “Social Media Best Practices for a Successful Holiday Season. Watch it here.]

[WEBINAR] 7 Things Every Marketer Needs to be Doing on LinkedIn

With over 161 million members, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social network. And it’s also an amazing place for innovative marketers to connect with their audience. We asked 2 experts on the professional social network to join us for a live webinar on August 30th, and you're invited!

Register to attend, and you'll learn:

• The inside scoop on LinkedIn advertising best practices—so you can drive excellent marketing results


• A clear understanding of LinkedIn’s free and paid features—so you can grow your brand’s presence on the site


• Valuable insight into LinkedIn’s hypertargeting capabilities—so you can pinpoint your audience by title, geography, industry, company or other characteristics

Lana Khavinson, Senior Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn, and Brian Carter, social media consultant and author of the new book LinkedIn for Business, will share best practices and success secrets from some of the top advertisers, marketers, and salespeople on LinkedIn.

Are you coming? Tell us in the comments, and feel free to drop in any questions you'd like to have answered, we'll make sure they get onto the list!