Digital promotions platform Ifeelgoods today announced that it has been named a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer with an Apps badge.
The company offers customizable white-labeled Facebook apps that deliver digital rewards to customers. For example, a retailer could incentivize people to make a large purchase by giving them a $10 iTunes gift card in return. After the user completes a transaction, the Ifeelgoods integration will allow him or her to connect with Facebook and claim the gift card. Users will also be prompted to share back to Facebook or on Twitter. Ifeelgoods says 60 percent of customers do this.
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Facebook is testing a new way for page owners to create “unpublished posts” — those that intentionally do not appear to all fans of their page – directly from the composer on their page.
Unpublished posts do not appear on a page’s Timeline or in fans’ News Feeds, but they can be promoted with ads. This allows page owners to make posts that are tailored to a specific audience and ensure that they are only seen by that audience, not distributed to anyone who Likes the page. It also creates a way for advertisers to test different creative options for their page post ads without overwhelming their fans with multiple posts. Unpublished posts do not contribute to People Talking About This counts or appear in Page Insights.
Now page owners can make these kinds of posts directly from their page by clicking the clock icon used to schedule posts. After users select a year, a “hide from News Feed” option will appear. Checking that box will prevent the post from being distributed to fans’ feeds, though it will still appear on the page’s Timeline. Then a page could promote the post or use it as part of a page post ad in the mobile or desktop News Feed. Photo posts, link posts and video posts are eligible.
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Facebook today announced that its new version of Offers with larger images and calls to action are now available on Android.
In February, the social network began testing the new layout on desktop with an option to shop immediately or get a reminder before the promotion ends. The interface also lets users decide if and when to share the offer with friends. We started seeing this on iOS in early April, and the company officially announced it a few weeks later. Now, the product is uniform across desktop and mobile, including Android.
Overall, the new design is likely to increase conversions on Offers posts because of the cleaner design and more prominent buttons to “Get offer” or “Shop now.” The “Remind Me” button available for some retailers working with Facebook directly allows companies to prompt users to redeem their offer at a later date through a notification on Facebook.
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Triggit
Facebook Exchange retargeting partner Triggit today announced that it has secured $6 million in additional funding led by North Atlantic Capital along with existing investors Spark Capital and Foundry Group. Triggit says it will put the investment toward engineering and other talent as it focuses on improving products for advertisers retargeting users on the social network, particularly as Facebook evolves the exchange to include News Feed inventory.
Moontoast
Rich media advertising platform Moontoast today announced a partnership with user-generated video platform VideoGenie to give advertisers a new type of video ad unit within the Facebook News Feed. Brands will be able to post a call for user-generated video through their page, and directly from that post in News Feed, users will be able to record and submit their videos.
Mass Relevance
Social curation and engagement platform Mass Relevance today announced that it has integrated more than 25 billion pieces of content into dynamic visualizations on digital displays ranging from TV and second screens through billboards, stadium displays, websites, mobile apps, conference centers and in-store displays. Mass Relevance is the first Certified Twitter partner licensed to re-syndicate Twitter content for display. It can also aggregate, filter and display posts from Facebook. In the past year, Mass Relevance has powered social experiences for the the 2012 elections with CNN and Facebook; the Olympic Games with NBC and Twitter; as well as campaigns for brands like Pepsi and Doritos.
awe.sm
Social performance tracking platform awe.sm today announced a new CEO: Fred McIntyre, who has held senior leadership roles at AOL, Last.fm and CBS, and most recently has served as an advisor to Univision, SoundHound and other media companies and startups. awe.sm measures the business results of social marketing, such as signups and purchase. awe.sm co-founder and founding CEO Jonathan Strauss will now be Head of Product Development.
Compass Labs
Social marketing platform Compass Labs today announced a new dynamic campaign solution, The Social Advertising Optimizer, which automatically manages an advertiser’s bids. The tool can identify and optimize campaigns by ad placement, targeting and creative combinations based on different weighted actions and goals. Compass Labs says The Social Advertising Optimizer has helped clients achieve a 17 percent decrease in conversion costs. It is available as a standalone product or integrated in Compass Lab’s main platform, the CLIQ Ads Manager.
Optimal
Social advertising and analytics company Optimal, Inc. has launched Optimal Analytics, an audience analytics dashboard for demographic and engagement statistics, as well as competitive analysis across sources like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr. The tool looks at historical engagement data for top brands and daily interactions among millions of demographic and interest-based segments to give marketers key insights about their competitors and target audience. Marketers can get daily or weekly emails about the most engaging content from competitors or visit the tool directly to generate new consumer insights or build lookalike audiences for ad targeting.
Viralheat
Social marketing suite Viralheat today released a mobile app version of its platform, including the Viralheat stream and publishing tools. The app lets users manage multiple Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts from their iPhones. They can schedule posts, monitor conversations, respond and check analytics.
Kenshoo Social, a platform for Facebook advertising, has shared the results of a study it recently commissioned by Forrester Consulting called “The Key to Successful Social Advertising.” The survey of 105 U.S. advertisers spending more than $100,000 per year on social ads found that more than a third were not satisfied with their efforts. At the same time, it found many social advertisers were not using advanced optimization tactics like granular targeting or automatic bid management.
However, satisfied social advertisers were more likely to be paying to promote content — as opposed to creating branded apps and other organic efforts. Among satisfied advertisers, those who paid to promote their content were more satisfied by their campaigns’ ability to generate awareness, and those who ran other types of paid advertisements on social networks were more satisfied with their campaigns’ ability to drive purchases. Overall, the study concluded that although organic efforts are more popular, paid social advertising is more successful.
Kenshoo and Forrester will go over these findings in a webinar at the end of the month.
Expion
Social media management software company Expion announced this week that it has added support for Instagram and Foursquare to its platform, allowing brands to better monitor and respond to activity on those networks. Expion is among a small group of companies with access to the Instagram API for moderation. Brands can now use Expion to view and comment on Instagram photos based on location. They can also easily share their Instagram photos across Facebook, Google and Twitter.
Nimble
Social CRM platform Nimble this week announced that it won the SIIA 2013 CODiE Award for Best Relationship Management Solution. Nimble helps marketers and salespeople manage their contacts from email and social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Foursquare. The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) is a trade association for the software and digital content industries. Nimble was one of 27 CODiE Award winners in software categories.
Cisco Meraki, which offers cloud-managed networking solutions, announced a partnership with Facebook last week to include Facebook Wi-Fi in its new Presence platform for businesses to gather location analytics and promote engagement among visitors.
Facebook Wi-Fi is a service that allows businesses to offer customers free Wi-Fi after checking in on the social network. It began as a hackathon project a year ago and gradually rolled out as a local experiment with a few businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now it’s a full-fledged commercial product thanks to the Meraki partnership.
The integration with Presence gives business owners access to Facebook page insights with aggregate demographic information about the customers who check in. The check-in also results in increased exposure for the business and leads users to a business’ Facebook page, which could lead to more Likes or interactions. It could be a useful feature for local businesses, retail locations, the hospitality industry or large events and conferences, which want to learn more about their visitors and generate word of mouth.
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Every marketer uses Twitter to engage with customers. But there’s more to a successful campaign than simply gaining new followers and increasing your number of tweets.
That’s why we’re thrilled to announce the newest addition to the Inside Network product family: the AllTwitter Marketing Bible.
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This comprehensive subscription product is updated weekly with valuable how-tos and best practices, informative case studies, and detailed provider comparisons. This content will help you stay up to date on the latest platform trends and discover great ways to optimize your current Twitter strategy.
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This is a guest post from Jed Singer, director of client engagement at Stuzo, a creative technology company and Preferred Marketing Developer with Pages and Apps badges.
The Facebook News Feed is becoming evermore critical to engagement on Facebook. When you design branded social solutions, they need to serve as conduits for storytelling. 100x more people are likely to see the stories that your social product or campaign pushes out than will ever actually experience the product or campaign.
This amplification through the Timeline and News Feed is inherently key to awareness and viral distribution of the brand’s message, but it’s even more important because those stories in the Timeline and News Feed are more accessible by mobile users (63 percent of Facebook users) than the solution, itself, today. This focus on the “story” can mean success or failure of the program as it relates to actual business outcomes — the metrics that matter.
There are also other ways to have consumers effectively story-tell through a branded social experience: Rich Media News Feed Experiences. This is an HTML5 experience on mobile and a Flash media unit that is the experience within a promoted page post, or pushed out of a custom experience on Facebook (by either a user or a page). Both can be activated and engaged with directly within the News Feed.
Even into Q2 of 2013, these are rare for brands, but they are extremely effective at engaging users. Some, like Dunkin Donuts, Rovio, and Lexus have leveraged such units in their social repertoire. At Stuzo, we make sure that clients are intimately aware of the possibilities; one of our most successful Rich News Feed Experiences was for People’s Choice Awards this past season, which enabled fans to explore all of the award categories and vote for their favorite nominee. This gives users the full voting functionality in-stream and exposes them to the main business metric for the People’s Choice Awards — votes — without having to leave their News Feed browsing experience.
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Facebook Exchange retargeting ads that appear within News Feed deliver an average increase in ROI of 197 percent compared to FBX ads on the right hand side of Facebook.com, according to an early study by Nanigans.
Nanigans was among three “Qualified DSPs” with alpha access to Facebook’s first tests of putting FBX ads — targeted by web browsing cookies rather than Facebook data — into the desktop News Feed. Earlier this week, the social network gave beta access to several more DSPs.
Previously, FBX ads were only delivered in the sidebar. Many advertisers were already pleased with the performance of these ads compared to performance on other exchanges, but News Feed inventory could really give Facebook the edge. Sponsored Stories and Page Post Ads in the feed can have 10 to 20 times higher clickthrough rates than sidebar ads.
Now Nanigans has shared data from its recent alpha tests: an average 17.1 times higher CTRs and 51 percent lower CPCs for FBX in News Feed versus in sidebar. As mentioned, ROI was 197 percent higher as a result. These numbers come from more than 10 million ad impressions between April 18 and May 6 from retailers selling a variety of products, Nanigans says.
Among the benefits of FBX over other exchanges were lower costs per acquisition and ads that appear above the fold and on brand-safe pages. With News Feed inventory, FBX ads are in Page Post Link format, meaning they’re much bigger than before, and they get prime real estate among posts from users’ friends and pages. Additionally, News Feed-based FBX ads include options for Likes, comments and shares, which could lead to other types of engagement or even virality.
