Compass Labs/ShopIgniter

Social marketing platform Compass Labs today announced its partnership with ShopIgniter, a platform for creating rich media social posts. Through this partnership, brands can now develop rich media campaigns through ShopIgniter and promote them with paid media through Compass Labs’ CLIQ Ads Manager and with the insights gained from the CLIQ Social Intelligence platform.

With Facebook putting new demands on Preferred Marketing Developers to offer or influence all components of Facebook marketing, particularly paid media, many PMDs are forming business alliances like this one to better serve marketers throughout all stages of a campaign.

Marin Software

Advertising management platform Marin Software today announced new features for Facebook advertisers, making it easier to create different campaigns and optimize them, through automatic algorithms or enhanced reporting. Marin identified the following four key updates to its platform:

• Facebook Campaign Wizard – Quickly and easily create Facebook campaigns at scale by entering just a few variables such as headline text, images and audience targets.

• Creative Rotation Optimization and Reporting – Rotate creative within a single ad type or even rotate ads across different ad types after identifying the highest performing ads within a campaign.

• Bidding Enhancements for Facebook – Decrease costs and increase performance by optimizing for any objective across the purchase funnel.

• Single Interface View of Facebook Results – See all results in a single interface, including attribution and any financial or social objectives.

Syncapse

Social marketing platform Syncapse today announced that Maarten L. Albarda will serve on its industry advisory board. Albarda was previously Vice President, Global Connections for Anheuser Busch InBev, and before then Global Director, Media & Communication Innovation for The Coca-Cola Company.

Hearsay Social, maker of social media management software, is announcing a new Social Sales Solution to give individual salespeople better tools for monitoring their social networks and publishing relevant content.

The platform will identify top stories from a user’s network across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and send alerts about key people to reach out to in order to build and maintain relationships with prospects and customers.

Hearsay Social co-founder and CTO Steve Garrity says many salespeople, such as real estate agents, insurance brokers and consultants, use their personal social media profiles for business, building networks of friends and professional contacts. Through machine learning and natural language processing, Hearsay Social can pick out important posts and updates from those networks, such as someone getting married, moving or starting a new job. The salesperson could then comment on the item or send the person a direct message, though Garrity says many salespeople use these alerts as a prompt to pick up the phone and call the customer or lead directly.

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Facebook today announced the global rollout of “Promoted Page Likes,” a feature similar to Promoted Posts but aimed at helping page owners get new fans without having to use the more complicated ad dashboard.

All pages with a location and profile picture will now have the “promote page” option in their admin panel. This was previously in beta for some users in the U.S. From here, Page owners can select a daily budget based on how many people they want to reach. Like Promoted Posts, these ads are bought with a preset price rather than on a cost per click basis. Page owners can narrow down their audience by country, state or city.

This action actually creates three different types of Facebook ads: a standard Marketplace ad that appears in the desktop sidebar, Page Like Sponsored Stories that appear in the desktop and mobile feed, and standard Page Like ads which will appear in the feed on desktop and mobile. These are all meant to drive new Likes of the page so they simply include the page name, photo, description and Like button.

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Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers ShopIgniter, Shoutlet and Stuzo announced a number of high-level hires this week.

Social commerce and promotion platform ShopIgniter recently brought on two senior directors. Social media management platform Shoutlet chose a VP of Application Development and two new board members. Creative technology company Stuzo found a CTO and an EVP of Client Engagement.

ShopIgniter

• Justin Kistner, Sr. Director of Strategy – former senior director of product at Spruce Media
• Clay Moore, Sr. Director of Marketing Solutions – former principle business consultant at ExactTarget

Shoutlet

• Brian Nelson, VP of Application Development –  former Angie’s List Director of Product Management
• Brent Hill, Boardmember – current partner at Origin Ventures, former Director for Twitter’s Central Region
• Scott Bleczinsk, Boardmember – former Executive Vice President of Sales (EVP) at ExactTarget

Stuzo

• Richard Friedman, Chief Technology Officer  - former VP of Engineering at MeetMe/myYearbook
• Yan Rozovsky, Executive Vice President of Client Engagement – former VP of Social Sales & Strategy at Oracle, formerly Vitrue

Companies who would like their new hires included in our weekly platform industry post must contact us directly at mail (at) insidefacebook(dot) com.

Facebook today announced the winners of its Facebook Studio Awards for creative work done by agencies and brands on Facebook. Oreo won the blue award for its Daily Twist campaign by 360i and Draftfbc.

Other winners included Graubunden Tourism, TNT, Allstate, Nike, AT&T, Ford, Universal Studios, Grey Poupon and more.

Oreo and a number of other brands won for campaigns that focused on using page posts rather than applications. Brands and agencies seem to be recognizing that Facebook users spend their time in the News Feed, not in page tabs, and that consistent, high-quality page posts can be more effective than costly single-use apps. The introduction of Timeline and users’ shift to mobile, where page tab apps don’t work, seems to have pushed companies in this direction.

“Last year, brands tried to push the technical limits of Facebook, and digital platforms overall,” said Mark D’Arcy, Facebook’s Head of Global Creative Solutions, in a blog post. “Now, in just one year’s time, we were pleased with the renewed focus on the craft of great storytelling through publishing.” 

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Salesforce brands paid media offering as Social.com
Salesforce.com today introduced Social.com, a social advertising application to create and optimize social ad campaigns at scale. Salesforce has Facebook and Twitter Ads API access through its acquisition of Buddy Media, which had previously acquired ad platform Brighter Option. The new Social.com brand is the advertising arm of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which includes page management and app platform Buddy Media and listening tool Radian6. Salesforce is one of Facebook’s 12 Strategic Preferred Marketing Developers.

Nanigans closes $5.8M Series A.1
Facebook ads company Nanigans this week announced that it has secured $5.8 million in funding from a Series A.1 round led by Avalon Ventures. The company, one of Facebook’s sPMDs, focuses on optimizing campaigns for lifetime value through its Ad Engine product. Its largest clients are in the gaming and e-commerce space, which are also among the highest spending verticals on the social network. Previously, Nanigans raised $3.1 million from Avalon in 2011. The latest funding deal closed last week, but the Boston-based company held off on announcing the news after bombings in the city. Some of Nanigans’ own employees participated in the Boston Marathon, but were not hurt by the attacks.
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Looking for insider advice on social app development, marketing, and monetization? Discover how to take your app to the next level at the Inside Social Apps Conference & Expo, happening June 6-7 in San Francisco.

This event will showcase the industry’s most forward-thinking minds in panels, presentations, and fireside chats. You’ll also have ample opportunity to network with developers, marketers, investors, and managers in the app community.

Early bird rates end on 4/25; register by Wednesday and save $300 off onsite pricing.

Featured sessions include:

• Platform Opportunities for Social Apps: This keynote panel will feature developers from KIXEYE, HitFox Group, Glu Mobile, and DeNA. You’ll learn about which devices and platforms offer the most opportunity for growth and revenue.
• Maximizing Audience Engagement with Real-World Incentives: This session will focus on strategies to drive engagement by offering users real-world incentives earned through in-app activity. Panelists include professionals at AppGlu, Relevvant, Urban Airship, and Atomic Axis.

Featured speakers include:

• Deb Liu, Product Manager, Facebook
  
• Gabriel Leydon, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, Machine Zone
• Wilson Kriegel, President and COO, Paltalk
• Josh Williams, President and Chief Science Officer, Kontagent

Check out the full program and speaker list for more details, and don’t forget to register soon.

Wildfire, the social media marketing platform owned by Google, announced Tuesday that it is shutting down its self-serve Promotion Builder product.

The company will instead offer promotions solely as part of its Social Marketing Suite for enterprise clients. Basic, Standard and Premium promotions will be retired June 30. Promotions data will be available for export up until July 31.

The Social Marketing Suite covers ad buying, page management, conversation monitoring and analytics, in addition to promotion development. Previously, anyone could visit Wildfire’s site, sign up for an account and start creating and running social promotions, such as sweepstakes, coupon offers or user-generated content contests. Now, Wildfire doesn’t offer any pricing information on its site and asks potential customers to contact the company directly.

Smaller brands and businesses could look to alternatives like Offerpop, North Social or Heyo, which give marketers a range of tools for running social promotions and creating other custom experiences across social, mobile and web properties, but without the cost and commitment of an enterprise contract.

Forrester assesses social relationship platforms

Forrester Research released a report Tuesday evaluating eight top social relationship platforms in terms of their current offering, strategy and market presence. Shoutlet received the highest score for current offering and Spredfast had the top score for strategy. Salesforce.com’s Buddy Media led in market presence.

Forrester looked at Adobe, Hearsay Social, Salesforce.com’s Buddy Media, Shoutlet, Socialwave, Spredfast, Sprinklr and Syncapse, rating each on 49 criteria. Overall, the study found no clear leaders in the space, but most were “strong performers.” Socialware and Syncapse were in the lower tier of “contenders.”

Shoutlet led the current offering category largely because of its comprehensive feature set and easy onboarding. Spredfast excelled in strategy because of its highly satisfied customer base, which found its measurement and reporting capabilities to be the strongest of all platforms.

The full report, “The Forrester Wave™: Social Relationship Platforms, Q2 2013,” is available for purchase here.

ShopIgniter updates rich media advertising platform

Social marketing and commerce company ShopIgniter this week announced an update to its Igniter platform, which helps companies create rich media posts on Facebook, as well as its entry into the paid media management space.

The combination gives brands an end-to-end solution for running interactive advertisements in the Facebook News Feed. For instance, a company could show off a new product line with a video and image gallery that link to the retailer’s website or includes an entry form for a related sweepstakes. ShopIgniter provides templates, but experiences and design are fully customizable.

Instead of hosting these experiences in page tab applications that users hardly visit, ShopIgniter presents them in-stream so users can interact with and share the posts directly from News Feed. ShopIgniter says rich media posts generate more engagement and less negative feedback than traditional posts.

ShopIgniter now has a small media buying team to manage campaigns for clients. Sr. Director of Strategy Justin Kistner, who recently joined the company after leading product at Spruce Media, says he’s bringing on more media buyers and a product team is in the works but for now the company is mostly advising clients on how to apply paid media to their rich media posts created with ShopIgniter.

Facebook is today launching cost-per-action ads for certain actions through the Ads API, a company spokesperson tells us.

This pricing model lets advertisers define the action that is most important to them and set a maximum price they’re willing to spend for each action of that type. For example, instead of paying for every click — whether it came from a user who simply viewed a photo larger, left a comment or visited the advertiser’s fan page instead of actually Liking the page — a company could now say it only wants to pay for page Likes. Any other clicks or engagement won’t take away from the advertisers’s budget.

This option gives advertisers more control over their spends. Previously, a company would have to run ads on a cost-per-click or optimized cost-per-impression basis, and then constantly monitor their ads to understand the actual amount they were spending per action. Because Facebook ads include so many potential actions for users to take — photo views, Timeline visits, page Likes, post Likes, comments, shares, link clicks, etc. — it can be frustrating for advertisers to be paying for clicks that don’t accomplish their primary marketing objective. This is why cost-per-action ads are something many advertisers have asked for from Facebook, and many third-party providers were selling ads this way, even if Facebook’s API didn’t officially support it.
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Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told us last year that serving small business is “just as important” as helping large advertisers achieve their goals. Since then we’ve seen the company make a number of changes to simplify Facebook marketing and advertising tools and conduct more outreach to help small and medium-sized businesses find value in the platform.

Today Dan Levy, Director of Small Business at Facebook, shared new stats about growth in the SMB market. There are now more than 2 billion connections between people and local businesses in the U.S. There are an average of 645 million views of these pages and 13 million comments on them each week. Facebook says about 70 percent of all monthly active users in the U.S. and Canada are connected to a local business on the social network.
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