There’s a lot of change afoot on Facebook specifically around how to manage fan pages and there’s some conflicting information out there as well. We’d like to help you stay up to date on the real best practices, so, we’re working on a guide that will share what we’ve learned after producing hundreds of fan pages. We hope the it will be a great resource for you and want to make it as thorough as possible. For this reason, we’d be thrilled to hear what you’ve learned so we can roll that into the content as well.
What’s working for you? What can you share about publishing from your page? How your pages work together? Something about custom tabs? Have you been A/B testing using Facebook’s publishing tools? Does interactive content perform better for you in the stream? Feel free to share your insights in the comments of this post, or just shoot us a note at marketing@sproutinc.com. If we use something from your comments, you’ll be credited in the guide! (more…)
We know that the spend on online advertising has been going up fairly consistently over the last 8 years (see table 1), but the rate of growth has been suppressed by the US economic turndown which began in early 2008. Of all the online display spend, the amount allocated to highly interactive units experienced a disproportionate amount of the downward pressure because of a hesitancy to experiment in a down market. However, we project that as the economy recovers, a disproportionately large amount of dollars will flood back into this segment. This is because of the incredible innovation that has taken place in online display during the downturn. (more…)
Sprout is excited to announce some new and amazing campaigns that have been build with the Sprout Platform. Check it out:
Toyota’s Rock The Space
Turn up the volume, because Rock The Space is back! After a highly successful campaign in 2009, Toyota and MySpace decided to bring this contest back. Rock The Space is an application that gives all MySpace bands the opportunity to customize their own demo-tape and upload their song to compete for an exclusive MySpace Music recording contract. Like last year, there’s some pretty good stuff out there, click here to go to the app. (more…)
Facebook is moving fast, adding features, changing settings and slightly altering the way advertisers design and manage their social media campaigns. Moreover, it doesn’t look like that’s going to change any time soon. This makes keeping up with the news very important for social media advertisers.
According to recent research by Hitwise, Facebook has become the most popular site in the United States, they even overtook Google in terms of hits at the beginning of March this year. This just reinforces the fact that Facebook is top of mind for advertisers. However, creating a successful brand presence on Facebook is not always easy, in part because of all the changes that have been going on lately. Late 2009, Facebook passed the break-even-point (as reported by Reuters) and the company is continually exploring ways to improve opportunities for advertisers. While this process can be jarring at times, Facebook has a track record for innovating through this process. (more…)
Today’s online advertising dilemma: the majority of paid media doesn’t deliver enough impact and earned media doesn’t offer enough reach. An effective strategy to resolve this issue is to integrate earned content into paid media. This is the conclusion of a recent research report by Facebook and Nielsen, which studied 800,000 Facebook users and 125 advertising campaigns from 70 brands.
The findings of this research reveal that hybrid campaigns deliver more value than solely paid or even solely earned social media campaigns. You can read a summary of the report here, and download the full report here. Here’s a summary of how it works in the context of Sprout’s experience. (more…)
We’re thrilled to share a new case study based on our recent work with Intel. Intel is doing an outstanding job with their social media work on Facebook and we are proud to be part of their effort. For those interested in learning more about how Intel is leading the way, check out a recent panel discussion led by Ekaterina Walter, Social Media Strategist at Intel. The presentation shares some great tips on how to drive fan acquisition on Facebook, which also happens to be a key element of the case study below.
Intel Reaches Out To Their Community On Facebook
Back in October, Intel challenged Sprout to create a new Facebook fan page and application, with the goal of building a significant Intel community on Facebook. Sprout knew Intel had to deliver immediate value, which worked well with Intel’s concept of linking laptop pricing to fan acquisition. The result: the wildly popular “Fan Plan” campaign, which empowered Intel’s Facebook community to incrementally lower the price on three laptops with every new fan added. It reached hundreds of thousands of people and landed Intel over 24,000 new fans—in just two weeks. (more…)
This is just a quick update about a couple of recent product enhancements we’ve made to our Engage Platform. For those of you who are using the platform to build applications, the first one will be of particular interest because it saves you the trouble of building your own color palette tools. And the second enhancement will be of use to anyone building applications or ads because it improves how our RSS component works. Here are the details: (more…)
Inside the social media echo-chamber, the pressure to bring brands onto Facebook is intense. Amid the rush, many brands lose sight of why they’re going there in the first place, when they should have a clear focus on how they’ll deliver ongoing value to their community on the platform. These are still early days, as big brands that can afford to invest heavily on the platform are still experimenting and learning. And, it’s important to note that not all brands belong on Facebook. In this article, I’ll discuss a handful of unlikely brands that have invested in the platform in order to highlight some questions you should be asking yourself to determine if Facebook makes sense for your brand. Hopefully some of the examples will also inspire you.
We’re thrilled to announce that we’ll be participating on a panel at the Web 2.0 Expo this coming May 4th in San Francisco. We hope you can join us for a great conversation entitled:Social Or Anti-Social? The Next Generation of Online Display Ads. You can also get a 25% discount on your registration with code websf10fos. Here’s more information about the event: (more…)
2010
There’s a lot of change afoot on Facebook specifically around how to manage fan pages and there’s some conflicting information out there as well. We’d like to help you stay up to date on the real best practices, so, we’re working on a guide that will share what we’ve learned after producing hundreds of fan pages. We hope the it will be a great resource for you and want to make it as thorough as possible. For this reason, we’d be thrilled to hear what you’ve learned so we can roll that into the content as well.
Facebook is moving fast, adding features, changing settings and slightly altering the way advertisers design and manage their social media campaigns. Moreover, it doesn’t look like that’s going to change any time soon. This makes keeping up with the news very important for social media advertisers.
This is just a quick update about a couple of recent product enhancements we’ve made to our Engage Platform. For those of you who are using the platform to build applications, the first one will be of particular interest because it saves you the trouble of building your own color palette tools. And the second enhancement will be of use to anyone building applications or ads because it improves how our RSS component works. Here are the details: 
Is Facebook a fit?
