Facebook as a serious marketing tool

As the largest social network, Facebook offers plenty of opportunities for marketers. However, extracting those opportunities sometimes can be difficult using only the tools Facebook provides. Improving a social network and scaling it for use by 500 million people is difficult; because of this, the tools and engagement opportunities for marketers are still limited. Fortunately, through the Facebook API, third party developers have been able to create tools to help make a marketer’s day on Facebook a little easier.

Facebook Marketing Tools
1. Wildfire — Want to run a contest on Facebook? Facebook has some pretty strict guidelines for just how contests can be conducted on their platform. Fortunately, the folks at Wildfire have worked closely with Facebook and its guidelines to create an application that easily enables marketers to create Facebook marketing campaigns like contests, coupon giveaways and user-generated content promotions. The marketer builds the contest using the Wildfire app, and the contest is then accessible via a tab on the marketer’s Facebook fan page. Marketers can also make it accessible via their company’s website or a unique microsite. While a free version of the app does not exist, pricing starts at just $5 per campaign (plus $.99 for each day the campaign runs) for the most basic package and increases depending on the features and functionality you’re looking for.

2. Liveworld’s Facebook Forum 2.0 — Managing a Facebook fan page can be clunky; it is a manual experience that can be time-consuming, and Facebook provides very little reporting and analytics. Facebook Forum 2.0 is a tool from Liveworld that makes it easier for companies to manage their Facebook communities by allowing companies to quickly and easily respond to and moderate Facebook comments. Also provided is additional