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The long term outlook for influencer marketing

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In a bid to demonstrate a shift in its behavior, Facebook implemented restrictions to the APIs for both Facebook and Instagram on March 30 — APIs that many third-party developers, including players in the influencer marketing industry, were relying on in order to support their products.” – MediaPost

Some are concerned that this restriction on data will negatively impact the third party partners. In my opinion, whatever short term impact this restriction on data may have on measurement and influencer marketing platforms, the long term outlook for influencer marketing has never been better. Increased privacy regulations like GDPR are creating a positive situation that will far outweigh the short term issues that the current Facebook changes present.

Here’s why:

Audience targeting is about to undergo changes that will likely result in higher CPMs. The requirements for managing consent will add to the cost basis, thereby increasing ad rates. Some forms of ad targeting may even become too cost prohibitive.

This opens the door just a bit wider for influencer marketing and branded content. They rely on context and aggregate audiences, which are not impacted by privacy regulations. They also have nearly always been more costly than programmatic media and Facebook boosts. As the cost gap narrows, more budget should shake free for human-centered forms of marketing.

AdWeek certainly thinks so:

Working with social media influencers is another important model for marketers to consider in this shifting landscape. The assumption by many marketers about working with influencers is that they are meant for one-off projects rather than as parts of a wider campaign strategy. Yet, the brands who see the greatest success with influencer marketing take a longer-view approach, creating a steady connection with their intended audiences.”

So do I.

11 ingredients for digital success in 2018

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The past 6 months have seen tremendous upheaval in digital media. Companies that were once high flyers — Mashable, Rolling Stone, Time — sold for a fraction of their former (perceived) value. Whether you think this is massive disruption or simply inevitable course correction, the ingredients for digital success have evolved.

It’s not enough to have a mobile-first site with strong traffic, SEO friendly content, a way to deliver video pre-roll and a good native offering. You DO have to have that, but digital success in 2018 requires a few more ingredients. Scale alone is not enough.

Here’s my recipe for digital success in 2018. Whether you are a digital publisher or a brand extending its content strategy, below is my take on how to turn readers and viewers into true audience that you can then further monetize — events, products, e-commerce etc.

 

11 ingredients for digital success

The Basics
1. Great content. With a point of view
Content with a point of view will be more successful than content that tries to be all things to all people. Vanilla is a lovely flavor, but if everyone offers that same vanilla, content becomes a commodity. Point of view isn’t necessarily an opinion or a “stand;” you don’t have to be news or hard-hitting to have one. It can be everything from a niche target, an overt POV, to a more subtle theme or vision underlying and holding together the content you create. It is NOT a mission statement or manifesto, although those can part of a point of view.

2. A deep understanding of and commitment to your customers — both the one you have and the one you want.
Point of view is likely something you share with your target audience or customers. The more you know about them the easier (but never easy) it will be to build a product they will love. This is equally true if your project is 100% digital, or digital is simply the gateway to purchasing a tangible good. You also have to be committed to looking at your business with a customer-centric lens. Everything truly does depend on making the customer happy. Shortcuts may get you through in the short-term but long-term success for any brand is about delivering to customer needs. Consider expanding the C- suite to include a Chief Customer Officer to be the steward of this effort in partnership with client service, marketing, sales, finance and operations.

3. Data, data, data
Data drives decisions. What gets measured, gets managed. You’ve probably heard these phrases more than once in your career. Simply put, the things we measure are the things we can effectively act upon. If you don’t have data, you can’t adjust, optimize, improve. Of course, for measurement to be effective, you have to define a baseline for success up front so you measure the right things, not every thing. All data is not equally important.

Analytics (website, social platforms, campaign performance) are just the first part of a comprehensive research plan. Third party research data is the second. And proprietary research – into your audience, your content performance, market opinion — is the connective tissue that brings analytics and third party data together into meaningful, actionable information that you can use to make your content better and differentiate from the competition.

Traffic Drivers
Our first set of ingredients are the traffic drivers. How do you find the audience and bring them to your content?

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is your first, and best, friend for building traffic. Nothing — not even paid search — replaces strong organic search results. You can build an internal SEO team or contract an SEO firm to develop your SEO plan and process. However you choose to operationalize SEO, it should be a continuous loop between the content creation team and the SEO management team. But search alone is not enough to ensure success, and you shouldn’t expect it to deliver all your traffic. Against one measure, it scales amazingly well. One well written, search-optimized article can deliver many readers against multiple queries. On another, not so much. You acquire every reader one search at a time. To achieve any scale, you have to keep feeding the beast fresh new content all the time. Even though you can update older content, you still need staff to write and edit. Search is the foundation of your traffic strategy, but it isn’t the whole structure.

5. Social traffic
Social traffic isn’t the panacea either, but you need a robust social strategy to distribute your content on the popular social platforms. Specifically Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter (in descending order of importance). Earned, or “organic,” mentions of your brand are important and you should by all means start with a social communications strategy that leverages your owned social accounts to spread the word about your content and initiatives. But don’t expect earned social to get the volume you need. For most brands, organic social reach is a delightful myth. While your audience may follow your accounts for the news, they aren’t going to re-share it at the volume you need to reach new audiences. And then there’s the fact that the algorithms of social (Facebook in particular) are DESIGNED to push you toward paid social. Ads, boosted posts etc. Don’t fight it. Embrace it. Make it work.

My advice is to post your news and stories and get the organic reach that your audience will naturally deliver. Then boost the best performing posts to reach new readers. This will increase the potential pool that might share the content, thus increasing your earned media. Branded content in the form of influencer-generated posts is an important ingredient; consider MarketingLand’s report this week on research done by social analytics firm Shareablee showing that viral reach from branded content ads on Facebook eclipses standard ads.

6. Native advertising
The power of native content is why you should use your web and social analytics, and even your SEO analyses, to identify the best content to put in native advertising units. Publishers may prefer to promote the branded content they create in their native units, but increasingly they are opening their inventory up to native programmatic as well as premium native advertising using content sourced elsewhere. Plus of course services like Taboola and Outbrain, although I recommend that you regularly evaluate whether the traffic you get from less-premium sources is the same quality that you get from more premium sources of traffic.

But like SEO, social posts and native ads deliver one reader, one viewer, one click at a time. Scale requires volume. Every increase has a real cost to produce and distribute the content. It’s effective, but not terribly efficient.

In addition to growing your unique users, you need to convert those one-time readers and viewers into a loyal audience. You want them to keep coming back for more, and consuming more than one piece of content at each visit. In analytics terms, you want your uniques to keep growing, but your page and video views to eclipse uniques. In my opinion, 4x is a baseline for good, and you really want it to be much more than that. Our next set of critical ingredients are the engagement and loyalty drivers.

Engagement and Loyalty Drivers
These ingredients deepen your readers’/viewers’ relationship with your content.

7. Newsletters
What’s old is new again! Newsletters are the best mechanism to get casual readers/visitors into into your content ecosystem and regularly coming back for new content. Because they are permission-based, with the user having control over what data is shared with the publisher, they are more compatible with privacy regulations like the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will become increasingly important for any firm doing business with EU nationals when GDPR takes effect in May 2018.

That said, getting permission from the user is only part of the privacy mandate; you also have to protect it, so your newsletter tech needs to be super smart. Bottom line though, the more you can get the reader/viewer to share with you (first party data), the less you will be restricted by potential regulations/restrictions on the use of third party data from the big databases. That means delivering real value in exchange for personal information, and the more you ask, the more value you must add.

Don’t use your newsletter simply as an index to articles on your site. Folks may subscribe but they won’t necessarily become loyal readers (and repeat visitors) if the newsletter is nothing more than a promotional tool for your articles. Take the time to create some original content around the articles you recommend. Follow the example of Digiday; its daily newsletter highlights articles from the Digiday site, but it places them in context, giving the reader value even before she clicks over.

8. Recommendations
Website design matters. It is all well and good to say that no one comes to your home page, so giving it undue importance is wasted effort. For many, site visits are driven by search and social directly to the content. But the structure of content on the site once someone gets there and their ability to discover new, relevant content matters. A lot.

Publishers and brands need to invest in recommendation engines and native units that bring readers/viewers deeper into content based on their interests. Baseline is a smart keyword/topic match to the article/video they are reading or viewing, but we need to push the envelope on this. As we build stable databases of loyal readers’ preferences and past viewing habits, we should make inferences about the type of additional content they would like to consume, both editorial but also branded content. The better we match our recommendations to their interests, the more likely they are to consume multiple pages of content by choice, and not just because you split the content up into 7 pages.

9. Video (but smarter)
Digital publishers by and large have struggled with video. There is huge advertiser demand, nowhere near enough quality inventory, and strategy after strategy to manufacture it has met with lukewarm success at best. Facebook seems to be the hands-down winner for delivering targeted video eyeballs, followed by the video aggregators like Jun Group who have fed the digital demand of both publishers and brand-direct.

What seems clear to me, whether you are looking at digital, linear or OTT, is that successful video strategy is grounded in more than just delivering consumer eyeballs through targeting and audience acquisition strategies. If you BUY every view for slightly less than you re-sell it to your advertiser client, your business cannot scale efficiently. It works for a while, but eventually the advertiser figures out that she can buy that same eyeball direct.

To be successful with video, it comes back to figuring out what resonates with your audience, what fits with your editorial or brand mission, and most importantly, what you can do better, smarter than the other guy. I wrote about this in September. Success is rooted in smart content strategy, incorporating video where it makes sense for the story, not simply to deliver advertising. We shouldn’t pivot to video; we should integrate video into a multi-format digital strategy that includes all sorts of content. For a successful publisher’s take on this issue, check out Digiday’s report on Bustle’s strategy.

Even if your content is primarily text, and doesn’t seem to “need” video to tell the story, for example B2B content, you need to start at least thinking about video. Pew Research reported this spring that millenials are now the largest living generation : “In 2016, there were an estimated 79.8 million Millennials (ages 18 to 35 in that year) compared with 74.1 million Baby Boomers (ages 52 to 70).”

This generation looks at and engages with content — both digital and IRL — differently than the older generations. For many in the cohort, video is the preferred communication medium. Business sites that want to reach this new worker need to think about how to incorporate video into their content strategy.

For what its worth, I think it helps to think about video as 5 basic types.

  1.  News / Documentary — current events, educational, fact-based. Your purpose is to convey specific information to viewers, and you may or may not have a specific point of view and desire to convince / persuade.
  2. Comedy — Make ‘em laugh.
  3. Caught on Tape — There is a reason “America’s Funniest Home Videos” has been on television for more than 20 years. People LOVE to watch real people and animals in funny, silly situations. The quality of the videos may be dodgy, but the quality of the engagement is not. See also babies, puppies and kittens.
  4. How-To – do just about anything. Cook, apply make-up, style a wardrobe, decorate, garden, change a tire, take pictures, make videos, even business topics can come to life in video. You name it, there is a how-to video to show you the way. This is the easiest type of content for publishers and brands to add to their sites, and our appetite for it is insatiable.
  5. Scripted entertainment with HIGH production values — the market has been cornered by linear and OTT properties created by the big entertainment studios, especially at long-form, but I think there is room for scripted short-form where talented amateurs can be competitive with the big guys.

In my opinion, there are two successful video strategies. You can specialize in one type of video, and go deep and long to meet the needs of your audience for that type of content on your channel. In an increasingly crowded marketplace, you must have an unserved or underserved niche to be successful. The other strategy, which is the one most publishers and brands would be well-served by, is that you integrate the appropriate type into your story telling as needed, but your focus is the stories. You don’t need to specialize in one form as much as you need to make sure that the video you are creating is additive to the stories your audience comes to you for.

Note that some of these formats lend themselves naturally to the development of community, ie the fans that are loyal viewers. For example, comedy shows, reality TV, and character driven drama or comedy. Others are more likely to be driven by search engine results such as tutorials. Current events are a bit of a blend. We may be fans of a particular franchise such as The Rachel Maddow Show, but much of the time, we are driven by search about a specific news item.

Make small, smart investments in your original video programming, and then look at the numbers – what drives traffic and engagement? Do more of that. Drop anything that doesn’t work, no matter how much you love it.

10. Community
Influencers must become part of your content ecosystem. For branded content but also more broadly to extend the footprint of a publication or brand authentically into the community. This takes a different shape if you are a brand using your content strategy to directly promote your company and its products or a publisher, aggregating content and monetizing through advertising, but the fundamental principle is the same.

Go beyond seeing your customers as content or product consumers, and engage your audience in the content creation process. Last fall, I outlined how this might look for a digital publisher. The most important thing to remember is that you want to create multiple touch points for your customers into your brand or publication, and leverage their contributions as much as you can. Everything from deep relationships and extended partnerships with brand ambassadors or top-tier contributors to simple content creation programs with mid-tier influencers and earned media with micro influencers.

11. E-commerce
Many publishers are leaving money on the table by not integrating shopping into their sites. For branded content for sure, but also to earn against the products used in the normal course of business. Where can I get the clear mixer bowl in that video? I love what the host was wearing. Show me similar outfits. One needs no further proof that this is a smart strategy than that Amazon has launched an influencer program to develop branded content as an extension of its affiliate marketing program.

Online retailers like ShopStyle have a robust affiliate program as well as content programs using influencers. Publishers like Diply, Mashable and Bustle have incorporated e-commerce on their sites, to varying degrees:

  •  CRO and President of Diply Dan Lagani sat down with Cheddar to talk about the potential of e-commerce for digital publishers.
  • Bustle in the Wall Street Journal:  “The company has also signed additional video deals with Facebook Inc. and YouTube, and boosted its affiliate commerce, where it takes a cut of product sales generated by links included in its posts.”

But for long-term success, publishers need to develop e-commerce strategies that do not depend on Amazon affiliate income; Amazon will likely start cutting its affiliate commission rates as it further develops its own content strategy. Whether they choose to go direct to brand, partner with the affiliate networks like CJ Affiliate and Rakuten or partner with retailers, the key will be to integrate the shopping cart in such a way that it is non-intrusive to, but integrated with the content experience. The smarter, the better. Bonus for integrating influencers into the mix, as ShopStyle does.

The other e-commerce play is to have your own product line. Not every publisher has the wherewithal, the brand or the stomach for this, but if you have your own products, you are the original channel 😃 Subscription boxes were all the rage this year; no matter what your interests, you can probably sign up for a box of merchandise to be delivered to your door every month.

The garnish — a podcast

A podcast, my last ingredient for you, is more of a garnish than a requirement, so I am not counting it among the 11required ingredients for 2018, but I suspect it will be one by 2019.

Podcasting is the most social of social media. The format is so simple — a conversation between/among two or more people that makes us feel, with the intimacy of sound, like we are seated at the table too.

According to Edison Research, podcast reach has grown by 50% over the last four years, and nearly a quarter of Americans age 12 or older listen to a podcast monthly. Podcasts are most popular among 18-34s, but teens and the 35-54s are also listeners. 41% of Americans listen to some form of “speech” audio on any given day.

Right now, the playing field, and opportunity, is wide open to all. The duopoly of Facebook and Google are no better situated than any other player to establish a podcast audience and generate revenue from (and with) that audience. Even though many big advertisers are still waiting for listener metrics to get better, Edison projected podcasts to earn $220 million in ad revenues in 2017. Publishers searching for new sources of revenue would be well served by considering a podcast. It ticks a lot of boxes — content, community, native advertising, low barrier to entry and easy to experiment with formats.

The fast and simple way in is to sponsor an existing podcast that aligns with your brand values/proposition and reaches your target audience. The longer way around, and the more lucrative for a publisher, is to create a new podcast that delivers unique value for your brand and to your advertisers. I highly recommend looking to your community of readers/viewers/influencers for both hosts and guests.

And there you have it — 11 ingredients for digital success plus a bonus garnish. Thanks for sticking with me to the end.

The Myth of Organic Scale

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Massive organic scale for branded content, whether sponsored video, editorial or influencer posts, is a myth. A pretty, shiny, elusive myth.

It was always something of a pipe dream. Those of us in the business learned quickly that we need to use amplification media to reach large numbers of consumers with our messages. No matter how large the organic audience of a website or influencer blog, we could not target content the same way we could ads. Drop that excellent post into a banner or native amplification ad, and I could be sure that moms of elementary school children were exposed to the sponsored juicebox posts.

This doesn’t minimize the value of the authentic voices who create sponsored posts on their blogs. Their endorsement of the brands they love drives consumer engagement with the brand in ways that traditional advertising never could. But we are lucky if 5% of a blog’s readers read any given sponsored post during the typical 6-8 week timeframe of most digital campaigns. If we want to drive that number up, we need to drive traffic to the posts.

Paid media is one way to do it. The other common way to drive traffic to our content is through social posts, both paid and earned. When a reader magically clicks the SHARE button, that earned share is GOLD, providing both engagement and amplification. Paid promotion is everything from asking the author to promote her post on social to engaging microinfluencers to share out links to branded content to standalone social posts that act as the endorsement and deliver the brand message directly to the audience.

And no matter how you look at it, for the most part, organic scale is a thing of the past on social. The most popular platform in the world is Facebook, and its branded content policy and content algorithms are designed to support its business model, to sell access to the most targeted audiences in a variety of ways. Ads are but one way to reach the Facebook user. If you want sponsored posts and branded content to reach as much of the target audience as possible, you have to boost the posts. The other platforms may be less obvious or less advanced (and certainly smaller), but the fact remains that paid social is the best solution for scaled amplification.

I’ve stopped worrying about whether that is a good or bad thing for influencer marketing. It just is, and your branded content programs, whether publisher- or influencer- driven, need to include paid social as an amplification tactic. We need to worry less about whether something was paid or earned, and more about whether it is shared.

Influencer – ie consumer – endorsement is the most powerful testimonial for a brand. A good influencer marketing program focuses on activating the right influencers to share about a brand, and then amplifying that content so it reaches the largest possible number of other consumers. I’d rather see brands regularly work with a smaller number of influencers, but in deeper relationships (brand ambassador, content partner, etc.) and supplement that core group with scale microinfluencer activations when they have product launches, major initiatives etc. This delivers the largest possible impact for the brand.

In a blog-based campaign, the initial posts carry the authentic endorsement of the influencers, and reach their organic audiences, some of whom will engage with the brand by commenting or sharing the content. This content is the irreplaceable foundation of the social strategy. For scale, we then have to amplify.

The amplification strategy has two parts. The first phase broadens the reach of the initial posts with social shares and paid media designed to scale the targeted audience for all the content. The second phase evaluates the best performing content and boosts it on social to extract maximum value from the best content.

Social-first programs generally skip the paid media phase, and jump right to boosting the best performing posts, although I have always wanted to develop a really well-done native ad treatment to amplify Instagram content back to digital with an e-commerce component.

Bottom line, matter how much organic reach your chosen influencers have, it’s never enough. Adding paid amplification delivers the targeted scale needed to maximize message awareness and optimize engagement with the audience.

Organic scale is a myth, but that’s okay. Like most myths, the truth is less sexy but it works just the same.We still can get the results we need.

Who “owns” social platforms?

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Who “owns” social platforms? The user or the platform? The answer is both obvious, and yet not.

Clearly the developer of the platform (and its shareholders) own the business and its intellectual property. Deciding who owns the experience is a wee bit harder. Without the engaged users, there is no experience. In that respect the users are just as invested in the platform as its nominal owners.

This tension can sometimes get ugly. Nearly every time Facebook changes its terms of service, interface or algorithms, the users get restless, threaten revolt etc.

But what happens when a change in and enforcement of the terms of service impacts the business of its users. As when Facebook restricted sweepstakes and contests a few years ago. Restrictions it has since loosened. Or when Pinterest began applying daily pin limits to minimize spam and revising and enforcing its guidelines for contests and sweepstakes that involve Pinterest.

On some level, the platforms rely on creative users to experiment with business models to surface interesting ways of leveraging the platform. Is it then fair when the platform asserts its marks (pin, pinning), chooses to limit an activity (number of pins per day) or restricts something to itself alone as Facebook did with “advertising.” Perhaps not, but no one ever promised fair.

When you build your business on the back of someone else’s platform, you run the risk — always — of the platform making changes that impact your business. For example, when Pinterest asserted its claim to the concept of digital pins and pinning and signaled intent to enforce, a number of companies building third party Pinterest tools that used Pin in the name rebranded. Pingage became Ahalogy. Pinerly morphed into Reachli.

And last month, blogger Amy Lupold Blair was requested to not enforce a trademark she had registered for “Pinning Party” and to comply with Pinterest’s terms of service guidelines for sweepstakes and contests.

I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the Internet, and my purpose for sharing this example isn’t to overanalyze it or decide who is “right.”

Because it doesn’t matter. Pinterest has a terms of service, and reserves the right to change its TOS at any time. If you want to use the service, you have to play by its rules.

The company also has to be consistent in its enforcement of its TOS and defense of the claim to the concept of the digital pin. That means pinning only happens on Pinterest and no other business entity can own pin/pinning in a digital context. It may seem draconian when applied to a loyal user like Amy, but if Pinterest doesn’t assert its claims consistently, it sets dangerous precedent for when it tries to assert against the inevitable copycat platforms.

I’m far more interested in exploring how we can use social platforms in our marketing and business offerings without getting tripped up by the inevitable tension of who owns what. Here are a few thoughts. Your Mileage May Vary.

  1. Build your offering on something you can own independent of a platform. It can certainly leverage a platform but for maximum flexibility, the underlying concept should be portable. This is why content-based plays are so powerful. The “product” is the story. The platform is simply the conduit.
  2. If you have a great idea for technology play on top of/relying on a single platform, be honest with yourself. Are you a bleeding edge first mover? Or is your idea a breakthrough for the platform? Then it’s possibly worth trying to position you/your idea/your company as an acquisition candidate quickly. Whether the platform wants to leverage your technology, get you out of the way or both, this is a strike-fast play.
  3. An independent technology concept that might plug into multiple platforms is also a decent bet, but again first mover or breakthrough has an edge, and shopping yourself may take longer than you have funds. Your idea needs to have legs on its own. Does it really fill an unmet market need?
  4. Pick a name for your product/service/company that you can own. You can’t own another’s trade or service marks, so don’t use ’em. Very few companies will be as lenient as Twitter when it comes to use of their name in your name. As we’ve learned with Pinterest, that a term is a generic like “pin” isn’t enough to rely on if the company can prove that use of the generic term in the specific context is something it created beyond the generic meaning.

And you know that just because a domain name is available, that doesn’t mean the name is, right?

For most bloggers, the content-based play is the simpler choice. It allows you to build on your strengths as a storyteller without being married to a platform. Your power is in your story, and in who cares to read it/engage with it/converse about it. Not in how you share it.

Bottom line: don’t build your empire — however large or small –on someone else. Build it on YOU.

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Changes to Facebook rules for contests and sweeps

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Facebook revised its guidelines for contests and sweepstakes this week,  removing the requirement that such promotions must be administered through a Facebook app.

Brands can now use their Facebook Pages directly for sweeps and contest entries, including core Facebook functionality like posting to the brand’s page, commenting or liking a post.

However, it is still a violation of the Terms of Service to require users to take actions on their own personal Timelines as entries.

Quite simply, Brand X can ask users like a post on its Brand X Page as an entry but it cannot ask users to share the post on their own personal Timelines as an entry.

Facebook also updated its TOS for Pages to make it explicitly prohibited to tag people in content they are not depicted in, or to encourage people to tag themselves as a sweepstakes entry. This seems a little weird and random but the folks over at Hubspot got this explanation from Facebook:

“It’s OK to ask people to submit names of a new product in exchange for a chance to win a prize. It’s not OK to ask people to tag themselves in pictures of a new product in exchange for a chance to win a prize.” – Source Hubspot

Important:  I interpret this restriction to apply to brands and Pages, the use of this tagging in promotional content,  and most specifically contest and sweeps entries. I do not believe this specifically applies to the common practice of tagging non-present people in photos on your personal Timeline. For example, tagging a picture of your niece with your sister’s name so other friends have a clue whose child this is. However, I am NOT a lawyer. Personally, I advise doing it sparingly and generally limited to the example I gave. That’s a nice privacy protection for the kids, and common sense would indicate Facebook would allow this. I am far less fond of tagging people in images merely to make them aware of the photo.

Why did they make the changes?
Facebook says it is to offer more flexible solutions to marketers. I don’t doubt it. Brands were using other platforms (Twitter, Instagram in particular) for their quick turnaround promotions.

Given the sheer volume of non-compliant stuff I continued to see on Facebook under the old rules  — usually but not always from smaller companies, I imagine the cost of enforcement also was well beyond the benefit. Rather than apply the rules inconsistently or try to stem the tide, Facebook decided to go with the flow.

Now it just has to go after promotions that violate the prohibition on using the personal Timeline. Bound to be a smaller task.

What does this mean for Brands?

Brands now have more options for contests and sweeps, particularly to execute things quickly when necessary. Facebook apps are still better for brand awareness and customer acquisition, as you can design a more engaging experience and capture email addresses for future promotions. They are also more expensive and take time to develop.

Activating a promotion on your brand Page is quick and easy, but you are also limited to the functionality of Facebook.

For Bloggers?

If you have a Facebook Page for your blog, you can now do promotions on Facebook, but read the Promotion Guidelines carefully. Facebook has other requirements for contests and sweeps, and you should always make sure that any promotion you administer complies with the law.

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