New Wildfire Data Quantifies the Impact of a Brand's Most Active Fans

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., August 6, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Wildfire, the global leader in socialmediamarketing software, today released data that underscores the importance of identifying and engaging a brand's most influential fans.  The data is based on an analysis of 10,000 social marketing campaigns that ran on Facebook over the past 9 months, of which the top performing 10%, belonging to just under 700 brands, were isolated and studied to ascertain key differentiators that achieve success.

Key conclusions from the analysis include:

• Sharing of social media campaigns generates significant earned media.  Wildfire's data shows that campaign "sharers" and "advocates" (whose shares result in someone new engaging with the campaign) generate an average of 14 earned media impressions each. In other words, for each sharer, 14 additional people will learn about the campaign in their news feed.
• Sharing has a large impact on page engagement.  Brands that are highly effective at engaging sharers and advocates, via campaigns, see 3x more engagement on their page than other brands (in the form of user participation with custom applications, and "likes," shares, and comments).
• Brand "advocates" bring in an average of 1.3 new people each.  For every 10 advocates a brand gets to join their social campaign, 13 entirely new people will engage with the brand's campaign through clicks, entries and other interactions.
• Advocates can also impact fan growth.  Tripling the number of advocates in campaigns (as our top 10 "super brands" did in this study) correlated with a 13x higher annual fan growth relative to average-performing brands.

"This data clearly shows that brands need to be focused on nurturing their most active fans, particularly their brand advocates," said Victoria Ransom, CEO and Founder at Wildfire.  "Brands should give users a variety of ways to engage with them -- and several options for what to do when they get there -- to increase time spent on the page as well as return activity.  Brands should also give users specific instructions about what to do to engage.  For example, if you want someone to 'Like' your post, it helps to directly ask for it."

A free report "Brand Advocate Factor" is available for download here: http://bit.ly/N6cHCi

Wildfire will host a free webinar, entitled "The Brand Advocate Factor: How Best-in-Class Brands Breed Communities of Brand Advocates That Supercharge Social Media Campaigns" on August 8, 2012 at 10am PT.  The webinar will showcase the study's key findings and share more in-depth best practices for engaging advocates. For more information or to register for the webinar, please visit:  http://bit.ly/MTDMfu

About Wildfire
Wildfire is the global leader in social media marketing software, with over 16,000 paying customers worldwide, including 30 of the world's50 mostvaluablebrands. Wildfire's Social Marketing Suite combines best-of-breed social promotion and advertising software, robust mobile and desktop page management, messaging and sophisticated real-time analytics in one complete platform. Wildfire's powerful and intuitive software allows creative marketers and non-technical managers alike to create social campaigns and pages, communicate with their social audience and measure social media performance. Brands and agencies such as Virgin, Amazon, Unilever and Ogilvy as well as thousands of businesses use the Wildfire platform to engage with audiences on major social networks, including Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter. The only social media marketing company to receive an investment from Facebook's fbFund, Wildfire has offices in California, Chicago, New York, London, Paris, Munich, and Singapore.  For more information, please visit www.wildfireapp.com.

SOURCE Wildfire