Social Media Community Building

Social network campaign and
community building platforms
A Smart Insights Marketing Tools Review
Author: Stuart Turnbull
Published: December 2012
Plan > Reach > Act > Convert > Engage

2 © Smart Insights (Marketing Intelligence) Limited. Please go to www.smartinsights.com to feedback or access our other guides.
Social media campaign management tools
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Social media campaign management
and community-building platforms
A Smart Insights Marketing Tools Review
Why we created this review?
Whether you’re engaging a consumer or a business audience, you will be posting status
updates and reviewing comments on Facebook and Twitter. Depending on your audience
and priorities you may want to schedule messages for LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and
YouTube too. Basic status update messages work fine, up to a point, but new types of
engagement devices like promotions, surveys, quizzes, coupons and sweepstakes are
needed to get more engagement, build community and run sales promotions. These tools
are also important for running integrated campaigns with social media at their heart.
While you can develop these tools in house or use an agency, why re-invent the wheel when
there are already tools to manage the creation, deployment and reporting of social media
campaigns offering a wide range of tools?
In this report we define three main categories of social media management tools which are
used to engage online communities in social networks and to run social campaigns. In this
guide we focus on the THIRD category, social media campaign and community-building
services. These are less well known than the other two, so we thought a guide would be
useful for members as some have asked us about this.
Topics covered in this review?
þþ A brief introduction to three main categories of social media management platforms
þþ Creating an engagement plan for using community tools
þþ Brief review of tools including: Constant Contact Social Campaigns, Crowdfactory, North
Social, Shoutlet, SnapApp, Wildfire. We also reference lower-cost tools more suited for
startups and smaller businesses in a final section.
þþ 2 or 3 examples of campaigns deployed with each tool to showcase their capabilities and
inspire ideas for engagement through social media
Tell-us-what you think!
We hope you find this review useful, we would love to know how you find it. So please email:
support@smartinsights.com with your ideas on improving this guide or new guides to help
your work. Thanks you!

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An Introduction to social campaign platforms
The three key types of social media management services
Finding an efficient way to engage audiences on different social networks is important to
most businesses today. Whether you’re engaging a consumer or a business audience,
you will want to post status updates, review comments and run structured campaigns on
Facebook and Twitter. Depending on your audience and priorities you may want to schedule
messages for LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and LinkedIn too.
To meet this need there are hundreds of tools and services for managing, monitoring and
scheduling messages on social networks. Most managing interactions don’t have the time
to log-in individually to the networks to post updates and review responses. Although it can
be best to use the native features of the social networks at some points for reporting or for a
more tailored update, there is also a need for cross-platform management.
We identify three main categories of social media management tools which are used to
engage online communities in social networks and to run social campaigns. In this guide we
focus on reviewing social media campaign management platforms which, are capable
of running creative campaigns on social networks. It does not cover the better known
services for managing updates on social networks or social listening tools, although we do
give pointers to other resources on these.
1. Social network management tools
Social network management tools enable companies to regularly interact with their audience
on the main social networks and track the results of these interactions.
What is it? Social network management tool
Software or services to post, schedule and track the response to social media updates
across multiple platforms.
Key functions of these tools social network management tools include the capability to these
across the different social networks:
þþ Post the same status update to multiple channel at the same time
þþ Reply to comments and questions for delivering customer service and pre-sales support
þþ Tracking and reporting on sharing and clickthrough from these updates
þþ Review updates from publishers and other influencers (for example in Twitter lists)
þþ Review comments from named competitors or hashtag topics (basic social listening
features)
We have outline reviews of these tools on our blog and plan to create a more detailed guide
to them, but for most businesses we believe Hootsuite is the best option for all of these
functions. To see what’s available it’s useful to see which brands are using some of the other
tools available and their popularity – see this post for a review of the most popular1
.
2. Social listening tools
Social listening tools are specifically designed for identifying and reporting on online
mentions of a brand, particularly within social networks and user generated content.
What is it? Social listening services
1 Smart Insights: The post popular social media management tools

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Software or services to review social networks, blogs and other sites for new mentions of
keywords, particularly within user generated content. More sophisticated tools will also
report on conversation volume and sentiment for a brand compared to its competitors.
There are two main types of social listening, defined best by Stephen Rappaport2
(Author of
Listen First!):
þþ Social monitoring: Tracking online brand mentions on a daily basis for PR, brand
protection, operations & customer service outreach & engagement.
þþ Social research: Analysing naturally occurring online categories of conversation to better
understand why people do what they do, the role of brands in their lives and the product,
branding and communications implications for brand owners.
For social media management, it’s the first which is most relevant here.
Key functions of social listening tools include:
þþ Setting up keywords for tracking mentions of a brand, competitors and other market
related keywords like product names
þþ Identifying influencers based on their reach and authority related to a topic
þþ Tracking and reporting on conversation share and sentiment of a brand against
competitors
þþ Supporting non-promotional marketing activities like identifying the need for customer
service or new product development insight
We have an analysis of 26 of these tools with the free tools separately identified at http://bit.
ly/smartlistening.
3. Social campaign management platforms
Having a strategy for engaging with, and listening to, users on social networks receives a
lot of attention at every social media seminar and these platforms can certainty help. These
platforms, however, are often limited with their ‘in-built’ creative capability to engage and
grow an audience through the engagement devices you need to run campaigns.
What is it? Social campaign or community management platform
Services which enable marketers to use different types of engagement devices within social
networks. They can also be considered to be community-building tools.
We are now seeing the next generation of platforms emerging which are starting to engage
social network users far more. As opposed to generic content posting capabilities through
tools such as HootSuite and Tweetdeck, online platforms are becoming increasingly available
that publish interactive campaign features. The main advantage is that you do not have to
develop an application in-house or use an agency.
Key functions of social listening tools include:
þþ Enable interactive engagement devices to deployed to run campaigns particularly within
Facebook, i.e. they go beyond posting text, images and videos.
þþ Examples of engagement devices include promotions, surveys, quizzes, coupons and
sweepstakes.
Using these services can reduce the need for companies and their agencies to deploy and
manage their own elements.
2 Listen First: Stephen Rappaport

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David Coombs, Senior Marketing Executive from Berghaus, has had experience with
developing bespoke applications. He found that they were expensive to build, needed
to be planned well in advance and needed to be maintained as “Facebook changed the
dimensions of pages recently leaving us to rebuild previously built applications.” A pain felt by
many marketers, and a worry which can be taken away by using a provider of highly custom-
isable, off-the-shelf applications.

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Creating an engagement plan for using community
tools
Before you review and select a social media platform, it makes sense to think through what
you are trying to achieve by using the platform and how this will affect the type of consumer
interactions.
Let’s take a look at an example to see what can be achieved and the type of goals you
should set. We got in touch with Jasdev Dhaliwal, the AVG Head of Communities when their
Facebook page passed one million to understand the reasons behind their success.
Jas outlined his four Cs for success3
:
1. Content. We produce content that our community loves to engage with. Whether it is
a blog post, a video or picture, we work hard on producing content that resonates with
our users. We often experiment to see what the audience engages with and listen to their
feedback. As well as publishing our own content, we also curate relevant third party content
with our audience. Measuring content on the success of its engagement value gives us a
really refined idea as to what content works and doesn’t work with our audience.
2. Community. We put the AVG Community at the heart of everything we do. It’s the voice of
the customer and we take their feedback very seriously. We are always listening and we use
their responses to build better products and provide a better service. We reward our biggest
advocates with recognition.
3. Customer service. Our Facebook page attracts its fair share of people looking for help.
As such, we offer a dedicated customer support channel on Facebook and encourage fans
with problems to log a ticket with our customer support team. As well as this, we have in
incredibly diligent and active group of our community volunteers who actively help other
users. Both channels are incredibly important to us and add tangible value to our community.
3 Smart Insights: Growing a successful Facebook presence: the AVG example

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4. Collaboration. The social media team at AVG is global, we are a passionate and
dedicated team that strive on putting the user first. We work hard on building an environment
where people enjoy visiting and keep on coming back because they are presented with real
value, whether it is through content, conversation, or a chance to connect with like-minded
others. Having the right blend of people in your team is very important and our successes are
due to the continuous hard work and expertise of everyone involved.
How will you engage your audience through a content strategy?
Ultimately, campaign management tools, provide you with a way to deliver different types of
content and engagement devices for your campaign. So before selecting a tool it’s best to
produce an editorial calendar. Take a look at the calendar from Smart Insights to gain an idea
of what this can contain4
.
One formula you can use to help develop the calendar is Joe Pulizzi’s BEST content
marketing formula which we introduce in our 7 Steps Guide to content marketing which is
referenced in the editorial calendar post too. BEST helps you gain more of an understanding
of what you need to achieve by bridging your products and services in line with the content
needs of your customer.
These are the questions we believe you should ask when reviewing BEST to create a
content calendar:
Behavioural
rr Q. What action do you want your customers to take?
Common actions include:
þþ Increase following ‘Likes’?
þþ Encourage sharing with their network/
þþ Submit information about themselves, i.e. through a profile form.
þþ Signing up for email communications.
These are core features of the tools featured in this report which are fundamental to your
success, so review how well the different tools achieve this.
rr Q. What broader brand aims and sales goals do you have?
Increasing awareness through amplification will be a common aim, but you also need to
consider how these tools will encourage first time and repeat sales. Review the mechanisms
available to achieve this.
rr Q. What measures will you use to review actions?
It will be important for you to measure growth in Likes, followers, conversions and you may
also need more detailed information about your customers such as their demographics?
You will also want more commercial measures such as return on content spend or return on
campaign investment.
Consider what the capabilities of the reporting to deliver this.
Essential
The essential requirement here is understanding how your content supports the intersection
between your expertise around your products or services and the informational/entertainment
needs of your customers? Questions to ask here include:
rr Q. What do your buyers really need to know?
4 Smart Insights: Editorial calendars for social media marketing

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Not just about your products, but about information and tasks relevant to what you have to
offer. i.e. what interests and appeals to your customer?
rr Q. How do you position content for maximum impact?
Consider how your typical customer uses a particular social network more than others; do
campaigns work better at different times of the year or times of the day?
rr Q. What are the media types to be included?
Which content do you need to showcase your products and promotions including using
images, videos, sound or documents?
rr Q. How does what they need to know align with the your unique expertise?
Ask which types of content will provide the most benefit personally or professionally? These
are different content types such as guides, reviews, competitions, updates, group deals and
offers. Use our content matrix tool to review which content types you review now and which
you would like to deploy in future5
.
Strategic
Joe Pulizzi says: “Too many custom content projects are remote from marketing and the
overall strategic goals of the company. To truly be successful, a content strategy needs to
tell your brand story as it relates to your customers. Do not let it live in a vacuum”. Ask:
rr Q. Does this content marketing effort help us achieve our strategic goals?
rr Q. Does it integrate with other strategic initiatives across channels?
rr Q. Do we have executive support for this content strategy to help get alignment?
5 Smart Insights: Content marketing matrix

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Targeted
Think about the range of audiences you are targeting and their needs. Joe suggests under-
standing the buyer persona6
for each of your customer segments. He says: If you don’t know
them well, how do you know what they need? Our Personas toolkit will help you define key
persona features including:
rr Q. Have you precisely identified the prospects you want to target?
rr Q. What are the different customer segments? Why are they different?
rr Q. Do you really understand what motivates them?
rr Q. Do you understand their professional roles?
rr Q. Do you understand how they view the product or service you offer?
6 Smart Insights Hub Page on Marketing Personas including guide to creating personas

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Platform 1. North Social
North Social offers what it describes as an ‘app buffet’ of social media apps for sweepstakes,
coupons, contests, promotions, viral downloads and more. Browsing through their buffet of
18 apps, it is easy to realise that there is plenty to get your teeth into and scope to create
some mouth-watering campaigns... Bad metaphors aside, credit is due to this quirky and
innovative company. It has produced a nice suite of apps to work on Facebook which are
reasonably priced and easy to use with pricing models aimed at agencies, small businesses
right through to larger corporates.
North Social’s website provides clear and easy walkthroughs and plenty of inspiration to
create engaging and creative campaigns. If none of the apps do not provide any of the func-
tionality you need, then they provide a custom app service for a premium. Most of the apps,
however, provide some basic customisation options, which will get you by. The apps also
have the ability to enable users to share your content, with some apps having the capability
to collect and export data.
To help increase the ‘likes’ on your Facebook page, for most of the apps, there is an option
to set a ‘fan gate’ which encourages the user to first like your page before they can see and
interact with further content such as competitions, videos, deals or sign-up forms. This can
be disabled if you think it might discourage interaction.
There is plenty of useful information about North Social’s apps [link here], and if you need an
inspiration, check out their [examples page]. For this guide, however, here are four examples
of popular and noteworthy apps.
Examples of North Social campaigns
Example 1 - Deal share
The deal share app works in a similar way to GroupOn, the visitor is presented with
information on the page as to how many registrations are required to activate the deal, it’s
status, registration limit and the time left before the deal becomes inactive. To register for the
deal, the user must share it with their friends and register their name and e-mail through a
sign-up form.
To notify entrants of the status of the deal once it has closed, data from the campaign can
be sent to North Social’s own ‘Social Contact’ CRM extension (discussed later). This can be

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used to build lists or data can be exported to Excel for you to import into your own CRM or
email marketing system.
Example 2 - Sweepstakes
The sweepstakes app works in a similar way to the deal share app. To enter, the user must
enter their name, e-mail and select the correct answer from a drop-down box. Once shared,
there is an option to share the competition with friends, but that is only if they want to reduce
their chances of winning of course!
Example 3 - Video channel
If you have a YouTube channel, North Social’s video channel app enables you to sync your
videos with your Facebook page within a neat layout.
One of the main benefits of doing this is that it allows greater exposure and traffic to your
videos and page through the optional Facebook comments feature. It is important to note that
you do not have to be a video producer to share videos on your page using this app. You can
create a YouTube channel with favourite videos that have relevancy to your company and still

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showcase them on your Facebook page.
Example 4 - Show & Sell
To give you an extra channel to sell your products, North Social’s show & sell app will enable
you to neatly showcase up to ten of your products on your Facebook page. Images and
content of the products can be added and each product has comment functionality. The app
does not handle transactions and instead refers the user to the product on your website,
which is probably for the best if you have your own e-commerce platform or sell products
through another provider such as eBay or Amazon.
North Contact
An added advantage of subscribing to North Social is that their basic packages provide you
with your own mini CRM/email marketing system. North Contact has the ability to collect lists
of email subscribers from some deployed apps to then enable you to send out customised
branded e-mails. It also provides you with standard reporting capabilities you would expect
from an email service provider such as clicks, opens and forwards.
Publishing, monitoring and analytics (Ngage)
If you subscribe to one of North Social’s ‘Ngage’ packages you will gain access to their
analytics and publishing system which works across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, email and
your websites.
Like many social media publishing and analytics tools available at the moment, the Ngage
platform allows you to schedule content posts across networks with options to grant team
members different publishing permissions. One nice feature about the platform is when
content is posted to your social media sites, the tool does not promote the Ngage tool
in posts. Instead North Social gives you the option for your company to effectively white
label the publishing tool so users will not see that you are using a particular social media
management tool within your posts.
Those familiar with Tweetdeck and Hootsuite will be familiar with Ngage’s monitoring
capability. Their monitoring ‘inbox’ streams content based on trending topics, companies,
people and keywords that are relevant to your company. You can also set up e-mail alerts
based on certain keywords for when you are not monitoring the inbox.

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The powerful analytics tool allows you to measure your fan engagement so you can
understand which content is working, or indeed which is not. The tool allows you set goals
so you can measure conversions from social network sites. For each goal you can then set a
value to help you measure ROI from your social media efforts.
Pricing
For small to large businesses, basic pricing for access to all 18 apps for 1 fan page ranges
from $30 to $240 a month and pricing is decided by the number of fans your Facebook page
has. If you need the analytics and publishing functionality, there are the ‘Ngage’ plans which
cost between $400 and $1,000 a month and are dependent on the amount of fan pages you
have. Agencies who manage up to 50 Facebook pages on behalf of their clients, will expect
to pay around $1,000 a month.
Final note
North Social has clearly produced a nice suite of apps and a useful social media
management platform and it will be interesting to see any future releases from the company.
The apps are simple to use and content is nicely laid out within pages. I must note that the
attractiveness of most of the apps will really depend on how creative your design artwork will
be. Some of the apps feel as if they have been remixed and slightly tweaked from others to
create a whole new app, so do not be fooled by the scale of what is on offer.
The Ngage platform, available at more expense, will give you some extra social media
management functionality but the platform is not as joined-up with the apps as I would like.
For example, it would be nice to understand more about the demographics of the users
interacting with the apps. That said, there are dozens of other providers who will be able to
provide similar functionality for far less.
The North Contact app was a pleasant surprise, and would be particularly helpful to small
businesses who do not have access to a CRM system or an email service provider. For
larger businesses, it might be best to import any data collected to your own systems.
Small sized business:
Medium sized business:
Large sized business:

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Platform 2. Wildfire
Google’s 2012 acquisition of Wildfire led to speculation that its features could be included
in Google+ in the long-term and in the short-term that it is trying to capitalise from selling
‘advertising space’ on other networks.
Based in Silicon Valley, Wildfire claims to have over 21,000 customers including 30 of the
top 50 most valuable brands in the world. Wildfire Suite 2.0 works on the leading social
networks such as Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. The suite
is one of the most comprehensive in this guide and combines a range of tools for messaging,
advertising, creating pages, running promotions, analysing campaigns and measuring
success. The main features that Wildfire offers are:
Messaging
To communicate with your audience directly, Wildfire’s messaging tool allows communication
on social networks to be personalised, scheduled during times where engagement is likely
to be high and can be targeted towards specific audiences. Content can also be attached
such as coupons, links, photos or flash applets. For collaborating teams, messages are able
to be assigned to other users and the administrator can restrict permissions to prevent them
having free-reign over your brand.
Advertising
If you are considering or currently advertising on social networks, then Wildfire’s ads tool
provides you with some enhanced options which are not otherwise available that can
optimise advertisements on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The company claims to use a
unique self-optimisation technology, which reduces cost and increases engagement of ads.
It does this by “using over 160 social metrics that measure your audiences engagement”
and then refines the ads content and target audience automatically with minimal setup effort
required.
Creating pages
Creating non-standard pages on Facebook can sometimes require quite a bit of skill.
Wildfire’s pages tool gives you the flexibility to design and deploy mobile and tablet optimised
pages for all skill levels. The tool allows you to choose from using one of their pre-built
templates, build a page from scratch, or it gives you the option for a designer to customise
pre-built templates.
Pages can also be enhanced with Wildfire’s library of viral plug-ins such as [insert], and for
targeting, the content published on the page can be dynamic according to the audiences
location and language. To protect and control your pages, permissions can be set as to who
can edit, publish and approve pages.
Promotions
Wildfire’s promotional capabilities are the stand-out tool set amongst the suite. It allows you
to run sweepstakes, coupons user-generated contests, quizzes, group deals and more.
Minimal effort is required with launching a basic promotion but the main downside is each
promotion is chargeable.
Customising campaigns can be done through their WYSIWYG drag and drop editor and
includes features such as unique coupon codes and shopping carts. Analysing promotional
campaigns is straightforward too; analytics are available which report on real-time metrics on
users behaviour and their demographics. Here are a couple of examples of the promotions

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that can be run on Wildfire.
Examples of Wildfire campaigns
Example 1 – User generated contests
Wildfire’s user-generated contests allow entrants to submit original work such as a photos,
videos, essays, t-shirt designs and more. The winner/s can be decided through public voting,
by the company or a combination of the both. Running contests can help increase brand
awareness, build a community around your brand, increase fans and will also help to identify
avid and enthusiastic fans.
Example 2 – Coupons and Giveaways
Use this promotional application to distribute your coupons, vouchers or give-aways within
social networks and your website. Running this sort of promotion can help to increase sales,
spread the word about your products, increase fans, build brand awareness and drive
traffic to your company’s website. It can also be used to collect customer data i.e. by having
entrants complete an entry form before accessing the coupon enables you to collect a list of
leads to follow up.

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Analytics
Most marketing tools are not complete without the ability to analyse performance. Wildfire’s
analytics dashboard is similar to that of most email marketing service providers. The
dashboard gives you access to reports on your pages, tabs, posts, referrals and campaigns
using standard metrics on user demographics such as sex, age, location and education level
as well as other standard metrics.
Interface
Wildfire has recently updated its user interface to improve usability. Those who use Facebook
mobile or tablet apps will be familiar with the structure. Its side bar gives you easy access to
all the suite’s tools and prevents you from getting lost within the platform.
Pricing
There are various pricing options available, but you will first need to decide whether you want
to access to promotions only or the full suite. Access to the full suite can be expensive with
one reviewer quoting last year a cost of $2,500 a month with unlimited custom promotions! If
this has put you off there is, however, a ‘contact me’ form on the site with an option to state
your marketing budget range to obtain a quote. This area is a little grey as there is close
guard over the suite’s pricing.
Wildfire does give you more flexibility and visibility with regard to its ‘promotions only’ access
and outlines pricing based on setting up a promotion and then charges for every day the
promotion is active. The site quotes promotion setup ranges between $5 to $250. Running a
promotion then costs between $1 and $4.99 a day. The cost is all dependent on the level of
customisation that is required and whether you need custom entry forms and quick support.
There is a white-label option where cost needs to be requested. This is if you want to remove
the ‘powered by Wildfire’ graphics from your promotion, which in my view, should not be
there if you are already paying a premium for the service.
Final note
Google’s recent acquisition of Wildfire may give you the confidence that it is backing a social
media platform which is highly capable and innovative. Having said that, Google has been
known not to get it right all the time. Investigating this platform amongst others it does appear
to be one of the most comprehensive. The interface is clean, the tools are straight forward to
use and the platform caters for the small business (pre-built templates) right through to the
larger corporate (user permissions).
Although the platform claims to work across leading social networks, it is heavily focused and
geared towards Facebook. If the full suite is too costly and the promotions are still appealing,
there is the option to run chargeable promotions. Deciding to go down this route may be cost
effective but will only become a problem if you are running many promotions and need heavy
customization.

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A Wildfire case study - an interview with David Coombs - Senior
Marketing Executive - Berghaus
Q. Why did you choose Wildfire and were there any alternatives you considered before
signing up?
A. “Wildfire has had a meteoric rise to prominence which coincided with our desire to test
how this type of SaaS (Software as a Service) would work for us and we’ve just completed
our first test competition with them. Low cost, ease of set up and branding options were all
important considerations for us when setting up. We didn’t consider any other platform for
this test. I guess Wildfire are winning the front of mind battle when it comes to this type of
service, but that’s not to say we won’t test others going forward.”
Q. What are your objectives for social media campaigns. e.g. direct response (sales/collect
customer data), raise awareness, both - or something else?
A. “Wildfire will really fill a gap for us in terms of being able to deliver low cost reactive com-
petitions to our fans on a regular basis to complement our larger brand activity and our
regular content updates. Our fans follow us because we deliver content that adds value to
their online social lives. Competition software such as Wildfire is just another piece of the
value proposition we deliver so it’s important to be able to do this cost effectively.
“Our community is small but it has grown almost completely organically and with hard
work we’ve developed high engagement rates so the key to all our activity is to maintain a
responsive, involved community while our numbers grow.”
“A key piece of research for us is to work out what effect being a Facebook fan has on brand
loyalty and sales across all channels, and if the content we deliver through Facebook has
positively impacted on this or if simply, people who have liked us so far have naturally been
more inclined to be brand advocates.”
Q. Lastly, do you think using a platform like Wildfire will bring you the ROI you need?
A: “I think it will strengthen our case on what value social media activity delivers. The
temptation for businesses when measuring social media is to simply say that direct sales are
the only ROI metric which is not accurate. The picture is much more complicated than that.”
“My view is that the value of a fan is unique to each business and it’s up to you to define
what that value is and to set a framework that you can use the measure that – is it brand
sentiment, reaching a broader demographic, multi-channel sales? Each one of these will
have a different way of measuring it.”
“The irony of how measurable the digital world is but how difficult it can be to measure the
value of social networking is causing everybody in digital marketing a headache but the more
you can tie social activity back to real world activity the better – particularly when it comes
to allocating budget in tough economic times. This is where Wildfire will be useful. It will
also give us email sign ups, which in turn feed in to the ROI of other activities, amplifying the
importance of this type of activity.”

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Platform 3. SnapApp
Pangea Media, the curators of SnapApp, claim to have launched and managed an
impressive 300 million online quizzes, sweepstakes and surveys within six years. Investigat-
ing their platform, it is clear that their extensive experience of learning and implementing best
practice, has resulted in a strength for building customisable apps that collect data on social
networks and elsewhere.
As well as the capability to publish apps to social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn,
Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+, SnapApp’s apps can be published to websites, ad units
blogs ad units and within e-mail templates. Fully optimised for mobile, the apps are highly
customisable let you to add your own branding and you can measure how effective your
launched apps are through the analytics tool. Here are three noteworthy examples of the
apps that you can launch:
Examples
Example 1 – Surveys & Polls
Using SnapApp’s surveys and polls apps provide you with the ability to collect useful
marketing data from customers and prospects about your products, services or brand. Or you
can launch a poll of what customers think about a general subject and allow them to share
with their networks. Results can be published to the user or it can be presented privately for
your own purpose.
Follow up questions can be added to the poll or survey, as soon as the user answers a
question, they are quickly shown the next question without having to press submit. After the
questions, there is also an option for the user to share the poll or survey and there is the
ability to end it with a form so they can submit data about themselves.
Example 2 – Sweepstakes
SnapApp’s Sweepstakes app is a great way to increase brand awareness but its main focus
is to help you help drive signups and leads. The promotion allows you to add your own
branded artwork to encourage users to enter information about themselves in order to win
a prize. Entries can be limited to users who like your Facebook page, try your product or

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download a whitepaper. Share buttons on the promotion for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
can help your promotion go viral; SnapApp claim that a shared promotion can encourage 3 to
6 additional entries per user.
Example 3 – Quizzes and Tests
Quizzes and tests work similar to the surveys and polls applications in that they ask the
user a set of questions and can help you to run popular trivia quizzes, personality tests and
IQ tests. Once the user has answered all the questions, and if they have provided with a
result, they can share their results with their network. For example, this is useful if you want
to launch a popular ‘which kind of person are you’ type personality test. Quizzes can also be
enhanced with a sign-up form for the user to be entered into a prize draw.
Analytics
SnapApp’s analytics tools is integrated to measure the effectiveness of the promotions and
collects metrics such as:
þþ Completion rate – the amount of users that participate with the application, right through
to the results page. Use this metric to ascertain if the app is holding a participants

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attention
þþ Viral lift – the amount of traffic which comes from shares on social networks
þþ Sharing rate – the amount of users who have participated in the application and have
shared results on social networks.
Overall the anyaltics tool is painless and straight forward to use. Within the tool, you can
also see all the leads, responses from your promotions and you can customise the metrics
needed within your reports. You then have the capability to export the data and results to a
CSV file and have it e-mailed to you, which is handy.
Interface
Creating apps is managed through a single interface. Before customizing the finer details
of your app, you will go though clear and informative wizard which details how the apps can
engage users. During the process of setting up your application, the configuration lets you
choose from a list of goals, which is a nice simplistic way of configuring your app from the
top-down without being bogged down with a page of technical jargon. For example, if one
of your goals is to ‘publish the app to a website’, selecting this option then gives you more
option to generate some code so that it can be embedded on a website or it can host the app
on microsite for you.
Within the process of setting up an app, there is an option to use a free theme, although, the
designs are very basic and dated and look like they have been lifted straight from Microsoft
Publisher ’97. Therefore, you still might want to attempt to create your own from a basic
template or customise one of the free ones heavily.
When it comes to customizing the finer details of you app, the interface gives you plenty of
customisation options with a real-time preview of your app. The time it takes to deploy your
app really dependent on how detailed you want to go here, but it’s nice to see an editor which
really is WYSIWYG without having to dip into any HTML code where a lot of editors fall flat.
Accessing the app builder interface is free for anyone, and you can test drive this functional-
ity for yourself without signing up for a premium account and is certainly worth a test drive.
Pricing
Subscribing to a license which gives you access to unlimited apps is on the expensive side
and will set you back $995 a month. Alternatively you can run a single SnapApp over your
desired period for $249 a month. There is also the option to white label the apps and request
custom functionality for the apps where quotes are available on request.
Final Note
SnapApp’s clear strength against others in this guide is its ability to collect data about
recipients, whether this be for marketing research or you need to collect useful lead data.
Some of the apps have great ‘shareability’, particularly the quizzes and test app that will
likely to be popular on social networks, and will help increase your brand awareness and
responses.
One other advantages of using SnapApp is the way the platform has plenty of scope to be
used outside of social networks where apps can be placed on websites in different ways
such as within ads, blogs or microsites. The SnapApp platform has been designed and built
to be scalable, meaning when Pinterest became popular, SnapApp was quick to adapt it’s
platform for apps to be launched on the network, which will give you the confidence that apps
could be adapted to work on emerging social networks quickly.

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The analytics tool and the clearly guided app building functionality are also quite strong but
where SnapApp falls flat is with its extra functionality for medium to large such collaboration
features teamwork and to permission controls. That said, this might be unimportant for some
businesses, but other platforms within a similar price range do provide this sort of functional-
ity.

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Platform 4. Crowd Factory
Crowd Factory defines itself as “a cross platform social campaign management platform that,
helps generate peer to peer recommendations and referrals in a scalable and repeatable
way”. In short, they provide the ability to run social campaigns that have the potential to
go viral. Crowd Factory’s intuitive suite of social apps have cross-channel capabilities
(categorised under promotional, referral and engagement), a social CRM database and a
powerful but visual analytics tool.
Best suited for the medium to large sized businesses, Crowd Factory is a good all-round
social campaign platform. Here are two of the noteworthy apps:
Examples
Example 1 – Refer-a-friend
Growing a customer base is easy with the refer-a-friend app and is perfect for sharing
‘money off’ deals. Users are given incentives to share offers with their friends, which are
tracked so they can see the progress of their referrals to see if they have met their own
referral target to obtain the incentive. As prospects share your message with their networks,
you increase your database and collect social profile data on those leads, as well as their
sharing behaviour.

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Example 2 – Polls & Voting (Engagement)
With Crowd Factory’s polls and voting applications you are able to create some very visual
and compelling polls that have the capability to add images to the voting options, which is
unique compared with others. The polls have the ability to be shared and you can track par-
ticipants’ interaction with the poll.
Analytics
To understand and improve the effectiveness of your social marketing initiatives, the
real-time dashboard and analytics allows you to get deep insights into the performance of
your campaigns so you can test, tune and optimise them over time. The dashboards give
you metrics on each campaign including top-of-the-funnel metrics like, social reach and
impressions as well as closed-loop metrics like conversions, opportunities and revenues
attributed to each campaign.
Social CRM and CRM integration
Crowd Factory has its own powerful social CRM capability. By building a database of
individuals, their sharing activity, their social reach and the impact they make to your bottom
line, you will be able to segment and reach out to them again with future campaigns – more
intelligently. If required, Crowd Factory can assist you with the integration of your CRM
system, but from speaking to them, most of their clients prefer to export data to a CSV and
then import it into their own CRM database.
Pricing
In a conversation with Crowd Factory, access to the system will set you back between $2,500
- $5,000 a month which is a similar enterprise price range to that of Shoutlet and SnapApp.
For this, you and your team will receive access to all applications, analytics, social CRM and
cross-channel capabilities to run an unlimited amount of campaigns simultaneously, without
extra cost. The applications, however, cannot be acquired separately and as such their suite
comes in one package.
Final note
Crowd Factory is without doubt an enterprise solution and has some big clients such as
Microsoft, Universal, HP and IBM. One of their strengths is creating applications that aid

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referral marketing. This combined with Social CRM provides some helpful and interesting
insights to how your campaigns are shared. Is it worth the price? Comparing it with Shoutlet
it does not have as many innovative features and is not as comprehensive.

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Platform 5. Shoutlet
Shoutlet is a comprehensive, sophisticated social publishing platform. With clients such as
Burger King, Ikea, Cisco the platform may not be within reach of small to medium sized
businesses. This all-in-one platform provides social media management, an easy to use
campaign builder (social canvas), the ability to run a wide range of social media campaigns,
social CRM functionality and integrated analytics.
Examples
Example 1 – Shop & Share
To encourage word-of-mouth marketing through Facebook, Shoutlet’s Shop & Share app
enables you to showcase products on your Facebook page with the option for users to share
items through other social networks. Embedding products within Facebook pages, with links
to a store, encourages users to shop socially, share products with friends, get advice, and
weave online shopping with Facebook activity.
Example 2 – Contests
Like other platforms within this guide, Shoutlet has the capability to run video, photo,
or text-based polls and contests on Facebook that can be shared while collecting data.
Shoutlet, however, is a bit smarter with launching and closing its apps. Through the platform’s
unique ‘social switchboard’, the campaign can be scheduled and triggers can be set to close
the campaign once certain criteria has been met i.e. 10,000 entries. Subsequent campaigns
can then be launched, or messages sent out automatically once the contest is closed.

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Pricing
Shoutlet would not disclose the price but indications are it will cost in the region of $20,000 a
year7
. That said, running such a system like this could bring you a healthy return if there is
wide interest in your products or services on social networks.
Final note
Ideally suited for the large business, Shoutlet knows its market and has taken this into
account with enhanced security, unlimited accounts, permission and global support. Analysts
have confirmed that the platform is the most comprehensive in the industry, but what makes
it stand out more, is some of its innovative features such as the ‘social canvas’ builder - an
is an easy to use drag and drop campaign builder. Shoutlet’s ‘social switchboard’ also allows
you to build a workflow of content and campaigns to be published across multiple channels
when certain triggers or milestones are met.
7 Social Media Explorer: Jason Falls review

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Platform 6. Constant Contact Social Campaigns
Social Campaigns from Constant Contact is a basic platform to help grow your fan base
through Facebook and can help promote your products and offers. Compared with other
platforms in this guide, the campaign capabilities of the platform are very limited and each
social campaign has similar ‘like-gate’ functionality. That is, when a user ‘likes’ your page,
it unlocks content such as videos, offers and exclusive content. Here is an example of a
campaign.
Examples
Example - Coupon
For retailers to increase ‘likes’ of your page, one of the best ways is to offer coupons to
users. For the campaign to work effectively, the user first sees artwork to encourage them
to ‘like’ your page before further details of the coupon are unlocked. Users can then share it
over Twitter, LinkedIn, Email or through Facebook.
To create the campaigns, this tool has a flexible editor, or you can choose from a selection
of templates. Campaigns can also be scheduled to make sure you get the best exposure at
peak times. Once launched, the reporting system measures your social campaign’s visits,
shares and how many new fans you have acquired.
Example 2 - Likegated PDF document
This next example is also from a retailer using a coupon, but uses a different campaign
mechanic. Here, a guide is offered initially and this is followed up through a campaign offer
within the PDF.
This example is from Scribblers, an Expert member company that is featured in our case
study guide.

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In this case the offer is pinned to the timeline and the app is positioned in Views, at
the top of Scribbler’s Facebook page.
Pricing
Constant Contact’s social campaigns is free to try if you have under 100 Facebook fans.
Pricing then ranges from $30 a month for 101-500 fans to $100 a month for 5,001-10,000
fans. If you are fortunate to have more than 10,000 fans, you will need to enquire about a
quote.
Summary
Social campaigns is a basic platform ideal suited for small businesses. If you have not set up
a Facebook page, or you are struggling to increase your following, trying the free <100 fans
option might be a good tester to see if you audience is reactive to social media campaigns.

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Otherwise, North Social’s platform would be a better option, which gives you better value by
providing the same capabilities plus a lot more.

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Other simple social campaign management tools for
small businesses
In these reviews we have looked at tools with multiple features for established brands which
attract a price to match. If you are looking for budget tools for smaller businesses, or startups
there are other tools similar to Constant Contact’s Social Campaigns which offer simple
Likegating in Facebook and some other widgets. These include:
þþ Pagemodo – offers simple Likegating. We use this on the Smart Insights Facebook page
to encourage Likes in return for a PDF - ideal for a B2B service with content assets to
share.
þþ FanPage Engine – For a single $97 fee a small business with a single Facebook page..
can build custom tabs using different themes and create sweepstakes, contests, and
deals with our amazing applications.
þþ Tabsite – More similar to the other tools in this report containing widgets for sweepstakes
and contests. Prices range from $20-50 with a free option for a limited tab.

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