The iPlatform

Swatch: How Do You Wear It?

Carolina — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:02:38 +0000

Last month we helped the worldwide famous Swatch launch two different Facebook competitions to engage their fans. The competitions are running on the iPlatform Competition Platform.

How We Wear It is a competition with a twist, where users can vote for the magazine that had the best photo shoot celebrating the Colour Codes Collection and its amazing 80’s influence. One Swatch Colour Codes watch will be given to 100 readers who voted for the winner. As well as being in the Swatch Facebook fan page, the competition was also embedded in the Swatch and publisher websites.

How I Wear It encourages users to share interesting pictures showing their passion for the wrist watches. The most passionate – as voted by their friends and other fans – will win twenty watches from the brand new Colour Codes Collection; a valuable prize! Users can pull in photos from their Facebook albums, or upload directly, and then have the chance to publish their entry to their profile and invite their friends to come and vote for them, turning them into social advocates for the Swatch fan page.

Encouraging fans to show their passion for a product in Facebook is a great way to engage them. The iPlatform can help you develop campaigns and competitions in Facebook and other social platforms. If you are interested in finding out how we can help, get in touch now. Follow us on Twitter here.

We Have Risen to the Challenge

Carolina — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:04:21 +0000

We all know how Sport Relief encourages the whole of the UK to come together “to get active, raise cash and change lives”. This year, however, there’s something quite new about their fundraising approach. Sport Relief has turned to Social Media to encourage people to get involved and we have risen to the challenge and helped to implement their exciting Facebook application.

With it you can challenge your friends to do something to help raise money. Users choose a friend and a challenge to “spur them into action”. All the money raised is used by Comic Relief to help transform the lives of poor and vulnerable people, both at home and abroad.

The iPlatform can help you develop campaigns and competitions in Facebook and other social platforms. If you are interested in finding out how we can help, get in touch now. Follow us on Twitter here.

Facebook Fans Become More Loyal Customers

Carolina — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:01:12 +0000

Facebook has more than 3 million active pages, with 1.5 million maintained by local businesses. In total, these pages have more than 5.3 billion fans. These are impressive numbers, and show the extent to which Facebook has become a new major communications channel between brands and customers. However, despite the general view of fan behaviour being a ‘lightweight’ action from the customer, a recent study has found that Facebook fans actually become more loyal customers.

The study, by Rice University, examined the dollar value of Facebook fans on the sales of the cafe chain Dessert Gallery (DG), by setting up a Facebook fan page and measuring the effect on customer behaviour between fans and non-fans. The page was updated regularly with pictures, news and promotions.

Over the three months of the study, the research found that customers who became a fan of Dessert Gallery on Facebook became more loyal throughout the period. Although they spent the same average amount of money in each visit as non-fans, they visited the cafe 20% more often and were more likely to recommend the cafe to friends, and showed a stronger emotional attachment to the company.

It’s possible that simply the act of publicly declaring themselves a fan created a positive feedback loop with how they felt about the company, and this had a real affect on sales and recommendations. This shows the potential for all brands in increasing their fan page activity, even on a most basic and simple level.

The iPlatform delivers marketing campaigns and competitions in Facebook and other social platforms. If you are interested in finding out how we can help, get in touch now.

People spend longer on Facebook than any other site

joshuamarch — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:26:08 +0000

Facebook users spend on average seven hours using the social networking website, according to a recent survey by Nielsen, with a month on month growth of nearly 10%.

The iPlatform delivers marketing campaigns and competitions in Facebook and other social platforms. If you are interested in reaching and increasingly part of the population who spend time in the social networking website, get in touch now.

Turkey, UK, France and Germany show impressive active user growth

joshuamarch — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:59:14 +0000

As the number of Facebook users in Europe reached 123 million at the beginning of February, UK, France and Germany showed the biggest growth among the regions countries, according to Inside Facebook.

With its 24.3m users, the UK is still leading – with an impressive 40% of the population on Facebook. In comparison, Turkey, France and Germany have rates of 26.3%, 24.3%, 8.1%.

These numbers show once again how relevant the Facebook platform can be for marketing campaigns that wish to reach a growing part of these countries’ population. If you want to find out how we can help you deliver successful marketing campaigns on Facebook, get in touch now.

500% increase in sharing in Facebook – in just 6 months

joshuamarch — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:26:34 +0000

At the end of 2009, Facebook announced its most recent statistics revealing that sharing on the site increased 500% in just six months, with the average user sharing 12 pieces of content each week.

With 400 million users - 50% of which log in the network website every day – increasingly using the site as a tool for sharing stories with their friends, this may not be a surprise. However, we can say this also reflects the continuous implementation of Facebook Connect over the Web – more websites are sharing content into Facebook now than ever before.

These stats show how important Facebook has become for your business. If you want people to be telling their friends about your products or your content, you need to be either in Facebook, or using Facebook Connect!

Get in touch to find out how we can help.

The future of Facebook

joshuamarch — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:04:39 +0000

The Facebook Developer Garage will start 2010 bringing the Future to agencies, developers and social media types attending its first event of the year! The gathering will happen on February 24th and promises a close look at the year ahead and possible developments in areas such as brands, monetization, mobile, game developers, etc.

A few weeks later, a team from the Garage will be at the Social Media World Forum to present workshops on successful Facebook campaigns and to handle delegate queries related to the Facebook platform.

2010 is a promising year for Social Media and the Facebook Developer Garage London is on top of that to bring you the most recent platform updates and relevant information for developing for the Facebook platform.

Joshua March, CEO of iPlatform, is Chairman and host of the Facebook Developer Garage London

The Flavourhood: McDonalds reaching their fans through Facebook

joshuamarch — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:58:26 +0000

Towards the end of the year, we worked with Razorfish to develop McDonalds first major Facebook campaign, The Flavourhood. This campaign included several game-like applications aimed at building a fanbase around McDonalds products.

As Alistair Macrow, McDonald’s UK marketing director, said on an interview to NMA, “the campaign was designed to engage customers with its top-selling products… Using Facebook lets us engage, entertain and reward our fans,” he said.

The campaign includes a central application connected to multiple games and fan pages related to each product, and has reached over 200,000 users so far. Unit 9 created the introduction flash.

iPlatform worked with us on ‘The Flavourhood’ activity we developed for McDonald’s, and they have been a real pleasure to work with. They were very flexible, accommodating our many requirements, and have shown real dedication and commitment to deliver. The Facebook platform is constantly evolving, and having a collaborative partner who understands it well is invaluable.

Deborah D’souza – Razorfish UK

If you want to find out how we can help you deliver similar campaigns, get in touch now.

You must be a fan to enter!

joshuamarch — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:53:53 +0000

After Facebook updated their competition and promotion guidelines towards the end of last year, there was a lot of confusion surrounding the ability to require users to be fans of a fan page before they could enter a competition. The guidelines weren’t clear, and seemed to suggest that you could restrict users from entering the competition if they weren’t fans, as long as you didn’t require them to be fans as an entry condition (so you could limit the entry page to fans, but couldn’t actually say ‘you must be a fan to enter’). This was inconsistent and confusing for clients, and the Facebook team themselves.
Luckily, this has now been amended – on the 22nd December they updated the guidelines to read (emphasis ours):

4.2 In the rules of the promotion, or otherwise, you will not condition entry to the promotion upon taking any action on Facebook, for example, updating a status, posting on a profile or Page, or uploading a photo. You may, however, condition entry to the promotion upon becoming a fan of a Page.

This will make things much simpler and avoid the verbal wrangling that was going on before Christmas!

The iPlatform Competition Platform allows us to quickly launch fully branded text, photo and video competitions with voting, leaderboards and full fan page integration. Get in touch to find out more.

Josh discusses apps with PR Week

joshuamarch — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 09:06:37 +0000

I was recently interview for a PR Week blog on all things social media and Facebook apps. A small excerpt:

PR WEEK: Applications are the new crack. What are the top 3 things to remember when thinking about making an app?

Me:

1. If you can build it on a normal web app, you can build it in a social app – plus all the additional social graph data and actions you can pull in.

2. If the app isn’t inherently social, then using FB Connect / Twitter OAuth as an identity provider is a good idea; but building it as a Facebook app isn’t.

3. Usability is more important than making it look like Facebook; just because it sits on the Facebook platform, doesn’t mean it needs to look like Facebook, and our research does not show any particular benefit for doing this.

Read the full interview here.