Facebook

Why have a bespoke application?

1. Applications are a great way of differentiating your Facebook Page from the competition and generating brand awareness.
2. Having a Facebook app is a great way to help spread the message of marketing campaigns into a social audience.
3. Activity within applications can be automatically shared in the news feed and walls of participants, which offers a highly effective recruitment functionality and adds to the viral nature of campaigns.
4. Brand engagement and community building is at the very core of what we do.
5. Using the Facebook API it is possible to automate a huge array of actions (with a users permission) to allow for things such as creating a new (custom) post on a profile's feed/wall, commenting on a post, liking a given post, writing a note on a profile, writing a link on a profile, create an event and inviting people to it, creating a photo album and then uploading photos into it, creating a checkin at a location represented by a page, and many more.
6. The cost of creating a Facebook application is a lot less than you might think.

Using the "like wall"

This is a highly effective means of community building and is the perfect catalyst for engagement further down the line. If users are incentivised highly enough to "like" the page then this strategy can work exceptionally well. We have used this technique effectively for clients such as the highlight whereby users we incentivised to "like" the page by offering them discounted tickets to see live comedy at one of their venues across the UK.

Profile image optimisation

A very often overlooked area on the Facebook fan page that should be used to best effect. Facebook allows profile image resolutions of up to 200 x 600 pixels.

There's no need to re-invent the wheel every time you require a Facebook application, in many cases you'll find an existing white label application that meets or comes close to meeting your requirements - these can generally be re-skinned and branded as you please. This approach is usually cheaper than building a bespoke Facebook application and works well with things like:

1. Customer service applications such as Get Satisfaction
2. Polls
3. YouTube channel pages
4. Twitter feed
5. Surveys

We have used this approach in the past for the Radley "collections" campaign whereby we re-skinned the Wildfire app.

Zoocha can advise how the promotional strategy should achieve cut through in a saturated environment, driving participation and engagement.

An obvious start point when planning how to increase the exposure of a Facebook app or page is to look at Facebook Ads. The Facebook ad platform is easy to use and ads can be created in minutes, enabling:

1. Target the users you want based on geographic, demographic and interest criteria
2. Easy budget setting and management - ad can be either PPC (pay per click) or CPM (cost per thousand) depending on whether you want to target engagement or exposure
3. Ability to test different ad creatives and ad copy
4. Use the 'like' button to increase the influence of an ad
5. Measure the performance of your ads through the Facebook reporting tool

Zoocha also recommend that you take a ‘cross channel' approach to Facebook marketing. This can be as simple as including a link or ‘Like' button on your website, but could also include driving people to your Facebook page from your other advertising channels e.g. on your marketing emails.

Having been involved with the development of Facebook application since 2009, we have a solid understanding of what can and can't be achieved using the Facebook API.

We can offer advice and consulting on the following areas:

1. Facebook PHP SDK integration into an existing application. We can also advise about how to correctly query the Facebook Object.
2. Facebook JavaScript SDK - we have vast experience in manipulating the core methods (FB.api, FB.init & FB.ui) and are familiar with the common pitfalls that developers often struggle with.
3. Facebook Graph API - calling and extracting data from the JSON objects.
4. Troubleshooting Facebook Social Plugin integration problems.
5. Building Facebook applications using Drupal. See our Property Place project and supporting case-study for information about this.
6. Best practice Open Graph Protocol implementation.

A few Reasons to work with Zoocha

1. We build applications that deliver results and win awards.
2. Campaigns that we have worked on have a track record of success. Several hundred thousand extra fans generated for the UK Skittles fan page over a period of one month...
3. We have experience in developing Facebook applications for very high traffic campaigns that have enjoyed explosive growth. To support this we make sure that the infrastructure that the application sits on is capable of handling large amounts of concurrent users without performance being inhibited.
4. When we build a bespoke Facebook application for a client we ensure that the social application mechanic and architecture can be re-used for future campaigns. New concepts could be re-skinned for minimal cost at a later date, enabling a long term return on investment.
5. Some other applications we have created are: Adecco, Games Workshop, MOBO, Paul Smith Optimistic, Property Place, Radley, Swiftcover Roadology and Swiftcover Summer Mourning.
6. We specialise in cost-effective Facebook applications and have a very transparent costing structure - get in touch for a free quote!