If you run a business and know the value of promotional campaigns on Facebook but have been stopped by the logistics, legal aspects and costs, you might want to check out Wildfire Interactive’s Promotion Builder application. The service, which has now been integrated with Publisher’s Clearing House’s new PCH Boost API for sweepstakes handling, is a great solution for instantly walking Facebook’s prohibitive promotional terms.
Through an exclusive partnership between Wildfire and PCH, you have access to an SMM (Social Media Marketing) platform with multiple business benefits, including the ability to setup and publish promotional campaigns quickly:
- Satisfies Facebook’s new promotions guidelines, which were updated in late 2009. As part of the changes, Facebook stipulated that they have to approve your promotional campaigns. You also cannot suggest that Facebook endorses your campaign, and can only mention “Facebook” in a couple of acceptable ways. The app ensures that your campaigns satisfy Facebook’s rules.
- Covers legalities and rules. Sweepstakes always have standard rules and legalities about age of participants and so on. You set the prize amounts and the app generates the appropriate rules for your campaign.
- Winner selection and prize fulfillment. Because of the partnership with PCH — who have decades of experience with sweepstakes — these aspects of sweepstakes are handled for you. PCH will select and award winners for prizes of up to $100,000. These services are free to Promotion Builder users for the next three months, up to Jun 15, 2010. After that, there’ll be a per-entry fee, though this amount was not specified in the press release.
Wildfire’s Promotion Builder could be a great way for small businesses to leverage Facebook campaigns, without all the administrative hassle and legal costs. Even if you are not running a sweepstake, you can use the app for other interactive campaigns, such as building out your business’ social network, getting newsletter signups and more. You can learn more about the product via the Wildfire website.
Update
To those of you wondering about the cost of using Promotion Builder, Victoria Ransom of Wildfire Interactive informs me that regular service is not free. The cost is $0.99 per promotion per day. What is free (for ~3 months) is the extra sweepstakes integration with Publisher’s Clearing House.
Quick note: we've run a number of sweepstakes using the WildFire app for some big brands and it works really well! Nice work WF!
Comment by Peter Corbett — March 16, 2010 @ 12:29 pm
We've run both sweepstakes and photo contests using WildFire for our clients and it's been great!
Comment by Chad Richards — March 16, 2010 @ 12:37 pm
looks like a great program, wish i had thought of it, i'm going to check it out for! p.s. what facebook connect plugin are you using?
Comment by adelaide dancing — March 16, 2010 @ 2:56 pm
Peter & Chad: Thanks for the kind comments… we really appreciate it!
Comment by Alain Chuard — March 16, 2010 @ 7:32 pm
I also use Wildfire frequently and am a big fan of the company! They definitely get my recommendation too!
Comment by Helen Todd — March 17, 2010 @ 7:57 am
The article says that this will be free for 3 months, I tried to create a test sweepstake and I get charged.
Comment by dmitry Savelyev — March 17, 2010 @ 4:33 pm
Sorry to hear that, Dmitry. I went with what the press release said. Are you outside of the USA? It's possible that offer is only valid in the USA, and if that's the case apologies. I will contact Wildfire.
Comment by Raj Kumar Dash — March 18, 2010 @ 7:21 am
Dmitry, I have updated the post as per a response from Wildfire Interactive. You have to pay for basic service, but the sweepstakes-handling feature is free for 3 months, until Jun 15th, 2010.
Comment by Raj Dash — March 18, 2010 @ 11:16 am
@Raj: Thanks for updating the post!
Comment by Alain Chuard — March 18, 2010 @ 10:51 pm