• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer, June 7, 2012

According to a recent Wildfire analysis of over 10,000 social media campaigns to see what types of campaigns generated the most earned media, the most entered campaigns are not the campaigns that generate the most earned media, or sharing activity. Certain campaign application types generate higher entry and participation rates (contests and sweepstakes for example), while other types are more likely to be shared via a news feed post or an invite to the app (pick-your-favorites, quizzes and trivia).

When 68% of Facebook users say that a recommendation from a Facebook friend would make them more likely to buy a specific product or visit a retailer, however, brands want all the earned media they can get, says the report.

Promotions are one of the most popular marketing methods on Facebook whether sweepstakes, contests, or coupons and more. The study reports a number of actionable results for social marketers, including the types of social marketing campaign that tend to get the highest participation rates, the different campaign types that get the highest sharing rates, and the common thread among campaign types that generates the most sharing with friends on Facebook.

In addition, other key findings from the study include:

• Coupons, giveaways, and sweepstakes get the highest amount of entries on average.
• “Pick-your-favorites,” quizzes and trivia that get the most shares by users, thus creating more earned media for the brand.
• The campaign types that generate the most earned media are those that allow users to reveal personal preferences, tastes or opinions to their Facebook friends. These include pick-your-favorites, quiz and trivia applications.
• People are equally as likely to enter contests and sweepstakes whether they heard about them directly from a brand or from a friend’s post. In other words, where a user learns about a contest or sweepstakes within Facebook does not impact the likelihood they will enter it.
• The earned media generated by users sharing to their networks about interactions with these apps resulted in a significant conversion of new users— in other words, the earned media is working. For example, 82% of the users that clicked on a friend’s news feed post about a quiz they’d taken went on to take the quiz themselves.

On average, coupons, giveaways, and sweepstakes get the most entries and Facebook engagement. These campaigns are closely correlated with low barriers to entry (as in a sweepstakes), high-value perceived rewards (as with coupons), and the popularity of a “sure thing” (as with giveaways).

When earned media is the focus of the analysis, an entirely new set of high performing campaign types emerge, with an interesting commonality. The campaigns types that are most “shareable” are campaigns that include “pick-your-favorites,” quizzes, and trivia.

The most-shared campaign applications are designed to either:

• Allow the user to discover an aspect of his personality of which he was previously unaware
• Display facets of his personality that he knows about and wants to share

The most important question of all, says the report, is whether or not the shares generated by users get additional new users to engage with the branded campaign too. The analysis of earned media’s ability to draw additional users into engagement with a brand showed positive results: “pick-your-favorites,” survey, and quiz campaigns (that appear in users’ news feeds) have a high chance of being seen and clicked on by their friends.

The study reveals that 82% of the users that click on a news feed post, shared by a friend who took a quiz, will go on to take that quiz themselves. This indicates that when a user’s attention is piqued by the news feed, the engagement potential is very high.

The report says that earned media can account for up to a 12% boost in engagement rates, which means viewing, clicking and participating with a campaign.

For additional information and access to the complete report, please visit Wildfire here.