Marie C. Cassandra

We are working on setting up a Facebook contest at Pronto.com to start gaining some Like momentum on our page. Our development schedule is tight right now, so we decided to go with a social media marketing platform company to help us set up, promote, and run the campaign.

Once we started looking for a platform, we quickly realized that there are dozens of companies offering these services in one flavor or another. Be warned, their offerings are similar, but just different enough to make it fairly difficult to do an apples-to-apples price comparison. My suggestion is to go into your hunt with a clear idea of your social media goals and what service level you want.

As a reference, we are currently very happy managing our social media via HootSuite. We were mostly looking for a company who could easily facilitate running a giveaway. We were also looking for some additional analytics that aren’t available via HootSuite and Facebook Insights. For example, we are very interested in being able to track ‘Like’ referrals.

Here is a quick rundown of the main contenders we considered:

• Wildfire: We contacted them the week they were bought by Google, so were completely amazed how responsive they were. They didn’t have the analytics we were looking for, but their Basic DIY options start at $5 per promotion + 99 cents per day making them very attractive.
• Wizehive: Focus on running contests. We wanted a simple “Like” to enter sweepstakes to lower the barrier to entry.
• Votigo: Currently they do not have analytics that enable tracking ‘Like’ sources, but is something that they might be adding when they launch their updated version. They offer four levels of service from DIY pay-as-you-go to full fledged white-labeled enterprise support. 
• Likeable: Appropriately, we found their employees to be very “likeable”. However, they partner with wildfire for competitions so there wasn’t much of a point for us to go through them.
• Strutta: Solid, multi-platform manager with very competitive prices. Can run a sweepstakes for $199 per contest + $ 99 for each month it runs.
• Involver: Just purchased by Oracle in July. Pricing isn’t listed on their website, but they do have some very high profile clients such as BestBuy & Ogilvy. More of a full service suite than a DIY plug-and-play sweepstakes provider.
• Buddy Media: They only seem to offer a premium service. In order to talk about their products and pricing they wanted us to sign an NDA. We found this very off-putting and didn’t pursue further.
• Context Optional: We were unable to get in touch with them via any of the contact methods listed on their website. Looks like we were trying to get in touch with them while they were transitioning to becoming Adobe Social.
• Webtrends: Services and pricing are not available on their website and they never got back to us.
• Extole: Solely consumer to consumer approach to Facebook marketing. Someone can enter a competition, encourage their friends to enter it, and get rewarded when they do. Have several error pages on their website and when we called it went to a voicemail. They did wind up calling us back, but on the whole didn’t feel as responsive and professional as the other sites. 

In the end, it came down to Strutta & Wildfire. They both had competitive pay-as-you go pricing and offered us discounts to try their service. We really wanted to go with the Wildfire guys because they were just so nice. They obviously wanted and valued our business. In the end, however, Strutta had more of the analytics coverage we were looking for. We will be trying them out for a sweepstakes to kick off the holiday shopping season.

What about you, do you use a Social Media Marketing Platform? Do you use one of the ones listed above or one of the many other options?