Back in January 2010, a small FBfund company called Wildfire was making a name for itself by helping brands and businesses launch viral campaigns — sweepstakes, contests, and the like — on Twitter and Facebook. It had around eight employees.
Fast forward to today: Wildfire now has a team of over 120, and it’s raking in money from a host of top brands and companies (as well as many smaller ones). And now, they’re upping the ante: in addition to the viral campaign builder that has been their core product to date, Wildfire is now offering what it’s calling a ‘Social Marketing Suite’ — which CEO Victoria Ransom says makes Wildfire a one-stop shop for all of your online marketing needs.
So what exactly does the new suite entail? The first new product is the Page Manager, which is meant to help businesses craft Facebook Pages that look good and can be frequently updated. There are several templates and support for custom designs, and support for multiple tabs.
The second new product is Messenger, which allows companies to schedule posts and manage inbound messages — you can delegate certain messages to specific employees, if you’d like.
The last new product is the Dashboard, which offers an overview of analytics that’s more detailed than Facebook’s built-in Insights feature. There’s also a mode that lets you chart your progress against a competitor’s (we saw a similar feature from ContentAide back in April).
Rounding out the suite is the Promotion Builder, which has been Wildfire’s main product to date. This allows companies to construct giveaways using a straightforward interface — drag and drop the text fields you’d like to require during the sign up, tweak the banners, then enter the official rules and you’re off and running.
The company isn’t announcing exact pricing yet (you’ll have to call in to get a quote), but says that the suite will range from “low hundreds” to “low thousands” of dollars per month for a subscription, which includes both the campaign builder and the products above (though different features will be available for different plans). The social suite is already being used by some large brands, including Facebook itself, Lady Gaga, and EA Sports.
Wildfire isn’t alone in this space — competitors like North Social and Involver also offer applications that can help with many of these tasks. But this is also a huge market, with many businesses eager to establish themselves online without having to hire someone to design them a custom Facebook page.
