Facebook's preferred marketer program has only existed for 18 months. In that time it has already grown to encompass over 260 of what Facebook refers to as Preferred Marketing Developers, or PMDs, in over 45 countries.
It might be described as the world's most important social media marketing collective and certification program rolled into one.
The main purpose of the program is to connect brands with developers who excel at social marketing (PMDs must be referred by Facebook employees or existing PMDs). Facebook grants certain privileges to PMDs, allowing them to collect analytics and serve ads into the social network with the latest and most advanced tools.
PMDs themselves develop some of the best social marketing technologies available: interfaces that allow brands to publish to thousands of individual Facebook pages at a click, 0r buzzword-monitoring filters that allow them to identify trending topics.
PMDs must understand the crucial positive feedback loop between paid, earned, and owned social media.
Among the PMDs there's an even more elite group known as Strategic Preferred Marketing Developers (SPMDs) of which there are only 14 in existence.
In this report, we'll speak to four SPMDs and reveal some of their strategies and insights into Facebook marketing.
The SPMD designation is only awarded to those marketing companies that are "best in class," and understand all the nuts and bolts and how they fit together. Many of the SPMDs also have a deep knowledge of other areas of digital marketing, and it's often this contextual knowledge that differentiates them from the rest of the pack.
We've distilled the SPMDs' insights and contributions into five principal themes.
Multi-Touch Attribution.
Pre-Testing Paid Media.
Measuring Quality Of Engagement.
Understanding Facebook Activity In Emerging Markets.
Influencing Facebook Product Development.
We'll also touch on whether the PMD program has proven a reliable channel for successful business relationships.
Finally, we'll use the PMD program as a window into the present and future of strategic marketing on Facebook.
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Click here to download the charts and data sets in Excel »
Mapping PMDs
Facebook has divided SPMDs and PMDs into four distinct areas of expertise, so that brands and businesses can connect with those most in tune with their plans:
Pages: These are brand and business pages, which are free to start, but come loaded with options and tracking tools that PMDs can manage and help clients parse.
Ads: All paid ad products on Facebook, including right-rail display ads and promoted posts that show on user news feeds. Influential ad-focused PMDs recently helped push Facebook to streamline its paid ad product line.
Apps: Marketing developers can develop apps like games and catalogs that users can access on brand Facebook pages, the App Center, and on the open Web if Open Graph is enabled.
Insights: PMDs hook into Facebook's API and often offer clients an analytics dashboard. They may also offer consulting services to help clients make sense of, and act on, data.
Of course there's a great deal of overlap and many PMDs have more than one area of expertise, as the graphic above shows.
Moving Beyond Last-Click Attribution
PMD campaigns are not a matter of simply acquiring likes, or putting some dollars to work in order to gain a wider audience for a couple of posts.
Facebook success demands a holistic marketing approach, and that means moving beyond the digital media's obsession over the last click.
The last click mentality puts all the value in the last website or service that drove a customer to a landing page, or to carry out a desired action. That's shortsighted.
"Far too many people are concerned with last-click attribution," says Jeff Feldman, director of strategy at Adobe.
"It comes down to multi-touch attribution, and all these channels — search, social, apps — and how they fit together," Feldman adds. "The same holds true on the platform level. On Facebook, you want to fully understand how users interact with your pages, apps, and ads, because they are all interconnected with the user experience."
For example, the casino and hotel company Caesars Entertainment has more than 80 Facebook apps, in addition to multiple pages for its principal hotel properties.
The company wanted to integrate tracking and attribution across their Facebook presence, and contracted with SPMD Adobe to do so.
Adobe's tracking effort successfully removed the focus from the "last click," and revealed that many app users were later contacting Caesars to book hotel stays and entertainment and dining deals online.
Caesars invested in upgrading and managing those apps.
As a result, the brand increased "likes" by 10% a month and social-driven visits to its digital properties by 13%.
"A significant portion of our app revenue came from people who interacted with our apps and later came back through a different channel to purchase," says Eric Petersen, director of new media marketing at Caesars Entertainment.
Pre-Testing Paid Media
PMDs use powerful analytical tools to analyze non-paid engagement on a brand's Facebook page and in its apps. They then use those insights to sculpt more effective paid media campaigns.
In early 2013, Brand Networks started working with a national beverage brand that wanted to increase its page fan base by 100,000 and leverage the page to drive in-store sales.
Brand Networks took a four-step approach to accomplish this goal:
Growing the fan base organically.
Analyzing audience engagement with organic content by demographic and market.
Retargeting the right audience based on the resulting insights.
Monetizing the fan base and measuring return on investment.
Brand Networks was able to grow the client fan base and reach 100,000 fans within four months.
The key was to test content on the brand's page, even as the audience grew, and then double-down on the posts that audiences responded to the most.
Another SPMD, Adaptly, also achieved good results by repeatedly retargeting users who were interacting with a brand's organic content.
In the case of an airline that Adaptly worked with, the brand's page engagement rate nearly doubled to around 15%, with over 79,000 individual actions, attributable strictly to page posts promoted by Adaptly.
Meanwhile, total reach more than doubled to 63% of the airline's targeted fans, meaning that well over half of the targeted audience saw the promotion content at least once.
What's more, the airline's promoted posts that appeared in the Facebook News Feed had a click-through rate of 5.97%, when the average click-through rate of a brand in the travel industry on Facebook is just 0.26%.
Some PMDs even engineer their own index for ranking how well earned media content will perform as paid media.
For example, SHIFT uses an analytical method called StoryRank.
"We look at the individual organic page posts in real-time and score them from 1 to 100 across five metrics. The higher ranking the post scores, the better we believe it will be for paid media," said Mike Khristo, director of engineering at SHIFT.
Brands can then decide whether that content should be repurposed for earned media again, or if they should put money behind it and run an ad — a promoted post, for example.
Measuring The Quality Rather Than The Quantity Of Engagement
It may be cliché to talk about focusing on quality over quantity, but the conversation is needed because the truth is that social media marketing remains hooked on quantity metrics.
That's understandable because quality of engagement is more difficult to measure, but there are ways to do it.
"It's important to look at a number of different metrics that underscore quality of engagement," said Jamie Tedford, CEO of Brand Networks. "It's about seeing the whole picture: positive comments, negative comments, shares, clicks, likes, unlikes, etc."
Campaign goals vary depending on the vertical a brand operates in, and so PMDs need to develop a broad arsenal of analytics tools. That, in turn, makes it crucial for them to understand the technical aspects of hooking into Facebook's API.
"It's our job to dissect user interactions into microns of information," said Mike Khristo, director of engineering at SHIFT. "We collect this information and then make it available to clients in a variety of ways, including programmatic data dumps, Excel, and our own product called Media Analyzer which allows clients to login and pull data whenever they want."
The data itself is one of the values that PMDs can provide, and they can help clients shape it to make it more useful to executives.
Khristo adds, "With a little bit of context, the data becomes very insightful and is eventually filtered up to the chief marketing officers and decision makers at these brands."
Understanding How Facebook Activity Differs By Region
Facebook's PMDs encompass firms in over 45 countries, which allows agencies to better address cultural nuances and set the right parameters. Otherwise, they may be thrown off by cross-cultural differences.
For example, Facebook users in Singapore average more than 38 minutes per visit to the site, according Experian. Compare that to U.S. users who average just over 20 minutes per visit.
Culture can also affect seasonal usage patterns. A July 2013 study conducted by The Online Project found that Facebook users in the Middle East use the site 30% more during Ramadan, compared to other parts of the year. Knowledgeable brands dedicate 20% of their annual media spend to reach customers during those 29-30 days.
Facebook itself values the feedback it receives from PMDs operating in emerging markets.
"Emerging markets can be hard to penetrate, and PMDs on the ground in them help us do so," a Facebook PMD representative told BI Intelligence. "PMDs are very strategic to Facebook's global strategy."
Influencing Facebook Product Development
In fact, PMDs collaborate with Facebook's internal product teams very closely. On a technical basis, it's usually daily, according to the PMDs we spoke with. On the business side, PMDs interact with Facebook on a case-by-case basis
Facebook benefits from these discussions because they serve as a window into which brands think of Facebook as a marketing platform.
This collaboration often times leads to the development or enhancement of Facebook's marketing products. For example, Adobe's Jeff Feldman said that his team helped Facebook's product team build Facebook's first brand page.
Brand pages, it goes without saying, are now the cornerstone of Facebook marketing. And there were more PMD-fueled improvements.
"Page post scheduling is a great example of a feature that stemmed from PMD innovation," a Facebook rep told us. "Another example is ad permutation in PMD ads tools, which allow marketers to automatically create multiple ads based on a set of targeting criteria."
Furthermore, PMDs gather regularly amongst themselves to discuss Facebook marketing strategy and the social media landscape more generally, so that the grouping serves as an informal trade association.
What Does The Future Of Social Media Marketing Look Like?
With over 260 PMDs all vying for the same pool of ad dollars, it is unlikely that they all will be able to remain in business.
"There will definitely be consolidation," said Feldman of Adobe. "Eventually there will be less PMDs in the system, but the ones that do stick around will get larger."
By way of example, Syncapse, a Facebook PMD, has recently filed for bankruptcy. The company had taken $45 million in funding, had built a staff of around 180 employees, and had worked with blue-chip clients such as Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, and JP Morgan. The company appeared to have all the necessary components to be successful. What went wrong?
In social media, skimming fees from ad placements simply isn't where the money will be, at least not until there's much greater scale built into the industry.
Matthieu Chéreau, CEO of another of Facebook's PMDs, Tigerlily Apps, explained this point of view:
"The fact that Syncapse is a PMD doesn't necessarily mean that Syncapse is expected to take all of its revenue out of Facebook-owned and paid actions," said Chéreau.
PMDs should see a greater share of revenue come from software and technology, or software-as-a-service, and Syncapse lagged there.
Syncapse was also overly dependent on a single client, BlackBerry, and suffered as the smartphone market began to decline. (See chart, right.)
The lessons? Diversify your client base, and build your company on a foundation of great technology, not fee-skimming.
Even as Facebook's PMD program consolidates, other social media players may grow their certification and preferred partner programs.
Twitter's certification program is still just that: a seal of approval for Twitter-focused marketing and data products that meet certain requirements. Pinterest is still developing an API, but may launch a similar program once it does.
We need to see the bigger picture here: Social marketing platforms aren't sales drivers per se, but they do excel at customer acquisition, customer segmentation and driving long-term loyalty and life-time value.
Facebook is not a terminal marketing channel as TV might have been, but a means for brands to begin a conversation, and build compelling content and experiences, and communicate with present and potential customers.
PMDs are at once a way in and guides to the ecosystem, but they also aren't miracle workers.
BOTTOM LINE
Facebook's top preferred marketers offer the best window into the inner workings of Facebook and the direction that its products and platform strategy will take. Adobe and other SPMDs helped nudge Facebook toward its recent streamlining of its ad product lineup.
Strategic Preferred Marketing Developers combine top-tier technology and knowledge. Among other things, they're pushing brands to move beyond last-click attribution and measure metrics that track quality rather than quantity.
With more than 260 Facebook PMDs all vying for the same pool of social media dollars, it is unlikely that they all will be able to remain in business, and there will be some consolidation. At the same time, other platforms will launch or grow their preferred marketing partner programs.
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