Over 75% of marketers aren't sure if social media is working for them. Adobe Social, part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, offers tools, data, insights, and expertise to crack the code of social. The company aims at removing the walls around social, so you have visibility into how effectively your paid media is pushing traffic to your social networks. The solution makes use of real-time data to find out what gets your communities talking, and helps keeping them engaged by creating more targeted content and experiences. From messaging and offers to media buys and influencers, it is crucial to receive key information about what's driving results and gaining insight. You need to know what it takes to shift customers from awareness to purchase, and use the information to influence your broader marketing campaigns.

Key capabilities of Adobe Social

• Create content once and publish it to multiple places in ways that are appropriate for each social network, and choose when, where, and to whom content is pushed.
• Easily create and deploy interactive Facebook Apps with either complete design control or built from quick-to-deploy templates like contests, coupons, and questionnaires.
• Automatically assign published content and apps to a campaign and receive insight into how your content drives action, such as purchases.
• Use real-time insights to understand the reach and impact of your posts to identify opportunities for social advertising and other marketing promotions.
• Create and manage Facebook Sponsored Stories campaigns: Set your budget and target and then launch with a couple of clicks.
• Measure the effectiveness of campaigns, content, and engagement automatically. Understand which marketing tactics worked best and make improvements on-the-fly.
• Get a complete view of your customers across all touchpoints—not just on social networks. Understand their behavior, brand preferences, purchases, loyalty, and advocacy, and use it to inform more effective marketing.
• Monitor and respond to conversations within your communities on Facebook and Twitter—or anywhere it happens online, whether it’s a blog comment or a conversation on a message board.
• Respond to questions and issues by routing them to the right people and tracking them through their resolution.
• Identify trends and influencers as they emerge, and use real-time insights to go from strategy to execution in a matter of minutes or seconds.
• Tailor permissions to organize your social programs however best fits your business—by brand, business unit, team, time zone, or language.
• Use built-in review processes to maintain the right controls globally, while empowering local teams.

Adobe AdLens is the first unified ad management system for digital marketing efforts across search, display, and social media. It offers insight, control, and automation for cross-channel campaign management. Adobe AdLens for Social aims at opening new marketing opportunities on social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Automation eliminates complexity in campaign management and reporting workflows, while algorithm-based optimization and predictive modeling tools increase success in any social ad marketplace.

In social advertising, it's easy to spend your marketing budget without understanding the capabilities of each network's advertising products, how to get more from your investments in real time, or how to accurately measure the success of your efforts.

Adobe CQ Social Communities helps brands integrate and leverage social media and dedicated branded communities on their digital properties. With Social Communities capabilities, companies can make their websites social with user-generated content alongside premium content. Marketers can use out-of-the box functionality to offer social login, social plug-ins, comments, ratings, forums, blogs, social calendaring, and extended user profiles. Site owners have full moderation and permission-based controls over what content appears where and when.

Expedia: A social success story

In six short weeks Expedia accelerated its presence on Facebook by energizing its brand enthusiasts, building a base of new brand advocates, and creating new value for Expedia supplier partners. With a fun and innovative Facebook campaign called “The FriendTrips Game,” Expedia reached one million fans, representing a 750% increase in fans of the Expedia Facebook Page. Expedia’s performance was a result of a unified and integrated approach to acquiring and engaging fans on Facebook. Partnering with Adobe early in the process, the teams ideated, built, and optimized an innovative social application and marketing campaign for Expedia.

Getting to critical mass has been the first hurdle to drive earned media and word of mouth in Facebook. Adobe worked in close collaboration with Expedia, the world’s leading online travel company, to create an integrated Facebook marketing experience that optimized the performance of Facebook paid media and delivered a compelling social and viral experience for users.

All aboard: The trip of a lifetime with five friends

FriendTrips was an interactive, viral Facebook sweepstakes experience that enabled users to enter to win vacation packages. Users could enter by piloting a virtual plane bound for a specific destination and inviting five friends to join them. When accepting an invitation, invitees were encouraged to create planes of their own. The FriendTrips experience was highly social, requiring friends to fill planes with friends to enter contests. An important source of traffic to the application was friends’ clicking on friend’s invitations in the Newsfeed. To maintain user excitement throughout the campaign, Expedia gave away daily prizes based on votes associated with user-generated submissions of photos and stories.

The FriendTrips campaign was supported by a unified multichannel marketing campaign. To jump-start the sweepstakes, Expedia integrated print advertising, celebrity endorsements from Olympic speed skater Apolo Ono, email marketing campaigns to Expedia customers, placements on Expedia.com and supplier partner sites, as well as a robust Facebook advertising campaign using Sponsored Stories and standard marketplace and premium ads that drove the majority of users.

During the course of the six week campaign, the cost-per-fan was reduced by over 80%. As the total quantity of acquired fans rose, the efficiency at which Expedia could acquire a new fan improved. The power of social influence is clear in the inverse relationship between total fans and cost per fan in the Expedia campaign.

A critical element of achieving scale and efficiency was social clicks, which are clicks that originated from an ad that include the social endorsement of a connection. More than half of Expedia’s ad clicks in Facebook were social, demonstrating the influence of endorsements from friends. Compounding this effect, the rising number of fans resulted in a wider distribution of socially endorsed ads and contributed meaningfully to the lower cost per fan as the campaign progressed.

Facebook ad campaign optimization spanned the audience segments targeted, creative used, and bidding. Audience segments were both added and pruned using insights from the FriendTrips application engagement data. Engaged segments were added and broken apart for more granular targeting, while segments with low engagement were removed from the campaign. Creative assets were built and tested to capitalize on strong external events, such as the Royal Wedding, using images such as tiaras and copy such as “Travel Like a Royal” with excellent success. Additionally, strong performing segments were targeted with specific creative, such as Lady Gaga fans, to expand momentum. Bids were automatically set by the Adobe Advertising platform to reflect the value of the segment.

Sponsored Stories became a growing campaign component as the quantity of fans rose. The unit ultimately drove a significant portion of all Likes in the Expedia campaign. In addition, sponsored ads drove a more efficient cost per Like as compared to standard marketplace ads.

Expedia can now deliver compelling offers and relevant content to engage and capitalize on their new community of over one million fans on Facebook, extending the investment they made in Facebook marketing.

By MediaBUZZ