To get the word out about the Coke Zero Countdown -- hosted by Ryan Seacrest and featuring Darius Rucker and the band Daughtry -- Coke Zero, Papa Johns, Best Buy and several other companies are spreading the word on their Facebook pages using a new promotional tool called Wall Apps.
Wall Apps is a new product available from the social media management company Vitrue. Vitrue is the same company that powers Apple's App Store Facebook Page. Wall Apps is exactly what it sounds like -- a range of applications that can be activated and accessed from Facebook wall posts. So instead of clicking on a link and redirecting from your stream to another page, you can play video, look at a slideshow, get a coupon and create user polls.
Vitrue says that brands are able to get 110 times the reach using the Wall compared to other areas of a Facebook Page, like tabs. Users are more likely to interact with an app or a feature if it can exist inside the Wall than if they have to go to another screen.
Coke Zero, Best Buy, Papa Johns and the band Daughtry are all using Wall App polls to promote the main Coke Zero Countdown event. Because the polls can be customized by the page owner, each brand can ask their own questions and then fans can respond and add comments directly to the wall posting.
We think Wall Apps has some amazing potential. As an end user, I prefer to interact with brands in my newsfeed. For brands, it keeps fans engaged -- a crucial part of using Facebook as a marketing platform.
Because Vitrue also has an analytics system built into its suite of tools, brands can trace and see which campaigns work best -- so if one type of poll or graphic has a really positive effect on traffic, but another poll doesn't, marketers can make better decisions in the future.
As Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms take a larger role in branded campaigns, we expect to see a multitude of tools built on top of these platforms.
What do you think of the Wall Apps concept? Let us know in the comments.