This is a repost of an article I wrote for Sprout.

As marketers look for the best ways to build brands on social networks they’ve experimented with a wide range of strategies from friending campaigns to network ad buys, but what efforts are most effective? A recent study by MarketingProfs shows that branded applications top the chart, but are under utilized, with less than a quarter of all respondents having created one. At Sprout, we know from first hand experience that applications are at the heart of the most successful campaigns.

eMarket’s article What’s Working for Social Media Marketers? sums up the research well and identifies branded applications as a rich opportunity area. At Sprout, however, we also understand that getting the most out of a branded applications requires an integrated approach to your overall Facebook experience with fan pages, viral content, and sharing opportunities.

As brands move away from traditional marketing strategies, campaigns are becoming increasingly iterative and conversational in nature, with consumers participating through content generation and sharing. In general, consumers have greater expectations around engagement with brands where they socialize online. At Sprout we work with brands to drive engagement opportunities a key points in the cycle (click to enlarge):

Attract
The first stage of the engagement cycle is focused on attracting consumers. For brands that are establishing a presence on social networks, this often means relying on display ads that sit inside and outside of the social networking platform. Sprout helps brands with engaging interactive display ad solutions that include Twitter feeds, RSS feeds, polls and more. Of course, we can make these ads shareable as well to support viral spread.

Identify
The next step is to get fans to engage with your brand on the social networking platform by identifying themselves as fans. We create engaging fan page solutions that are social, interactive, and rich. Our fan pages include viral hooks and incentives to encourage fans to share your page with their friends and drive new fan acquisition.

Engage
With a fan page in place to serve as the foundation for managing relationships, it’s possible to place rich interactive messages into the stream with our Sprout Publisher tools. For example, some of our clients use this to send out weekly coupons, music releases, or polls. It’s even possible to create applications that are shareable within the news feed, so that your fans can engage and share without leaving their page.

In stream messaging is one tool to drive the initial engagement with branded applications that can include games, quizzes, polls and more. Brands that are still building momentum online may also use ad placements to drive application use. For those brands that have built an extensive fan base, they do not need to rely on ad buys because their fan base is large enough to drive the viral spread of the application experience.

Measure
Throughout all the points in the engagement cycle Sprout provides performance metrics to measure the success of ads, fan pages, and applications. Our technology platform allows us to modify all of the above in real time so we can optimize campaign performance based on real time data and take advantage of time sensitive opportunities.

With this cycle in mind, we agree with eMarketer that apps are at the core of successful brand building on social networks, but that in order to take full advantage of their value they must be incorporated into the larger engagement cycle. We believe that this understanding was part of the reason that we were selected to be a Preferred Facebook Developer.

Thanks for reading and we’d love to hear about your experience using applications as part of an integrated strategy.