“We actually drove over 55% conversion rates in some of these cases… You don’t get anything close to that when you put up traditional ads…” — Jon Siegel, Fan Appz CEO

Fan Appz Professional helps small business owners and affiliates grow an online audience, keep them engaged, and monetize that engagement. They have successfully worked with brands like NASCAR, the NBA, NBC/Universal and the Tonight Show, and Fan Appz Professional takes their successful suite of strategies and makes them customizable and affordable with a $50/ month subscription.

I had the chance to catch up with Jon Siegel, founder and CEO of Fan Appz, at the Ad:tech 2010 Speakers Lounge in San Francisco last week. He gave me some insight into what Fan Appz does and how Fan Appz Professional can help small business owners or affiliates with their online social media strategy.

“The techniques that people had been familiar with using: email marketing, buying pay-per-click ads, display ads, or means of driving traffic or acquiring new customers- social media present[s] a whole new series of opportunities and challenges that people need to learn to adapt to. That meant we build a suite of applications that helps businesses use social media to attract and retain an online audience.” — Jon Siegel

What About that 55% Conversion Rate?

For this particular example, Siegel explained that a comedian on Comedy Central wanted to see who were the super-fans. He used Fan Appz to create a series of quizzes, and at the end of each quiz invited fans to enter a Sweepstakes to win a signed DVD and other prizes. During that campaign, over 50% of the people who took the quizzes provided their email addresses. Those email addresses were then used to announce the premiere of his show, and that show became the #1 rated show on Comedy Central of the year.

Siegel explained that Fan Appz began working with larger brands, but that he wanted to develop a suite of applications aimed at smaller clients.

“It’s very simple. It’s a $50 subscription, they get a subset of our functionalities, and if they have support issues they email us at our support and we respond within 24 hours. The application itself is customizable in the sense that you can upload your content, your brand, and you can customize certain areas with your look and feel so that it looks like an extension of your social media presence.” -J.S.

And that sounds like the biggest advantage to Fan Appz- they figure out all of the technical issues while you, the small business owner/ affiliate, get to simply upload content and see it transform into a customized poll or other app that you can post within minutes.

Fan Appz Professional:

Siegel broke down the 3 key things that Fan Appz Professional does that he heard small and medium-sized businesses asking for:

1. Build and Grow Audience. “If they had 50 people following them they wanted 1000. If they had 1000 they wanted 10,000.”

2. Engagement: “Whatever audience they had, they wanted to keep them engaged, otherwise they would become disinterested and lose them.”

3. Make Money: “How do we take this audience that we’ve built and turn it into money? And that means different things to different clients.”

“At the end of the day, so many of the traditional ads that you see may or may not be relevant to you. [Social media content] is highly relevant, and they’re already passionate about that brand, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that conversion rates should go up. The key message is: We’ve built a lot of best practices into our suite of applications to help. A lot of it is just getting out there and trying it, experimenting with it and figuring out what works for them.”

Impressive statistics and a great opportunity for small businesses or affiliates to take advantage of technologies and strategies that are working for big brands. You can find out more at Fan Appz. They also offer a 7 day Free trial so you can test-drive the service.

— Scott James