The dynamic of Facebook application
marketing is rapidly changing. What once was an environment in which your
application was practically guaranteed to go viral has shifted to one in which
you need to come up with creative ways of marketing your application. After
seeing all the applications go viral I have decided to do a brief overview of a
few key features that help your application go viral. While this is not an
exhaustive list, it covers the majority of tricks of the trade that are
currently being used.
- Forced
Invite - The first instance that I
saw this implemented was by David Gentzel when he launched the Happy Hour application. Within a matter of weeks the application has already
become the 13th most popular application on Facebook, which is no easy
feat. This method was duplicated by other applications with varying
success within a matter of hours. What exactly is this method you ask? As
soon as someone decides to add the application they are forced to invite
10 friends. This is a risky tactic but David Gentzel was able to leverage
his other highly popular applications to drive traffic to this
application. Personally, I don’t recommend this tactic. It is a brute
force method that can be used by those with popular applications that
don’t have rich feature sets. I have a feeling that most happy hour users
don’t return to the app on a daily basis, but then again I don’t have
statistics to back that up.
- Invite
after action - When the Facebook platform
first launched there were no restrictions as to how many people an
application user could invite per day. As a result many of the initial
applications that took advantage of the checkbox invite forms grew
rapidly. Since the launch, there is now a limit of 10 friends per day by
each application user. While it has been significantly limited by
Facebook, it is still a useful form of marketing. When building your
application you should definitely come up with an effective way of
allowing users to invite other people.
- News
feed - The news feed is the most
powerful component of Facebook. Period. There are two ways that
applications can leverage the news feed. The first is naturally built in.
Most of the time, when a user adds an application it is displayed in their
friends’ news feeds. While it is not a guarantee that it will show up in other
people’s news feeds (due to a number of factors pertaining to news feed
optimization), this is the primary thing that helps applications spread
virally. When I launched my Bush Countdown clock I added no viral components and relied completely on
people’s news feeds. This has spread the application to close to 8,500
users. While not spectacular, it is hardly something to sneeze at. The
second way of using a news feed is by leveraging the news feed API calls
that Facebook has provided. Within reason, you can regularly post news
items to a user’s mini-feed within their profile. A small percentage of
the time that item will end up on their friends’ news feeds. While this is
severely limited, at least you can get it on to your users’ mini-feeds.
Every form of exposure you can get (within reason) for your application,
you should strive for.
- Referrals/Giveaways - This is the most recent form of viral marketing on
Facebook. I am seeing a number of applications adopting this technique.
The referrals tactic is to come up with an effective way of encouraging
your applications users to market your application for you. They can
market your application on blogs, websites, forums, Facebook walls, messages
to friends and more. The bottom line is that you end up with your
application users being the ones that get scrappy with the marketing, not
you. Giveaways are usually combined with this to provide an incentive for
users to promote your application. There is a risk though in making your
application look cheap, but for now I think this is a great technique.
- One-on-One - Used alone, this technique may not result in viral
growth of your application but combining this technique with one of the
others I have listed can result in exceptional results. The concept is
straight forward. Reach out to people that you think will find your
application useful. This technique is more for targeted applications, not
for generic applications such as poke wars or zombie biting or any of the
other generic applications out there. Reach out to those individuals that
you think will benefit from your application and then follow-up with them
once they’ve added it. The result is passionate users that become your own
brand evangelists. This technique has been used by countless communities
to help generate passionate users. If you nurture your application users
you will see positive results in the long-term.
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