December 15, 2007 at 12:10Promotion of Facebook applications
Although the Facebook blog is new, I don’t think it’s worth opening it with eulogies about millions of users, the highest network growth rates and a unique development platform, which provided all this joy.
If someone needs these praises - they are full on the Internet. Well, or look at least at Alex’s version of Facebook’s growing popularity compared to MySpace: Of
course, it’s slightly divorced from reality, but it’s cool in conveying dynamics.
It seems to me that the only thing that is really important to know about Facebook (hereinafter referred to as the FB) is that it is an excellent environment for the virus distribution of small programs.
How it works?
The user installs the program and uses it. In the process, he usually interacts with his friends in the FB. For example, you need to invite a friend in order to play a game with him, or give him a virtual postcard, write something on his "wall" and so on.
In addition, applications leave notifications of actions performed by the user in special feeds in the profiles of his friends. For example, entering the FB, I see that one of my friends has installed a new program and I can also install it for myself. Or I see that one of my friends sent something to another - being interested, I follow the link - and now I have unobtrusively connected to the next application.
This approach leads to the fact that the daily audience of users of popular applications is hundreds of thousands and even millions of users. Really impressive? Moreover, it turned out that creating applications on the Facebook platform is not so difficult.
A much more complicated (and more interesting) question is: How to make your application popular?
Any (even offline) virus needs to overcome a certain minimum threshold, after which its spread will increase progressively. But how to overcome it?
The commonly used means of promoting applications on the FB are as follows:
1. Placement of your application in the general listing.At the moment there are a little more than 11,000 applications in it, of which about 100 were added just yesterday ... It’s hard enough to swim in this crowd of zinger, each of which wants to hit the target.
2. Send an invitation to install a new application to your friends. The relevance of the proverb “Do not have a hundred rubles, but have a hundred friends” as applied to the FB goes to a new level. But if you do not have these one hundred friends, then things will not go forward ... Trying to get in to “friends” to strangers and immediately suggest installing your application is very quickly stopped by complaints in the Abuse Team and your account will be blocked without warning.
3. Spam in private messages or on bulletin boards of groups.It causes the same consequences in the form of an account lock (in my opinion, even automatic, judging by the latest posts on TechCranche ). At the same time, spam is still present: it’s not at all difficult to create a new virtual Persian, quickly get to sleep - and not be afraid for his tomorrow. But firstly, the effectiveness of such spam is still extremely low, and let’s not we all go down to such a banality? :)
4. Advertising on the internal network Social Ads . To pay for the promotion of an application that does not necessarily bring you money ... Perhaps for some it is an option, but unlikely for many.
I’m writing about all these options not out of idle interest - at the moment I have to solve the problem of promoting our application on the FB myself. The application is called Giftoscope and serves for non-standard selection of gifts to your friends and relatives. Briefly, the essence of “non-standard” is that the Gift Box allows you to choose a gift not only by age, price and other standard parameters, but also by color, originality (from “the world did not see” to classics), by usefulness (from trinkets to things, making life easier), by softness (from fluff to metal) - and so on.
If the user enters his friend’s name in the FB, the Gift Analyzer analyzes the gender and age of the friend, as well as the interests that the friend indicated in his profile. Based on these data, the Gift Card offers various gift options, among which you can choose by applying various filters and entering additional conditions.
So, the application is ready and functioning properly. Therefore, the question of its promotion is currently quite acute. And the legal promotion tools, to put it mildly, are small, and I used it completely:
1. I placed the application in the Application Directory.
2. I invited all my friends to connect to the application, but there are very few of them on the FB.
3. I posted an offer to try the Gift Box in business and send some gifts to my friends in my regional network. I asked my friends to do the same on their networks.
The result for this morning is 19 connected users, of which 7 are my friends. That is, not at all thick.
Hence the questions:
1. Perhaps someone has experience promoting applications on the FB? Share please.
2. The bright heads of Habr will surely be able to come up with a new way of promotion - legal and effective. Will we discuss?
PS Well, of course, I ask all Habralyuda who have accounts on the FB to install the Gift Box to choose and give virtual New Year's gifts to their friends. That alone will be a great help.
If someone needs these praises - they are full on the Internet. Well, or look at least at Alex’s version of Facebook’s growing popularity compared to MySpace: Of
course, it’s slightly divorced from reality, but it’s cool in conveying dynamics.
It seems to me that the only thing that is really important to know about Facebook (hereinafter referred to as the FB) is that it is an excellent environment for the virus distribution of small programs.
How it works?
The user installs the program and uses it. In the process, he usually interacts with his friends in the FB. For example, you need to invite a friend in order to play a game with him, or give him a virtual postcard, write something on his "wall" and so on.
In addition, applications leave notifications of actions performed by the user in special feeds in the profiles of his friends. For example, entering the FB, I see that one of my friends has installed a new program and I can also install it for myself. Or I see that one of my friends sent something to another - being interested, I follow the link - and now I have unobtrusively connected to the next application.
This approach leads to the fact that the daily audience of users of popular applications is hundreds of thousands and even millions of users. Really impressive? Moreover, it turned out that creating applications on the Facebook platform is not so difficult.
A much more complicated (and more interesting) question is: How to make your application popular?
Any (even offline) virus needs to overcome a certain minimum threshold, after which its spread will increase progressively. But how to overcome it?
The commonly used means of promoting applications on the FB are as follows:
1. Placement of your application in the general listing.At the moment there are a little more than 11,000 applications in it, of which about 100 were added just yesterday ... It’s hard enough to swim in this crowd of zinger, each of which wants to hit the target.
2. Send an invitation to install a new application to your friends. The relevance of the proverb “Do not have a hundred rubles, but have a hundred friends” as applied to the FB goes to a new level. But if you do not have these one hundred friends, then things will not go forward ... Trying to get in to “friends” to strangers and immediately suggest installing your application is very quickly stopped by complaints in the Abuse Team and your account will be blocked without warning.
3. Spam in private messages or on bulletin boards of groups.It causes the same consequences in the form of an account lock (in my opinion, even automatic, judging by the latest posts on TechCranche ). At the same time, spam is still present: it’s not at all difficult to create a new virtual Persian, quickly get to sleep - and not be afraid for his tomorrow. But firstly, the effectiveness of such spam is still extremely low, and let’s not we all go down to such a banality? :)
4. Advertising on the internal network Social Ads . To pay for the promotion of an application that does not necessarily bring you money ... Perhaps for some it is an option, but unlikely for many.
I’m writing about all these options not out of idle interest - at the moment I have to solve the problem of promoting our application on the FB myself. The application is called Giftoscope and serves for non-standard selection of gifts to your friends and relatives. Briefly, the essence of “non-standard” is that the Gift Box allows you to choose a gift not only by age, price and other standard parameters, but also by color, originality (from “the world did not see” to classics), by usefulness (from trinkets to things, making life easier), by softness (from fluff to metal) - and so on.
If the user enters his friend’s name in the FB, the Gift Analyzer analyzes the gender and age of the friend, as well as the interests that the friend indicated in his profile. Based on these data, the Gift Card offers various gift options, among which you can choose by applying various filters and entering additional conditions.
So, the application is ready and functioning properly. Therefore, the question of its promotion is currently quite acute. And the legal promotion tools, to put it mildly, are small, and I used it completely:
1. I placed the application in the Application Directory.
2. I invited all my friends to connect to the application, but there are very few of them on the FB.
3. I posted an offer to try the Gift Box in business and send some gifts to my friends in my regional network. I asked my friends to do the same on their networks.
The result for this morning is 19 connected users, of which 7 are my friends. That is, not at all thick.
Hence the questions:
1. Perhaps someone has experience promoting applications on the FB? Share please.
2. The bright heads of Habr will surely be able to come up with a new way of promotion - legal and effective. Will we discuss?
PS Well, of course, I ask all Habralyuda who have accounts on the FB to install the Gift Box to choose and give virtual New Year's gifts to their friends. That alone will be a great help.