What’s the Best Way to Advertise Social Apps?

Posted by Jonathan Kleiman on January 12th, 2008 9:47 AM

There has been considerable buzz on the Facebook Developer’s Forum about the best way to advertise applications. For a while some people were getting paid terribly low amounts for their clicks, and some of the services have apparently been buggy.

Since the best way to find out which one is the best service is to conduct empirical tests, I was hoping some of our readers who subscribe to them could provide some insight. I’m sure there are also some cool ideas out there that are outside of the box.

Since some cities are so heavily saturated with Facebook users, perhaps it’s even time to start considering advertising applications through other means.

I recently came across one of the most effective things I’ve ever seen a company do to market its product. My pizza box had an advertisement on it! Not some ugly ad… but a beautiful, high resolution, sexy advertisement for Tag. When I first saw it, I thought “wow.”

pizza box advertising with fresh tracks media It wasn’t until after 1 week of it staring at me from my fridge and 2 weeks of it sitting in a recycling pile that I realized just how brilliant it was.

Kudos to Fresh Tracks Media for coming up with a novel marketing idea!

Leave a comment if you have something to say about the best way to market an application, within Facebook or otherwise.

- Jonathan Kleiman writes for the blawg LegalIntellects.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 12th, 2008 at 9:47 am and is filed under Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Peter Corbett 8 months ago 1 point
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Nick, I'm building an application for my client (who shall remain nameless) that focuses on fleshing partner of teh 18-24 year old demo's social graph. The app will advertised to this audience via Socialmedia.com, but also through a network of brand embassadors on 300 college campuses nation wide. This client is fortunate enough to have an opt-in email list of 350k college students as well, which it sends monthly newsletters to and within which the application install will be promoted.

Pizza box toppers are not a new use of media, but it is certainly an interesting one.

A tactic that application developers could be looking to employ should be google ppc advertising. I don't know that i've seen people doing that with their apps yet and it makes a lot of sense due to the reach google has.

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http://www.twitter.com/corbett3000

Adam 8 months ago 1 point
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I wish pubmatic.com would work on facebook apps. i don't work for them, but they're solid with website ads.

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http://apps.facebook.com/cribfinder/

Alex 8 months ago 1 point
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For our video sharing website kiwiclip.com we use a mix of adwords, adbrite, shopping center flyers, and much like above, dominos pizza change, have leaflet handed out with ever pizza.

Works also well with Video stores.

Something to think about.

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http://www.kiwiclip.com