The Hidden Cost of Facebook Applications

Posted by Nick O'Neill on September 27th, 2007 8:30 AM

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Every day I talk with clients and prospective clients about developing Facebook applications and the best way to go about it. The reality of the matter is that unless you have some insanely catchy idea that naturally goes viral, chances are you are going to need some help. That help comes in the form of marketing. All the larger applications have been launching new apps which they the cross promote. For all the remaining applications (who now make up the majority), it is frequently close to impossible to gain significant traction.

While minimal traffic on Facebook still amounts to more than most websites drive in the first day, there is nothing that can be done to increase traffic except for the following:

Build in viral features (invites, news feed postings, catchy profile boxes … see top 5 viral techniques)
Invite all of your friends on a daily basis
Share the about page of your application so that it ends up in your news feed
Pay for advertising

Aside from that there is not much else you can do. This contrasts to websites which once picked up by search engines can immediately start getting traffic and as content is added can grow in size. On this blog for instance, over 50 percent of my traffic comes from search engines. This is not the case for Facebook applications since they can’t be crawled. The result?

As the application market becomes saturated it is going to become increasingly challenging to make your application go viral. Not that it wasn’t already challenging to make things go viral (see the book “Made to Stick“), but without search engines, driving traffic suddenly became a lot more expensive. In contrast to a website, your only hope of success is having your application go viral. While your odds of going viral are significantly increased on Facebook, I question the long-term sustainability. The number of applications that go viral without the assistance of marketing are going to decrease significantly in a short period of time. What do you think?

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8 Comments »

Nice post Nick! But let me call out a few more quick ways that app developers can employ to drive traffic:- Issue a press release: Easy, cheap and sometimes powerful… regardless, you can make information about your app search-engine crawlable and and have the potential to get picked up by a news source- Leverage the blogosphere: If you or your company has a blog, use it. If you're confident in your app (and if not, why release it?), send it to a few of the Facebook-dedicated blogs, like this one. There is a chance they will review it.- If a destination site for the your company exists already, leverage that: Pointing people to your app from other existing, non-Facebook properties that you own could be a significant traffic generator. While Facebook usership is far from ubiquitous, there is a large enough population where this can be an effective measure.I think Nick's list is a great start, but there are a myriad of other possibilities that can be used to market your app that I think can be included on the list as well.Cheers

Comment by Tim O'Shaughnes — September 27, 2007 @ 4:05 am

Nice post Nick! But let me call out a few more quick ways that app developers can employ to drive traffic:

- Issue a press release: Easy, cheap and sometimes powerful… regardless, you can make information about your app search-engine crawlable and and have the potential to get picked up by a news source

- Leverage the blogosphere: If you or your company has a blog, use it. If you're confident in your app (and if not, why release it?), send it to a few of the Facebook-dedicated blogs, like this one. There is a chance they will review it.

- If a destination site for the your company exists already, leverage that: Pointing people to your app from other existing, non-Facebook properties that you own could be a significant traffic generator. While Facebook usership is far from ubiquitous, there is a large enough population where this can be an effective measure.

I think Nick's list is a great start, but there are a myriad of other possibilities that can be used to market your app that I think can be included on the list as well.

Cheers

Comment by Tim O'Shaughnes — September 27, 2007 @ 5:05 am

At Altura we decided to test this hypothesis and create a purely viral app from scratch without huge marketing campaigns. Our app is silly, of course, but you can see for yourself how fast its growing: http://adonomics.com/about/17603244640We've been going full-tilt for less than a week and we already have more than 60k users.

Comment by Jesse — September 27, 2007 @ 5:37 pm

We've been going full-tilt for less than a week and we already have more than 60k users.

Comment by Jesse — September 27, 2007 @ 6:37 pm

I have no idea what you guys are taling about.

Comment by Noel Freedman — October 24, 2009 @ 12:08 pm

i am looking to build website+facebook app

Comment by Naeem — February 14, 2010 @ 6:11 am

I want to know what apps are considered protected on Facebook? Is their add selling set up copyrighted and protected or can anyone copy it and use it?

Their features?

What is protected and what isn't when you make your own web site?

Obviously people are going to try and copy off of the success that Facebook has had. What stops them?

Comment by Rick — February 25, 2010 @ 12:00 pm

go to account at top right of screen then go to privacy settings then in blue it should say custom hit it then the top one is where you want pic's,post wall info. really you can pick though and check all for friends or a friend here everyone their example: your staus, photos, and post you can choose everyone, friends of friends,friends only, recomened(which is what they put you on or custom. if/when you choose custom choose the blue custom at the bottom that way if theres things you only want you to see it has that chose

Comment by rebecc — March 30, 2011 @ 9:16 pm