There's been some great discussion and insight recently into Facebook applications and how to create successful ones. The Stanford class's reach of a combined 16+million Facebook application downloads in 10 weeks is testamount to what can be achieved with alot of hard work and determination and a surprisingly small development team.
What has become clear from their success and insights is the emphasis on metrics to substantiate what persuades people to download and use a Facebook application and how you can use metrics to keep track of your 'persuasiveness' - It's interesting how the professors of the Stanford Facebook course describe Facebook as a "Mass Interpersonal Communication" tool.
There is a science to creating a successful Facebook application: Constant testing, measurement, metrics and application iterations are key.
18 Insights for brands engaging in Facebook (and now Bebo) with an application.
1. Set metrics and objectives upfront. Based on the metrics establish why people are engaging or not engaging and tweak your application to improve these rates. Based on the objectives, decide whether your application has been a success.
2. Is your app viral? Generally, the more complex the app is, the less viral it is. The simpliest ones spread the quickest. The more complex the app the more time they spend on the app's canvas pages.
3. Go in light on the branding: A Facebook application can be "sponsored" by a brand and still attain marketing goals. Don't beat people over the head with branding.
4. Build applications that "Look and Feel" like facebook. People engage with familiarity of design. Don't have graphics with colors that overpower or clash with the facebook frame if possible. Don't use rounded tabs for navigation. 95% of facebook applications use the same style of navigational tabs. Do the same.
5. Plan on A/B split testing & measurement for ongoing tweaks of your application.
The key metrics are Keep Rate, Drop Rate, Install Rate, Uninstall Rate. Others include the amount of time people spend interacting with your application's Canvas Pages.
6. Metrics are critical. Many application teams set up custom metrics beyond standard Google Analytics in order to measure very specific details of an application. You need A/B split testing on things such as page layout, images, text, user flow etc. You can get enough statistical info within 12hrs to measure the effectiveness of different iterations of your applications.
7. Change 1 thing at a time for iterations and measurement towards desired metrics.
8. Pay very close attention to any trend or change in behavior; Un-install rate increasing for example. This can point you in the direction of a problem, either slow responsiveness (a scaling issue) or something being broken (a development issue).
9. Wording is very critical for influencing behavior. Change and measure. Part of the "Mass InterPersonal Communication" concept.
10. Pay close attention to the experience flow of how you pull people through your application and force desired behaviors to occur.
11. Consider "levels" or "rewards" as an incentive for participation. This means unlocking specific features of the app when a person takes desired behaviors.
12. Invites are critical. Do it right. Most facebook applications do not do it in the most effective manner.
A note on this is that Facebook has bundled invitation (which appear on the right hand of your profile page) together, giving only the most recent invite a prominent place on your profile.
13. Look at how you can easily expose behaviors through the viral carrier mechanisms available (mini-feed, news-feed, notifications, email, participatory sharing, etc.) without the user not having to think about sharing information.
14. Try not to shoe-horn a current app that's successful on to Facebook. Try to make something totally unique to Facebook. Use the 'Social Graph' that is at the heart of Facebook to facilitate new and unique connections between people and their friends on Facebook. Give it a Facebook 'twist'.
15. 2 attributes that make a successful widget are Attention and Interaction, also known as Engagement and Viral Growth. Pay attention to both.
16. Plan for continual evolution. Facebook's Platform is in constant change with new updates, features and restrictions added almost on a weekly basis. Developers aren't notified of the changes by Facebook unitl they occur and you need to be able to react. Application creators need to adapt to those changes and challenges.
Have a plan in place for revisions and additional feature sets. The application will evolve on a continual basis mainly due to people's feedback. You need to incorporate this feedback and build it into future versions. It shows that you're listening and creates affinity between your application and the people who use it.
17. Plan for scaling. Budget accordingly. It's best not to build an app in the expectation that it will be very popular but instead have a plan in place for scaling the application over the short to mid-term. Applications can spread virally incredibly quickly and you need to be able to react to that. Consider using databases that can scale according to use (Amazon's S3 is a good example)
18. Competitve landscape.
Look at you're Facebook competition. Keep up to date with the changes they're implementing and react accordingly.
These points are based primarily on learnings from the Standford Facebook class and on Facebook application development insight from Rodney Rumford and Jeremiah Owyang.
