Startup Review

Key success factors for Facebook apps

written by Nisan Gabbay, posted on June 28th, 2007

Like everyone else these days, I have been thinking a lot about Facebook and the F8 application platform. I thought I would share some of my research notes here, but this was not meant to be an exhaustive analysis. As of this writing, there were 18 Facebook apps (not developed by Facebook) having 1M or more users. These were the apps that I analyzed to draw my conclusions. In addition to my personal review of the app, I also e-mailed interview questions to the creators of these apps, some of whom responded - big thanks to David Gentzel (Food Fight), Blake Commagere (Causes), Dan Peguine (Honesty Box), and Zachary Allia (Free Gifts) for sharing their tips with us.

Let me start by first quickly touching upon what I would consider to be the obvious success factors for these 18 apps. These probably aren’t too insightful given all that has already been written about F8, but I thought I should cover them for sake of completeness. Being first to market on F8 was a huge advantage. There are plenty of reasons for this. First, users appetite for adding apps is greatest at the start simply for the sake of curiosity. After receiving a large number of app invitations, you are less likely to take a look at them. Lance Tokuda, founder of RockYou, eloquently summed things up in an interview on VentureBeat, stating that the viral channels on Facebook will become less effective over time, i.e. the channels will likely “burn out”. Second, early apps had the benefit of gaining users from the Facebook app directory, but as thousands of apps begin to pop up it is a lot harder to vie for the user’s attention within the directory. Third, Facebook has already begun limiting the amount of app invitations a user can make – it is now limited to 20 invitations per user per app, and 10 at one time. The earlier apps were not subjected to this limitation. Maximizing use of the viral feature sets available within Facebook is essential. Facebook provides app developers with a variety of ways to virally market an app, and the top apps took advantage of these. Pretty much all of them make use of the invite request flow and news feed features. I don’t want to go into all the available options, as they are pretty well documented in the F8 documentation. Finally, all the top apps are clever products that fill a very simple function that is easily communicated. Now, for the less obvious success factors:

1) Having a pre-existing install base of users from another Internet property is a huge asset for cross marketing

I found it interesting that approximately 8 of the top 18 apps, or close to 50%, are the product of either Slide or RockYou. I would argue that Slide and RockYou have been immensely successful with their Facebook apps mainly because they have the ability to promote their Facebook apps to their install base of users.

Even beyond Slide and RockYou, other companies with large install bases like Flixster and HotorNot are also behind some of these top apps. iLike for example was able to promote their Facebook application to existing registered users of Garageband.com for example. David Gentzel, the mastermind behind the Food Fight Facebook app, leveraged the use of another one of his Internet properties, Trakzor.com to launch FoodFight. According to David: ” Trakzor.com, a social analytics app for MySpace, has 3.5 million registered users and gets a couple hundred thousand uniques per day. I put up a (not so) out of the way message on the main page promoting the new facebook version. Facebook Trakzor got up to 100k users in the first week, and peaked at a growth rate of 7k users per hour. Then, Food Fight launched and was promoted from Facebook Trakzor, and now Tag launched and is being promoted from Food Fight.” More on this tactic of cross promoting Facebook apps from within Facebook apps is discussed in the second key success factor below.

To sum up this first point, I would argue that 13 of the top 18 Facebook apps, or 72% were launched off the backs of pre-existing, large user base Internet properties. So while the viral tools available on F8 are indeed revolutionary, the big guys still have a big advantage. As an anecdotal example, I am pretty sure that the “Favorite Peeps” application initially had more traction than Slide’s “Top Friends” application. Both products are roughly equivalent in function and clearly serve the same need, but somehow “Top Friends” (7.2M) was able to leapfrog “Favorite Peeps” (1.4M). While there are several contributing factors (site performance, implementation of invitation flows, product), I believe the main reason is the Slide cross promotion marketing machine. So what to do if you are not Slide or RockYou? You still have a decent chance (28%) of becoming a top app even without additional marketing muscle. But I think it’s pretty clear that the more distribution fire power you can bring to the table, the better your chances of success.

2) Cross promote Facebook apps from within other Facebook apps

It is pretty clear that having a popular Facebook app is a great way to help launch other Facebook apps. As quoted above, David had great success promoting Food Fight off the back of Trakzor, and is now using Food Fight to launch Tag. Slide’s Top Friends app has tabs built in promoting the “Moods” app and the “Funwall” app. I’ve also noticed what I will assume is paid placement to promote Facebook apps from within Facebook apps. For example, I have seen 30 Boxes Facebook app being promoted from a number of apps. This might be because the 30 Boxes guys are nice guys and have a lot of friends (I’ve met them before and they are genuinely nice), or equally likely, they are paying for that ad placement somehow. Either way, it’s a good strategy.

3) Replicate popular MySpace features or usage patterns

A number of the top Facebook apps are either directly or indirectly inspired by MySpace features. I believe the best explanation for the popularity of these apps is that Facebook users are already familiar with them from their MySpace accounts. It is no secret that there is a large overlap in the Facebook and MySpace user bases – so any app that has had success as a feature on MySpace will likely have success within Facebook. For evidence of this, look no further than the top two Facebook apps – “Top Friends” a direct clone of the MySpace feature of the same name and iLike, which enables songs to be streamed from your profile for visitors, a long standing, popular MySpace feature. Other apps are having success by making it easier to enable behavior that has long been a staple of MySpace usage patterns, albeit behavior that typically takes place in unstructured form via MySpace bulletins and comment boards. Familiarity helps alleviate user trust and communication issues.

I am not going to write a conclusion. I am hoping that people will contribute to the discussion in the comments by adding their thoughts on what the key success factors are/ will be for a Facebook app. Please fire away!

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