How Brands Should Be Using Facebook Apps
I had a little rant a couple of months ago about Microsites and how brands should be shunning them in favor of building Facebook pages. Microsites are hard to promote, only have a finite life and more often than not feature little interaction with your customers. Facebook pages on the other hand have tons of great ways of increasing interaction, creating engagement with your fans and attracting long term commitment from your fans. Luckily since writing that article more and more brands have opened their eyes to the potential of Facebook pages and companies, businesses, agencies and corporations are starting to embrace them in abundance. Not everything is rosy though because form what I have been observing the vast majority of people are getting Facebook pages and building expensive apps for those pages simply because they are expected to now rather than putting much long term thought or planning in to the types of apps that are building.
Share With Friends Should Not Be Main Feature
People seem to think that Facebook is like a viral paradise where no matter what you put up or build it will be passed around to thousands of your friends and become an overnight viral success. Most people’s first request when building an app is that it “should appear in your friend’s news feeds” and you should have ability to “invite all your friends to the app”. Now there is no doubting that both those mechanisms will help spread the word about your app but the first thing that you should concentrate on is creating something so compelling and unique that adds value to your user that people want to pass it on rather than making the recommend to friends the main feature. People are not going to pass on a crap app no matter how big you make the share buttons.
Apps Need Promotion
I’ll let you in on a little secret….Most of those brilliant shiny apps that you see brands build on Facebook…they hardly get used at all (the ones we build do of course). People like to follow the typical logic of “build it and they will come” but the truth is that it should be “build it then promote, promote, promote and they might come”. You can have all the fanciest prizes in the world for your app but without proper marketing and promotion on your own marketing materials, on 3rd party sites and within Facebook the app is not going to be magically discovered but millions of people.
Expensive Apps Are Not A Quick Win
I see brands time and time again trying to come in and build a big expensive app to grow their Fans (or likes as it now is) with some big complicated viral campaign with a huge shiny prize but just how effective is that? I could just as easily go out and acquire 10,000 fans through advertising (many brands do) but are these really committed fans who want to engage with me and my brand or are they just false inflated numbers for the sake of numbers? I’d always tell a brand to start off by getting the basics right and creating community within your Facebook page by engaging with your fans through the wall and by creating compelling content rather than just trying to spend a fortune on an app to acquire fans as a starting point.
Look For Alternative Metrics
Instead of just thinking about how many fans you get from your Facebook page or app as 90% of people do why not look at some alternative metrics to judge success? What about the amount of current fans who engaged with the app? What about looking at how you engaged your community and what sort of levels of engagement you saw? Maybe only 100 people engaged with the app but when they did they spent 30 minutes each interacting with your brand and you got 80 sales as a result. Where you able to generate sales as a result of your app? Were you able to capture email addresses or mobile numbers that you could use for future marketing? Was there online blog coverage about you and your app? Forget about trying to attract fans and spam people’s newsfeeds with useless information about your brand and instead focus on creating something super compelling and engaging and you’ll find that all the other things will fall in to place as a result of people using your app.
About SimplyZesty
Simply Zesty are a Social Media Agency located in Dublin, Ireland who offer a range of Social Media Services (including Facebook Marketing).
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