Email
RSS
Twitter
Facebook
New data on Facebook application virality
October 22nd, 2007
| By Justin Smith | 34 Comments » |
Facebook has unveilved new valuable marketing data to application developers that show which channels inside Facebook lead to the most application installations. While the stats are not perfect, they do provide new insight into how your Facebook users find and add your application.
The new feature, called “Application Adds by Facebook Referrer,” can be accessed from the “More Stats” page for your applications and clicking on the number of adds. Application Adds by Facebook Referrer provides install stats from the following channels:
- Product Directory – how many users found your app in the application directory
- Profile Box Add Link – the standard link Facebook places in the top right of your profile box
- Add Application News Feed Story
- Mini Feed Story
- Facebook Search
- Requests Page
- From within your App – how many users clicked content within your profile box or another canvas page that led them to install your app
Here’s a sample stats page from a friend’s application. While the relative importance of viral channels will depend on your application, the vast majority of this app’s installs (over 80%) come from within the app or the profile box, while very few come from Facebook Search, Mini Feeds, or Requests.
The Product Directory actually drives more installs than I would have thought, though the Add Application News Feed Story drives less than I would have expected.
Kudos to Facebook for providing this first step toward an integrated marketing dashboard for Facebook app developers. This kind of data is extremely valuable as developers seek to optimize their apps to spread inside Facebook.
[tags]facebook,virality,stats,marketing,referrer,dashboard[/tags]
Exclusive In Depth Market Research Report on the Future of the Social Gaming Market from Inside Network
Download The Guide to Marketing Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook
Strategic Facebook Platform Ecosystem Overview and Guide For Agencies & Brands
French / Français
Spanish / Español
Italian / Italiano
Exclusive In Depth Market Research Report on the State and Future of Virtual Goods in the US
Track Facebook's International Growth in 95 Global Markets with our Monthly Reports and Analysis
Inside Facebook analyzes 12 major Facebook marketing efforts from leading brands. Who comes out on top?
October 22nd, 2007 at 9:12 am
[...] Smith just posted an interesting article about Facebook revealing new application statistics to developers. I went [...]
October 22nd, 2007 at 11:38 am
So, what would be clasify the “invite a friend” feature that the apps have under…? I assume much of the traffic comes from that non?
October 22nd, 2007 at 11:48 am
HALLELUJAH!
this is incredibly awesome data… great stuff
October 22nd, 2007 at 12:02 pm
[...] das anzeigt, über welchen Weg ein User eine Facebook-Applikation installiert hat, hierzu Inside Facebook: The new feature, called “Application Adds by Facebook Referrer,” can be accessed from the [...]
October 22nd, 2007 at 12:17 pm
[...] — Naveen @ 12:17 pm If you’re into facebook app development, you’ll find this data to be extremely interesting. Thanks [...]
October 22nd, 2007 at 12:34 pm
“the Add Application News Feed Story drives less than I would have expected”
I’m not so sure the Add Application News Feed can be so easily discounted. Myself when I see it show up in the news feed I’m more likely to go and see the profile page of the friend that installed the app to see what the app does than to add the app from the feed. If it looks interesting then I’m more likely to click the Profile Box add link
October 22nd, 2007 at 2:57 pm
[...] Inside Facebook reports that Facebook has added new metrics for app developers to track the spread of their application. The new “Application Adds by Facebook Referrer” displays how many application ads were a result of the app directory, the profile box, the news feed, the mini feed, Facebook search, or requests. These stats will certainly be helpful for app developers to gauge the best way to market and promote their apps, and whether their marketing campaigns on Facebook ad networks like Social Media are worth their time and money. But just how most Facebook apps spread is likely to remain hazy until more data can be gathered from multiple app developers. Justin Smith has data from a friend’s application, which shows that the profile box is far and away the most popular channel for attracting new users to an application. Surprisingly, given the amount of press about how ingenious the news feed and mini feed are for spreading things virally, they do not factor nearly as much into the overall spread of this particular application. That said, Inside Facebook’s example is a very small sample size for one (undisclosed) application. As Smith notes in his post, “the relative importance of viral channels will depend on your application.” The Zombies app probably benefits more from requests, for example, because of the way it encourages people to invite users, while the Where I’ve Been app probably gets many installs from the profile box, and the Movies app likely does well in the product directory as a result of its prominence there. Would any app developers out there care to share some of their data? It would be great if Facebook would release data across the entire network in aggregate, but until that happens, if you want to share trends you’ve notice for your application. please do so in the comments. [...]
October 22nd, 2007 at 3:07 pm
@ Leigh – great question!
Justin – any idea where that goes? Especially when you think of the number of installs the early app guys got from partnering with the launch from unlimited invites….
October 22nd, 2007 at 3:28 pm
Justin…great entry! I agree with you re: what you were surprized about…it would be interesting if all apps experience the same type of distribution, or if there is something inherent in the type of app (what it does, who is interested in that, etc.) and also design (how well viral aspects are built in) that will shift it from app to app. Wrr
October 22nd, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Leigh and Mrinal – I think Facebook usually calls invitations “Requests”…
October 22nd, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Dear Facebook Insiders, I thought I’d drop a quick note to let you know that over at Valleywag Labs, we’ve developed a proprietary algorithm to solve all your problems. Our patented “Fanafi” algorithm — that’s short for “Find A Need And Fill It,” folks — uses machine-learning semantic-graph discovery technologies to extract the needs users express when they add your Facebook app. Come check it out.
October 22nd, 2007 at 5:42 pm
[...] has recently released a new feature which allows application developers to actually evaluate the virality of their product. This allows [...]
October 22nd, 2007 at 6:08 pm
[...] Facebook-Insider Justin Smith reveals, most of his users are suprisingly not being caught through the viral news displayed on the [...]
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:55 am
[...] Inside Facebook vient d’annoncer la sortie d’une nouvelle fonctionnalité chez le réseau social qui monte : les développeurs d’applis facebook ont désormais accès à des statistiques détaillées qui leur permet de mieux comprendre comment a été installée leur application (depuis le répertoire, depuis le news feed, depuis une recherche sur le moteur interne, etc.). [...]
October 23rd, 2007 at 9:57 am
There are several new hot aps taking off, here’s Facebook’s list of most popular apps: http://www.facebook.com/apps/
1. Crowd Cloud
2. Starcraft Pride
3. Srabulous
October 23rd, 2007 at 11:15 pm
Good find
Really good info for me.
can u tell me about any money making app for facebook.
October 25th, 2007 at 9:13 pm
@Rachel – you meant 3. Scrabulous?
October 27th, 2007 at 10:47 am
[...] Top 40 list? We know now that most adds are from the Profile box. So again, most users won’t care what’s in the app [...]
November 9th, 2007 at 3:30 am
OpenSocial Factory – Where social networking applicatios come to life!
Are you in need of a custom Facebook application or an OpenSocial application for social network? We are happy to build even the most robust applications to help promote your company in the realm of social media across any social network.
Visit now: http://opensocialfactory.com or http://opensocialfactory.net
November 26th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
[...] more recent reports suggest that applications get more users from users seeing each others’ [...]
November 26th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
[...] more recent reports suggest applications get more users from users seeing actions on their [...]
December 2nd, 2007 at 11:40 pm
Do you know why the number of adds from the requests page is so low? From my own experience, I add most of my applications after someone requests me to do so.
January 25th, 2008 at 2:21 am
[...] New data on Facebook application virality (tags: Facebook statistics viral analysis marketing research socialnetworks SocialSoftware web2.0 application attention entrepreneurship internet markets networking productdevelopment traffic tools strategy socialnetwork SEO) Posted in Uncategorized. [...]
March 8th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
woo hoo! finally more data integration. With all the tools they are making avail, it gonna explode. and their new cell phone integration with facebook – its opens a whole new world
May 7th, 2008 at 9:54 am
[...] applications and the increasing limits on the virality (no I’m not the inventor of this word, people have used it before) of facebook apps as imposed by facebook trying keep users unspammed and happy are making it harder [...]
August 24th, 2008 at 3:33 am
[...] This reminded me that I similarly found another useful utility, WinDirStat, via a blog post as well. In fact when i think about it, a lot of the software I end up trying out is found via direct or indirect recommendations from people I know. Typically through blog posts, tweets or some other communication via a social networking or social media service. This phenomenon can be clearly observed in closed application ecosystems like the Facebook platform, where statistics have shown that the majority of users install new applications after viewing them on the profiles of their friends. [...]
September 7th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
[...] have begun to offer which augments the reach of the platform. The Facebook platform offers several viral distribution mechanisms for applications which enables applications to get noticed by end users and spread organically among users without [...]
December 9th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
Setup software creates EXE file with full accuracy and no data loss while conversion from MSI file.
March 13th, 2009 at 6:51 am
wow. This is awesome and is going to make my life so much easier.
May 13th, 2009 at 12:46 am
Advance computer monitoring application is fully password protected that restricts unauthorized users to change the software configuration settings.
May 14th, 2009 at 9:48 pm
FAT data rescue software provide expert solution to restore lost file and folders from FAT16 FAT32 partition and supports recovery for mpeg, text, mov, bmp, doc etc file formats.
May 23rd, 2009 at 3:52 am
Website offers partition files recovery software to safely restore corrupted data from multimedia storage drives.
July 22nd, 2009 at 10:31 pm
Developers of file unerase tool facilitate to rescue music file even error messages are displayed while accessing media.
January 15th, 2010 at 1:46 am
There are people who lost their RAW images from digital camera and they can get back with the photo recovery software. The developers of Photo recovery were made it so powerful that it can recover from formatted media too.