Empowering Brand Ambassadors: Our Experience Creating Facebook Apps
Friday, May 7th, 2010
image from Mashable.com
This is Part 2 of a two part series focusing on Facebook’s API and using it to create Facebook applications for brands.
With Invoke’s latest application, we were able to develop a highly customized application that maintained the client’s branding and integrated nicely into Facebook’s framework. The client Invoke was working with already had a Facebook Fan page with a large number of fans but they needed to give their campaign a boost and make the fan page more dynamic and engaging for their loyal fan base. Invoke saw this challenge and suggested the solution – add an completely customized app seamlessly through a new tab on the fan page.
How did we do it? By utilizing FBML (Facebook Markup Language), our team created a user experience that made it apparent this application reflected the clients brand within Facebook. A major challenge was determining what data was available from the API. For example, we created an interactive Flash Map that allows users to post events on a map that feed into the Facebook database. On paper it was a simple task, but the solution proved to be much more complex as the format of the API data was not as expected. Other aspects of development went smoother than expected. The application uses Flash to load videos and display a counter for donations. Because Facebook’s API provides strong support for Flash, these flash pieces were easily reusable as “widgets” that could be posted onto Walls and News Streams.
All of these small details enhanced the user experience for both primary users of the application, and passive users who see the news stream postings. It’s these “small details” that can lead to big results for the client as passive users “like” a posting, visit the page, become “fans”, and hopefully become primary users. These metrics are used when determining a marketers ROI. Within a few days of launching, the application we developed experienced this Facebook effect as the application received more than 1000 signups in just a few days.
In the end, our primary focus with Facebook development is agile development, which requires many iterations with wireframing, design, API research, and programming. Put all of these together, and it’s a fine balance to launch an application that uses the latest offerings from the API and can be maintained for future revisions down the road. A well conceived and executed Facebook application is a fun and engaging way to deliver a marketing message or organizational facts. The interactive factor (which is demonstrably important for Facebook users) mobilizes existing fans and turns them into active promoters of your message, which in turn builds the fanbase. These brand ambassadors will then share and interact via the application and the messaging spreads.
