Facebook Application Development
Tuesday, October 30th, 2007
The phenomenal success of facebook is staggering. Within a year of the platform opening to the public - previously, it was only available to college networks - it has become the fastest growing social networking site on the internet. Facebook currently boasts over 42 million active members worldwide and is expected to surpass 60 million users by the end of 2007. From September 2006 to September 2007 facebook increased its world wide ranking from 60th to 7th most visited website, and was the number one site for photos in the US, ahead of photo sharing site flickr, with over 8.5 million photos uploaded daily. According to Chris Hughes a spokesman for Facebook, - People spend an average of 19 minutes a day on Facebook. This level of user interaction combined with its sizable user base, gives companies a huge incentive to try and leverage facebook for their own business.
Facebook has opened up their platform to allow third parties the ability to create applications that run within member profiles on the site. This development has opened up many opportunities for outside companies to create apps that leverage their core competencies to grow their user base and expand their brand recognition. The viral nature of the facebook applications means that you can have tens of thousands of users adding your app to their profile in an extremely short period of time. When done properly, this allows these companies to monetize their custom facebook application creating the potential to create a large revenue stream for the company.
The key to a successful facebook application is twofold. The first is to create something that users want to add to their profile and then share it with their friends. This step is critical for the app to become successful. When developing your app, you need to keep this step foremost in your mind, as if you create something that does not incentivize the end user, it will not takeoff within the facebook community. Second, the app must be relevant to your product or service. In order to monetize your app, it must be relevant to you. You could create the most popular app on facebook and unless you have previously planned on ways to properly monetize it and parlay it into at least an ancillary part of your business, in the end it has just been a drain on your resources. If you have both of these steps properly thought-out from the outset and follow the game plan during the development state, you have a good chance of creating something that will become popular on facebook and have a good return on investment for your business.
Invoke Media has created facebook apps for several in-house and client initiatives with great success. We first have a brainstorming session to determine the functionality required and the business goals of the app. From this initial meeting, we then develop documentation that thoroughly outlines the functionality, development schedule, and launch plan. If you would like more information about creating and launching a facebook application for your business, contact us today.
