This is my first attempt at LiveBlogging a video of a conference session, so bear with me. This should be fun… 
On the panel:
- Blake Commagere - Vampires, Causes
- Jason Beckerman
- Jia Shen - RockYou
- Tim O’Shaughnessy - Mardi Gras and seasonal apps
Justin is giving an overview of the platform. (1:40)
- 366 million apps installed in first 20 weeks (on pace for 1B in year 1)
- Shows incredible viral growth
- Metrics are changing: from total dist. to engagement
- Over 14 MM unique app users in August
- Users came 6-7 times on average, stayed for 5 minutes
History:
- Originally, no rules about invitations. Those who took advantage of that grew REALLY quickly and got acquired.
- Now there are a lot of rules - and a standardized interface that is mandatory.
- Now developers are targeting the invites.
- Invitation Incentives:
- Blake: points
- Jason: lotto
- Feeds:
- very powerful - the main way to spread word about apps
- How to optimize:
- Story, Elements, Calls to Action
- But we still don’t know the algorithm
- Notifications
- Can send to friends or any app user
- Can get blocked if too aggressive
Now the discussion is starting…
First question.
Blake:
- Blake was involved in optimizing invites. Ideas: auto-checking a given number of friends, check friends that convert better.
- What he focused on was AB testing - keep comparing and improving. Incentives are key, and AB testing brings great improvement.
- Notifications: never got around notifications. Uses them as a method to re-engage users. Does not help spreading to non-users.
Tim:
- Invite process - they were too late in the game to take advantage of this.
- Invite is the only method that requires active user approval. Many times the easiest decision is to hit skip!
Jia Shen:
- Invites are the only way to grow your app among non-users.
- RockYou’s focus has been two-prong:
- For invites, make sure the selection process is easy. Incentives are different for different apps. It’s not really “inviting”. In Vampires, it is biting your friends. In Event-planning, it’s invite to an event. Etc.
- Don’t just call it an invite -what is the incentive? What is the real use case? Get users engaged and wanting to have their friends involved.
- Tuning can increase conversion by up to 30%
- Mini-feeds - much more interesting for growing value of the app.
- Great for putting together really useful info.
- Same deal for notifications.
- Changing graphics that correlate has a VERY big effect on clickthrough rate.
- Targeting Strategies:
- Invite Side - who is likely to accept?
- People who have declared a relationship (girlfriend, engaged, married, etc)
- People who have between 3-20 wall posts
- It just represents people who are core, active users of facebook - they actually use facebook and have real friends on it
Jason:
- Lotto - must send it to 10 friends when you add
- Added “Bonus Ticket” feature - every day you can invite 10 more friends and get a ticket to the weekly lotto
- Mini-feed - jackpot increasing every day
Next Question: Did Facebook’s changes make any major impact? (question not really answered)
- News Feed: Templating is REALLY exciting. Great for aggregating interesting information.
- Call to Actions are key!!! You have to design them to intrigue and engage users.
App Analytics:
- Blake: track application-specific metrics. Trying to measure engagement tactics. “I don’t do as much AB testing as I obviously should.” (bet I’ll hear that again)
- Jason
- Jia: do not over design an analytics system. We run real-time sql - batch it daily. Build a reporting system to view a graph. But raw numbers speak for themselves. The crux is this: make sure you are collecting everything!
- Tim: the raw numbers is the key.
- Blake: don’t overdevelop - Facebook is working on it!
Spam Ratings?
- Formula: # installed/engaged users, # notifications sent out, # marked as spam
- Think carefully about notifications - is it a real user action?
- In Vampires, the number of invitations is limited - helps with spam.
- Jia: RockYou does not use notifications at all. Notifications are just like email - a lot is spam - similar standards apply.
- Lots of tuning to make sure notifications are useful.
Question: If facebook turned on notifying non-users through news feed, how would it change invitation strategy?
- News feed is SO powerful. It is the page you see when you log in. It would totally change the game. (Blake)
- Jia: wouldn’t change much. Engagement drives installs - mini-feed events are designed to build engagement.
- Tim: also not much change. It is another, non-persistent form of invitation. Would need to be able to have two messages for an action - for users inside and out of the app.
Question: How far will the viral methods go to spread an application that is not inherently viral?
- Get your viral coefficient above one, and you take off. For things that are not inherently viral, the coefficient is just not going to get that high.
- The idea doesn’t have to be viral - it just has to provide value. The facebook tools can make value viral.
Question: Do you have insight into the rate of dropoff because of requirements to invite or add the app?
- Jason: no problem, add 7-10k per day, 500 who uninstall.
- Users are becoming much more savvy. Previous: users love to just click next. Now users hate being forced to invite. The invite makes sense, but forcing does not.
- Tim: After June 26, growth rates dropped dramatically - because of user invite cap.
Question: How bad would it be if for every app, Facebook reported the percentage of people who uninstalled it?
- Facebook does report it on the new stat page. (internally)
- Blake: Vampires has the highest uninstall rate among his apps (13%). (actually a good number, says Jia Shen) Not as bad as expected. Is it interesting to users? Most users would not understand it.
And that’s it!
