During an interview I had last week with leading technology and business information magazine CIO.com, I discussed at length the emerging influx of organisations adopting Facebook Applications within their online marketing strategy.
The Internet has always leant itself to very rapid, responsive development and innovation. It’s quite remarkable, especially when you consider the diversity of developers creating applications for Facebook.
Utilising a combination of transparent development, enormous and captive audience and a framework designed to promote viral communication - clearly Facebook has hit the nail on the head.
Opening its doors to developers has been a truly revolutionary exercise. Facebook has become the pinup for a Web 2.0 generation as the peoples portal – using Facebook applications to build the social networking portal from the bottom up.
What makes an effective Facebook Application?
While the purpose of many applications is questionable (Scratch my vampire?), a successful application must be well written, well supported and relevant to its users. I believe there are still far too many applications out there that fall short and quite frankly don’t work.
Is it wise to rely on Facebook Applications to build your business brand?
Advertising is one approach that may bring revenue, though Facebook applications shouldn’t necessarily be seen as the means to the end. Applications can provide so many other indirect and tangible benefits.
Unlike the relationship a user may have with a traditional website or application, Facebook users inherently trust their applications and forward them to friends; this in itself is the first and most obvious basis of application monetisation.
As an example, a great application we’re building at Wiliam, allows friends to build a short-stay holiday together; the application writes a funny story around the holiday, referring to the specific locations, hotels and airlines selected by the friends.
While the obvious purpose of the application is to allow friends to build fantasy, short-stay holidays together, it is a single click to purchase the holiday, hotels and airlines already selected.
The locations, airlines and hotels are fed directly from the travel agent’s website, and even in the more likely event that the friends did not purchase their holiday, the travel agent is collecting rich statistics of where people would ideally stay and go.
We have thousands and thousands of people using our RSS Blog Feed Reader and the numbers continue to grow every day. We’ve been very lucky to have received wide promotion and write-up in a number of blogs and respected media from around the world.
Interestingly, associating our application with terms such as RSS and Blog might limit its adoption among less savvy users, though we are always refining it.
Should Facebook Applications be embraced in Business 2.0?
Facebook really is a perfect market where the success of an application is decided entirely by users. There is no room for hollow applications that do not clearly benefit the user. An application that merely dumps jobs from a recruitment website is not likely to gain much traction.
Businesses looking to engage with Facebook should really consider the benefits that their application is likely to deliver, and why friends would share the application with other friends; this really is the requisite litmus test.
The benefits of being affiliated with a great and widely adopted application is often the only aim businesses should have; the rest will follow.