BradPace.com

So a few weeks ago I was lucky enough to attend the Facebook F8 developers conference.  Last week I was gone to boy scout camp and this has been a very busy week.  So this is the first chance I have had to blog about it.  I feel that the company needs to get something out of sending me to a conference like this so I like to get my thoughts down on my blog (don’t know if anyone actually does, but here it is).  I love to live blog at events like this.  I can type so much faster than I can write.  Sadly the wireless network at the conference was lacking and I could never connect to the internet.  Too many connections I think.  So I will have to go off my notes.

The conference was great, but there was little news.  Also, having a top 20 facebook app (were related on facebook), there were no revelations on new features.  So here are some random thoughts on developing social apps on facebook I got from the conference.

• Outsource your ads until you get big enough to hire your own team.  The large app developers on the panel saw a 2x higher CPM on inhouse ad sales.
• Align user behavior with their motivation.  Too many apps try to motivate their users in a direction that conflicts with their current behavior on the app.  Monetization of a social app is like a tight rope balancing act.  If everything is not lined up, your users fall off and leave the app.  But if you can line up your user’s behavior in your app with a monetization method that makes sense to them you will make a ton of $$$$$!
• Leverage the social graph to sell products in your app.  These are the apps that are making the most money. I may write a blog post just about this at some point.  But I believe there are many, many new ways to monetize users in social apps that have never been done or thought of before! Understand those social connections and work to tie in products or services that use those connections.  That’s where the money is.
• As a side note, there has to be a good way to build an MLM business on facebook!  Maybe there are people doing this already and I just have not seen them.  I don’t have much MLM experience but I have always thought they are missing out on the opportunities that the internet provides.  MLMs are all about social connections.  There is money to be made here as well!
• There are a ton of companies making bank building facebook apps for large companies.  And best of all, most do it for “branding” reasons.  Many developers have stopped building their own apps because apps are hard to monetize and have switched to doing contract work building apps for others.  Seems like easy cash but not much long term opportunity. Glad I am not in this business.  I talked to one friend doing this and he jut seemed beaten down and tired!
• I talked to a few developers who are making tons of money using affiliate products instead of displaying ads.  This is an area I am very interested in because I love affiliate marketing!
• When building a new app there are 3 areas you need to understand, execute on, and optimize:

1.      Research – Understand the audience that will be using the app, understand the possible marketing channels you can make use of in the app, and come up with a formula for success by making them match up.  The RockYou guys claim they do this first and if they can not get the audience, channels, and formula nailed they will not build the app.

2.      Growth – Good apps are designed to make use of the social graph from the start.  You have to have a viral factor or the app is doomed to fail.  Once the app is running, tune it for distribution.  Top app companies make daily changes to tune their apps to maximize their viral growth factors.  This is a case where small things can make large differences.  You also need to promote your app in the beginning to “seed” it so you can get the growth you need to start.

3.      Engagement/Monetization – now days everything is engagement of the user with your app.  How many daily or active visitors you have.  Not how many total installs or new installs.  Just this week facebook made a change from showing stats of daily visitors to monthly visitors.  So they are pushing apps that have the most monthly activity and thus reach the most people.  This change propelled our app from the 70s in most popular apps to in the top 20!

I still feel that many of the developers and companies at these events are “gimmick” app developers.  Dumb ideas with little long term value just trying to make a quick buck.  But there are a few (like us) that have a long term vision of providing real value to users.  We will see more and more useful apps as time goes on.  I think there is still a vast opportunity in this area for serious app developers of serious apps!