MyListo Facebook Application: Swipe It
We launched a Facebook Application a couple of weeks ago called Swipe It as a way to quickly and cheaply acquire users. For those of you who aren’t familiar with social networking platforms, the primary advantage of building on Facebook is that you can leverage all of their communication channels between users such as notifications, newsfeeds, and requests to efficiently propogate your application.
The basic concepts behind Swipe It are very simple. Users have a virtual credit card that they can use to send each other gifts such as electronics, cars, jewelry, bags, shoes, etc. However, you can only send gifts that cost less their your credit limit. For example, if your credit limit is $50, you won’t be able to send an iPod because it costs $200. Users increase their credit limit by sending cheapers gifts or sending requests to friends. The application virally grows because users naturally like to send gifts to their friends and we encourage people to invite their friends to level up their credit limit.
Over time we’re going to start adding more high value features to the application that already exist on our main website such as the Own List, Want List, and product pages.
For those of you who are intersted in building Facebook apps, here are some things we learned that should help you:
- It sounds obvious, but keep track of every install and when it occured in your database. First, we noticed that the numbers reported by Facebook aren’t always accurate. Second, you’ll want to track your daily installs and make sure they’re trending up.
- The lowest install days for us are on Friday and Saturday. The highest install days are Sunday and Monday. Presumably people go out on Friday and Saturday and check their emails on Sunday and Monday when they go back to work. We’re not sure if this is consistent with what other app developers are seeing.
- Keep track of the number of notifications and requests you’re sending by day so that you can understand the health of your viral loops. For us, the number of installs we got on a particular day was directly proportional to the number of notifications and requests that were sent in the previous days.
- The nature of the platform is such that the most successful apps are the ones that that generate a lot of daily activity on a per user basis. More activity translates to more notifications and requests which translates to more installs. Think of ways in which you can get your users to generate activity on a continuous basis. For example, Swipe It reminds users to send gifts to their friends with upcoming birthdays. The average Facebook user will almost always have a friend who has an upcoming birthday.
