How Not to Market a Facebook App

Last week, we created the first Chitika Facebook app, designed as a “Hot or Not” for ad designs. We wanted people to be able to vote on what ad designs they like, and what ad designs didn’t look so hot. Tabbed “The Internet Beautification Project,” we approached it from the perspective of a Save Our National Parks campaign – help us make the Internet a more beautiful place by helping us clean up ad design.

Well, that didn’t work. People didn’t use it. More specifically, they got to the page where users can allow/deny apps access to their information (standard Facebook app process), and collectively said “No thank you, I’m not that interested in the beauty of the Internet.”

So what to do? The other thing we tried using to entice people to vote was a chance to win a free T-shirt, and that got a few people interested (one of whom is going to get a T-shirt soon). But what interests Facebook users? What could possibly entice them to use a Facebook app?

At that point, we said to ourselves, “Hey, selves, you’ve got 23,000 fans on Facebook. They’re Facebookers. Ask them.” And we did. Here’s the results of the poll (still ongoing on the Chitika Facebook page):

#1 was “My friends use it,” and it wasn’t even close. Once again, social media proves that the opinions of someone’s friends are the most influential thing on the web. At the time of this publication, “My friends use it” had 125 of the 225 votes cast. The second place answer – “Networking” – had 67 votes.

What about the two reasons we went after in our first iteration of the app? Giveaways and “It looks like a good cause”? Combined, those two got all of 13 votes, and “good cause” fell after things like “Misleading text that I fell for” and “I only use game apps.”

So we’re redesigning the app to appeal to the first two choices: friends and networking. The biggest opportunity tends to be in the content that goes on users’ walls after they vote – you’ve seen how apps like Mafia Wars and Farmville have used this feature to make themselves massively successful. Our copy now will contain the user’s name and a call to check out what online marketing, advertising, and blogging professionals like regarding ad design, and enticing new users to give their opinion.

We’ll be tweaking and monitoring this as the newly-changed app goes forward. Hopefully, in the near future, I can write a post titled “How To Market a Facebook App.” For now, all I have is some interesting data to work on.

Call for suggestions: Have you built a Facebook app? Was it successful? Why or why not, in your opinion?