Ro Choy from Rockyou
lot of questions on value of facebook– lack of long tail, what’s value, how relevant to business
most money spent on google and yahoo for internet spend. why social networks? relevancy via search and relevancy via social network. Sn’s showing radical growth. get in now to understand for tomorrow
social web on the rise with open Sns.
move destination sites– like service master– creates opportunity to thrive.
rockyou is a widget provider, 700k widgets embedded daily (WTF? what a world we live in) built on putting widgets on myspace to drive traffic to parent sites. tells story of rock you’s growth and strategy. Starting to feel like a salescall…
aps that focus on engagement (access to friends) rather than self-expression perform 7x better.
one key component of virality is simplicity. the easier it is, the more viral. every single extra step takes away from virality.
rockyou has 15 facebooks apos with 40M live installs and 10 of top 40 aps: superwall, xme, likenss, zombies/werewolves/vampires, horoscopes, slideshows, emoter
- leverage your aps to build audience for other aps
key takeaways for viral growth
- Viewer focus:
- problem with user-focus, leads too many features. viewer focus instead– the receiver form a invite is critical.
- mistake of one flow- landing page has five options, it’s too much to think about. viewer shouldn’t think, just add.
- you don’t want a new user to have to be creative. just add.
- because you can only send to ten users, you need to land all ten
- Simplicity
- fewer features to start
- Novelty
- first time ap with viral nature in a space wins the space.
- First mover advantage
- there is a attention space to be owned. Once someone has an ap, they won’t change to another look alike.
- Their horoscope is much worse yet has 6M to a 1/2M by the next competitor. viral tuning.
- universal applicability
- the more universally human, the longer the adoption curve
- appealing to 1%, 10% or more of the population
- rockyou.com essentially abandoned, because facebook so much more effective
- dogbook has 4 times users than dogster.
Building viral engagement
- new users ->build clean flows
- you loose 30% with registration
- direct friends–>deliver clear value prop
- as soon as someone links to ap, link to invite flow.
- superlatives, as soon as you add it asks you “who is most likely to go to jail” then invite flow.
- one sentence: no one reads
- example: for an event ap, who are your drinking buddies? then gets you to invite and set up a meet up
- boring messaging: big john joined water balloon, want to add it?, instead Big John hit you with a water balloon, want to hit him back?
- indirect friends-> focus on messagingh
- engaging notifications
- interesting parties-> allow universal use
ad networks on facebook
- rockyou
- socialmedia
- cubics
- appfuel
things to consider
- total potential throughput of ad network
- quality of ads
- ad copy-> makeit actionable
- viral tuning is still key
takeaways for growth
- self-expression vs engagement
- cross promotion is key
- integration is good proxy
- first mover advantage
- build with new users in mind
- engagement can generate virality