The push by marketers to be “bookmarked” has been going on since the Favorites tab first showed up in web browsers. A bookmark on Facebook is the Holy Grail for an app developer: sitting in the footer of every Facebook page is the only way to be consistently “above the fold” and in the view of a user. However, more social games are also encouraging users to become fans of an app, too. More on that below.

Recent changes and trends are making these channels more meaningful to developers:

• The Facebook homepage newsfeed has defaulted from a real-timefeed (where users only typically see it if they get online within four to six hours after the item was posted) to an algorithmic feed that users may never see,
• Notifications (which at least are continuously highlighted till you click on them) are going away in the very near future, and
• A recent study of US women by Q Interactive showed that 85 percent of them use five or fewer games/apps regularly (you can make your own inferences that there are only six bookmark spots in the Facebook footer).

It would be interesting to understand the correlation between being bookmarked and visit frequency (which I think itself is highly correlated to propensity to pay). Lacking that data, we CAN take a look at how well developers are getting users to become a fan of their application. Some of the bigger developers have several games at a low 5% Fans/MAU rate, but there are some notable exceptions (like Pet Society) that hit 15%. See the full analysis in the full post on InsideSocialGames.com.