EVCin

When viral marketing tactics were curtailed by Facebook’s platform and policy updates, the question wasn’t whether developers would take a hit, but how much? And whether those that thrived on aggressive viral tactics would be hurt more than those that didn’t. I look at what appears to be behind those who did well and those that took a major hit.

Facebook started enforcing a slew of application policies over the last week, forcing game developers to revamp their viral marketing. Here are three of the top changes and how top developers are revamping their viral marketing tactics.

Even though there is a mad rush by developers to get users to bookmark their application on Facebook, there is little data at all on how users are using Bookmarks. Using a unscientific sampling, we find that few users are leveraging bookmarks in their current state and Facebook’s planned revamping of Bookmarks may be a way to revitalize this feature for both users and developers.

While some have reported developers seeing a 20-30% drop in traffic and usage since Facebook pushed aside the live news feed for an algorithmic feed, Zynga is one of the first to visibily be trying to crack the code.

For developers, the constantly changing Facebook platform has always been a challenge. At least this time they’re getting a roadmap. And while those changes are pretty significant, they should improve the quality of interaction with users. The message is clear: it’s time to innovate again and make the new tools and APIs available work to keep users engaged and to virally grow the base in a little less “spammy” way.