Tag Archives: Marketing

Social Media, Uncategorized

Developers Revamp Viral Marketing Tactics to Comply with Changes to Facebook Policies

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As originally posted on InsideSocialGames.com

While we recently attributed some of the across-the-board declines in daily active user numbers for Facebook games to seasonality, it’s becoming clearer that recent policy changes by Facebook may be contributing to these declines as well, forcing developers to completely revamp their viral activities. Here are three viral practices that have been reined in and examples of how developers are attempting to cope with the changes.

Pre-Game Gifting Interstitial Screens are Gone

The policy:”You must not prompt users to send invitations, requests, generate notifications, or use other Facebook communication channels immediately after a user allows access or returns to your application.”

How developers are coping: This was viral-marketing 101 for nearly every Facebook game: every time you went to the application, you first had to go through a “gifting” screen before you could actually play the game. Only Playfish refrained from this practice in the past. Now that it’s been taken out of the arsenal, developers like Zynga and CrowdStar are trying different ways of getting users to get back in the gifting habit. Most games have opted to add an icon on top of the game play area, specifically prompting users to send gifts, like in CrowdStar’s Happy Aquarium and Zynga’s Roller Coaster Kingdom:

Zynga’s PetVille has incorporated the gift icon into the basic navigation on the screen, with little balloons that highlight an action they want users to take:

Zynga’s Mafia Wars is more aggressively integrating prompts and banners into the page:

And still, some games still have the gift interstitial, but they are generally smaller games, like Hive7’s Youtopia, which Facebook might not have gotten to yet:

Pop-Ups to Prompt Users to Share Achievements…Revamped

The policy: “You must not display a Feed form unless a user has explicitly indicated an intention to share that content, by clicking a button or checking a box that clearly explains their content will be shared.”

How developers are coping: Instead of the standard Facebook news feed form windows popping up, each game is experimenting with different in-game prompts that users need to activate to show their intent to publish to their wall. PetVille prompts users by having a new icon show up in the bottom right, with a balloon prompting users to share:

Playfish’s Pet Society has a somewhat confusing choice between a sharing icon and a green check mark icon (used to close the in-game pop-up and NOT share), whereas Farm Town by SlashKey prompts with a simple binary choice of either sharing (green check icon) or not (red X icon):

CrowdStar’s Happy Pets uses the check-box approach – although the prompt is by default pre-checked to share so the user must un-check it before clicking on the green check mark icon:

Gating Content Based on Number of Friends…Not Enforced?

The policy: “You must not provide users with rewards or gate content from users based on their number of friends who use your application.”

How developers are coping: This common developer practice often prompted users to request perfect strangers to “Add Me” so that they could unlock levels or items in the game without having to pay for them, thus running amok of Facebook’s intent to keep your social graph strictly to your direct friends (we recently offered up an alternative). In response to the policy being enforced, Treasure Madness by zSlide no longer requires you to have a number of friends to dig under certain heavy rocks. Instead, they now make users pay for “contractors” at 150 in-game gold pieces per contractor. So a rock that would have required 10 friends to lift, now requires 1500 gold pieces:

Yet it’s still a question as to how intense Facebook plans to enforce this policy. For example, Zynga’s Roller Coaster Kingdom still appears to be gating items based on the number of friends, gating the options for booking guests, upgrading park attractions and for expanding the amusement park area:

We fully expect these policy changes to have an impact on growth and retention rates as developers adjust their viral marketing tactics to comply. But with the seasonal impact of people getting away from their computers to celebrate the holidays, plus developers quickly reacting and optimizing new tactics, it may take several weeks to fully understand just how severe the impact of these changes will be on growth and retention rates.

Casual Games, Social Media

Detailing How Facebook Users are Using – Or Not Using – Bookmarks

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When I started looking at the recent push by developers to bookmark or become a fan of an application, I quickly realized there was no publicly available information about the number of bookmarks and what applications were being bookmarked the most. In recent discussions about platform changes, the Facebook team noted “At the moment we are not planning to make whether an application has been bookmarked query-able via our APIs.”).

Only since the beginning of this month has Facebook provided a way for developers to know how many users have bookmarked their application. Much like I looked at Fans per Monthly Active User (MAU) as a way to benchmark your ability to connect with users, a developer can now look at what percentage of MAU are bookmarked. But even this data doesn’t provide much detail as to how many of those bookmarks are actually visible in one of the current six available spots at the bottom of each Facebook page.

So how are users responding to all these requests to bookmark and what are they doing? I took a very non-scientific and not completely representative sample (42 of my friends and family) to get a very rough idea of what’s happening. The results surprised me: about half of the users had not taken the time to change the default Facebook bookmarks.

There are six visible bookmark positions on left hand corner of the Facebook footer, but five of them are pre-populated with Facebook applications by default: Photos, Groups, Events, Marketplace (new since March) and Notes. [Note: If a user uploads a video, then Videos is inserted between Photos and Groups and Notes is dropped; also if a user manages or has their own Fan Page, they will have “Ads and Pages” as the first Bookmark, pushing Photos and other defaults down a notch].

When a user bookmarks an application, the icon for that application slides into the sixth bookmark spot. After that, every new application bookmarked replaces the bookmark in the sixth spot (e.g. if you had FarmVille in that sixth spot, then are asked to bookmark Pet Society, Pet Society replaces FarmVille). And that’s exactly what over a third of respondents are doing – leveraging a single bookmark spot for a non-default application.

This split was pretty similar across gender line – but users who considered themselves frequent game players definitely were more proactive in adding more non-default applications:

  • Self-defined heavy game players had modified 3.67 of the six bookmark slots
  • Medium game players modified 2.27 of the six slots
  • Low or non game players modified 1.16 of the six slots

While some of the heavy game players had not figured out how to manipulate the bookmarks (just adding a single non-default app in the sixth spot), over half of them had modified five or six slots. Anecdotally, most game players tended to play ONLY the games that were in their bookmarks, rarely straying to play something not readily visible either through a bookmark or in their newfeed or notifications.

What applications appear to be breaking through?

Some 60 different applications were bookmarked and visible to these 42 users. The top non-default applications bookmarked (showing percentage of all users that had it in their top six):

  • FarmVille (26%)
  • Mafia Wars (21%)
  • Café World (14%)
  • Bejeweled Blitz (10%)
  • Farm Town and Cities I’ve Visited (7%)
  • And ten more apps were at 4%

For more stats and analysis, read the full post at InsideSocialGames.com

Casual Games, Social Media

Zynga Testing How to Recapture Value of Facebook News Feed Posts

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Just a little over a week ago, Facebook launched an update to their News Feed, moving the default from a real-time feed to an algorithmic feed. After a week of the new feed default, the algorithm seems to have

  1. cut down a great deal on the number of game achievement cross promotions that had grown to over-take the real-time feed (TechCrunch suggested some developers had seen a 20-30% drop in traffic and usage because of the change) and
  2. put the “biggest” stories over the last 24-48 hours together. By biggest, it seems that stories that get a great deal of engagement (user comments primarily, but “likes” as well seem to contribute)

Like any good algorithm (think search engine optimization), developers are already attempting to understand it and figure out how to make their messages more pertinent. And the first visible testing I’ve seen is from Zynga in Mafia Wars. Occasionally, a player may ask their “mafia” friends for help on a specific job by posting to their own wall; that wall post would be seen by these friends and when they clicked to help, they would be rewarded with some experience points and some in-game cash. Below you can see how Mafia Wars has added a “Post Comment” dialogue box:

By prompting a user to add a comment, it’s possible that if a number of users respond, this message could get picked up by the algorithm and show up in the new default News Feed. It will be interesting to see if this catches on or whether users are becoming more savvy about filtering the home page news feed to get the kind of information they want.