FacebookCampToronto4: How to Market a Facebook Application
On July 8, 2008 I attended my second Facebook Camp Toronto event. I had missed the first one because I didn’t know it existed and the 3rd one due to a prior commitment at work.
My friend and I arrived at the MaRS Centre about 15 minutes before the event and didn’t see the usual registration table set up nor did we see any sort of signage indicating that FacebookCampToronto4 was happening. After verifying that we had actually arrived on the correct date, we walked into the lower hall, found a couple of seats and sat down. I think the whole thing could have been a lot smoother as we weren’t the only ones who looked a little confused wandering into the hall. I guess when they say registration is at 6:00 pm, they mean it.
At 6:30 Colin Smillie took to the podium and did a quick introduction and provided some interesting statistics on the current state of Facebook:
After the intro, he handed the microphone over to Facebook’s Rebecca Sawyer to discuss how to successfully market one’s applications effectively through Facebook’s ad system. For those not familiar with Facebook’s ads, they are placed in two key areas: a user’s new feed (integrated with organic stories) and in the left hand column which appears on all Facebook pages.
After a brief case study discussing the successful promotion of the Sumo Khan application through Facebook Ads, she immediately went into discussing the best practices for creating successful ads:
1. Harness social actions
This can be done by creating ads that have a social action that appears as the headline in the ad. For example “Your friend John Smith has added this application”. This is effective because we rely on what our friends do and can be easily influenced by them. When purchasing ads, you should definitely have ads that target social actions.
2. Target your exact audience
The Facebook ad platform allows one to target based on a variety of key filters (eg. country, location, state, age, gender, college, political views, movies, books, etc). Included in the platform is a targeting tool which provides metrics on what demographic installs your ads. This is useful as it allows you to fine tune your ads. In general, targeting ads to smaller, more specific groups of users should result in higher click-throughs.
3. Writing an Effective Ad
The ad writing platform looks really simple to use. It allows you to easily enter a title, body, and image for your ad with full preview capabilities so that you can see what it’ll look like as you create it. The key point that Rebecca made was your ad has to be catchy and properly branded regardless of whether it’s image based or text based.
4. Create Multiple Ads
The idea here is very simple and self explanatory. Creating multiple ads makes sense to see what works and what doesn’t.
5. Optimize
Included with the platform is an Insights tool which provides real time statistics on impressions, and clicks your advertisements are receiving. Again, the higher the click-through rate, the more successful your ads are.
Rebecca did an excellent QA and handled questions quite well. Aside from an inappropriate question being asked by a disgruntled heckler, most of the questions were on topic and useful for the community.
Andrew Cherwenka of Trapeze was up next. He talked a lot about the growing developer community and a bit about the soon to be released “new” profile page.
I stayed briefly for the Praized demo by Sebastien Provencher but due to a prior engagement I had to leave shortly after.
All in all it was an alright FacebookCampToronto. The lack of registration and signage at the beginning could have been improved, but overall from what I saw everything else went really well.
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