It’s quick, it’s easy and it opens the door to a potential 500 million new customers. A well designed, engaging Facebook application spreads like a fire, from wall to wall, happily assisting potential customers to volunteer up their personal information and to view your marketing material. A poorly designed one will waste ten minutes of your time and do not much else.
Before you start building your app, think about the interests and needs of your potential customers and then work with that. Don’t think about how to sell to them, think about how to make them laugh, or think or share their feelings (and your app) with their friends.
Building A Facebook App Is Then Just A Matter of Following Some Instructions
1. Download the Application builder to your profile (search Application builder to find it)
2. Scroll through the list of applications and find one that suits your potential customers. If you want to get them talking about themselves and their interests, a quiz is the best option but all the applications listed are easy to build and use.
3. Fill in all the initial information, choosing a catchy title for your quiz.
4. Next go to “Outcomes” and fill in three or more desirable results. Make sure your results play on the emotion you are trying to procure as this is also a good spot to add your URL (don’t go over the top with advertising or Facebook may ban your quiz)
5. Fill in a series of fun and engaging questions. If you are asking very personal questions (and the idea of telling a secret can be enticing to you readers) make sure there is a “none of your business” option so you don’t get shut down. Make sure your spelling and grammar is accurate too.
6. Finally, carefully fill in the last page, following all instructions to the letter to prevent usability problems down the line. Remember to leave the Application Name box empty.
7. In the edit screen, you can fill in your details as a Facebook developer. It is not recommended you touch any of the other settings until you become more confident with application building.
8. On the “set up dashboard”:
- Upload your logo or branding
- Use the yellow page for promotion ideas.
- Edit the About the Application page.
- And, most importantly, invite some friends to use your application as you need a minimum of ten users before you can publish it to the Facebook Application Directory.
9. Once your friends are using your app, go back to the “Promote Your Application” page and use the orange link to apply for your app to be placed on the Facebook wide apps directory. This is where you could be in trouble if you’ve put too much sales information into your app! The approval process takes about two weeks, after that, there are 500 million reasons to cross your fingers and hope you did a great job!
This is just another new way to reach your market without the high costs of traditional advertising. Used correctly, there’s no stopping your app!
I tried this with a fan application -these seem much quicker to set up – looks good and you can actually overtly advertise your site. I can see how that is going to be harder to spread than a quiz though but it’s still another way to use Facebook that I hadn’t thought of.
Facebook does offer a lot of potential customer to anyone who is selling the product oriented for younger generation. But I think an average small business will not benifit much from facebook even when the people telling the seller their preferences. I know a lot of stories how people made sales using google adwords, but I do not personally famliliar with even one success story using facebook.
I completely and wholeheartedly disagree 🙂 About 40% of my website traffic comes via my facebook page and I generate about three grand a month in sales directly from Facebook. My target audience is 30-45 year old women. There’s a reason people call it Mombook and all the kids are tweeting and moving to Bebo. If you look at facebook stats, membership is burgeoning in all demos except youth.
With all due respect, I could not disagree with your more. 🙂
I agree that facebook is one that can bring traffic. although it should not also ignore other social networks like twitter or the other.
Thank you for listing down these instructions and for the advices you mentioned here. Your post is a big help.
Thank you for showing me how to get some more fans on facebook.But now days i guess quiz is don’t bring that much of a traffic i guess is facebook question that it does.But still great post.
Your guidelines are indeed helpful. Thanks for the thought of posting and sharing it with us. Keep it up!
Social media like all things marketing needs a great plan. Like this article says “Used correctly, there’s no stopping your app”. Social media is a good starting point for any successful inbound marketing program.