Designing Great Facebook Apps

By BRIAN DIGGELMANN Pick your favorite food brand and head to their Facebook fan page. Chances are good that they’ll have at least one app sitting prominently at the top of the pages. Apps have become ubiquitous on fan pages for a simple reason: they vastly expand the possibilities of what can be accomplished without leaving Facebook, whether it’s a contest, promotion, coupon or game. At the risk of a lawsuit from Apple, no matter what you need there’s an app for that. But like any power tool, misuse can lead to nasty accidents. We got in touch with Jim Belosic, CEO of tab development suite ShortStack.com, and Adobe Social Media Strategy Team member Marc Blinder, to figure out how to design, build and promote a successful app, all without losing any fingers. Scope You wouldn’t want to pad up and play in the NFL if you’d never touched a football before. Likewise, Jim Belosic says Facebook apps are something brands should ease into once they’ve built up their brand on Facebook. “Sometimes people try to skip right to something cool and flashy like an app or contest before they really have an established Facebook presence,” he says. “You can do a heck of a lot with fans just using the off-the-shelf tools Facebook gives you.” Belosic says brands and franchisees alike should start by posting good content, answering questions and getting used to Facebook in general. Then, when they have an audience, it’s time to take it to the next level with an app. “If you start from ground zero and add apps, your expectations may be a little high,” he says. “You have an app but you’ll be wondering where the thousands of fans are. That’s not really how it works. Apps are there to give users something more but there still have to be users first.” Design Apps come in more shapes and sizes than a childhood box of Legos, but there are two important design concepts that hold true no matter what your app does. One is to bear in mind the visual, ADD nature of Facebook users. “On Facebook, people want to interact in short, quick bites,” says Blinder. “It’s the newsfeed approach: flipping through what friends are doing, what brands they’re following are doing. People are image- centric on Facebook, especially pictures of people’s faces.” Blinder says the biggest mistake he sees people making with apps is trying to take all the content from their website and stick it on one Facebook tab. He suggests keeping copy to a few sentences of text to explain the tab and relying on faces to draw the eye. “When you want more in-depth content, we’ve found embedding an engaging video that can tell the story to be successful.” The short attention span of users also means fans can get confused and distracted when the visual appearance of an app doesn’t match the page they just came from. “Coming from a brand background, consistency is key, especially if you’re a franchise,” said Belosic. “Franchises should be able to provide graphics and style guides, but if you can’t have it perfectly consistent, keep it simple.” Belosic says one of the helpful features of ShortStack is that it allows users to install the same app to an unlimited number of Facebook pages, granting greater consistency for brands with local or child pages. Keeping it legal  Before you throw money and time at an app, both experts recommend familiarizing yourself with the Facebook Platform Policies, the set of rules that outline what apps can and cannot do. “One of the biggest failures we see is small business owners violating these terms without even knowing it,” says Belosic. “It’s common to see someone post a picture [on their wall] and say ‘write a caption’ then pick one to win. That totally violates the guidelines.” He adds that if Facebook detects such violations, the offending pages run the risk of being banned and having to go through an appeals process. Third party developers offer an advantage because they update their own policies to stay within Facebook guidelines, but Blinder says simply reading the policies beforehand can prevent most problems. “A lot of it is really common sense – they want you to use Facebook data in a way that is positive to the end user and not share it with third parties in ways that could be detrimental to that person’s privacy,” he says. “Facebook also has real people that are available as resources for Facebook advertisers. If you’re feeling a little nervous, you can reach out to them.” Promotion While we’re on the topic of advertising, considering how you’ll get fans to actually visit your by now magnificent and legal tab is the important and final step in the process. Facebook ads and promoted posts have been widely adopted to help community managers grow their pages, and they can help bring more eyes to your app. “We see sponsored stories and promoted posts performing really well, as well as anything that targets friends of fans,” says Blinder. “It’s really cost effective to test things. Try some ad words, promoted tweets, look at the numbers and data and see what’s working best.” Luckily for brands on a budget, Belosic says that while ads are very reasonable, you don’t have to pay to get the word out. “Once someone becomes a fan of your Facebook page, the biggest way they’re going to interact with you is through the news feed,” he says. “The best and cheapest way to promote is using status updates. Since photos get way more views than text updates, post a photo but have a link to the app in the caption.” What’s next If you’re reading this on your phone, there’s a decent chance you’re part of the majority of Facebook users who primarily access to the social network from a mobile device. It also means you’ve probably noticed that apps don’t show up when using the Facebook smartphone app or mobile site. Belosic says ShortStack offers a solution in the form of a smart URL that allows apps to be accessed on mobile devices. “Our mantra now is ‘apps anywhere.’ If you create an app and promote it with the smart URL, it detects if the user is on a mobile device and will serve the appropriate content.” With the popularity of tablets and smartphones continuing to soar, it seems that optimizing apps for mobile is an inevitability you can get a jump on. Parting wisdom By now you should be feeling pretty good about your ability to make an app awesome. To further your growing base of knowledge, we asked our experts for one last tip before they walked off into the sunset. “If it’s on Facebook, it should be about your friends,” says Blinder. “If it’s a coupon, make sure fans can send a copy to friends. If it’s a free sample, fans can give it as a gift to someone. If it’s a photo contest, friends of fans can vote. No matter what, it should have to do with friends of fans.” “Start small, set expectations, don’t think apps are a miracle cure,” said Belosic. “It’s a tool to make whatever you have even better, however it takes time and you have to promote it and get traffic there. If you’re good at that, the app will take you to the next level. It’s not something you can set and forget— it needs to be watered. But that’s your entire social media plan anyway. Nothing can be on autopilot.”