Useful tips to create Facebook Applications that work.

Facebook addiction – it’s a new phenomenon (an epidemic rather) that has spread across the world at lightning speed and conquered a big bunch of time that people spend online. It’s a sensation not just among the youth, but all age groups, no matter what their internet exposure is. Now, there’s something that has grown with it – the extensive range of Applications that makes up a prime feature of this social networking wonder.

What these Applications do principally is engage users online and serve various marketing purposes for their developers. They act as an indirect form of effective advertising, as these Applications are entertaining, functional and rewarding, all at the same time. Anyone can start an Application in compliance with the terms and conditions mandated by Facebook.  All one would need is to approach a Facebook Application agency.

Before that, read through these useful tips that would let you make your Facebook Application effective and spot-on.

Identify your Target Audience.

As in everything else, the best way to make a Facebook Application work is to clearly determine and categorize its Target Audience (T.A.). You’ve got to make your company or brand exposed to a large number of potential customers. The Facebook platform is not limited to any age group, except for children. This makes the chances of reaching out to your customers much higher than what you achieve through conventional advertising and marketing. There are numerous methods by which you can attract your T.A. to your Application and increase business accordingly.

Make your Applications as engaging as possible.

There are ten thousands of Applications that you would get to see on Facebook and more are on the making every single day. So, to make yours attractive and interesting, on and on, they should be kept engaging, interesting and exciting. While choosing Applications for the profile, it should be made sure that they would not only attract visitors to your page, but also make them stay too. That is, they should be drawn to return to your Application even after they have made use of it. The more engaging your App is more are the chances that people would come back to them.

  

Reliability counts!

People on Facebook often tend to share their experiences with each other on the usability of Applications. So it is important that you make your Facebook Application as reliable as possible. Remember that the best results are attained not by the amount of money and time you spend on creating these Apps and advertising them, but the very simple logic of usability and ingenuity. The App should speak for itself!

Keep them simple.

Simplicity would do great things and bring about big changes to life. Apply the same universal logic to your Facebook Application too. Keep them simple, user-friendly and easy to use. If your Application is too complicated and time-consuming to use, your users won’t be interested and would simply leave them. So, allow them to navigate through the App easily and see the difference for yourself

Twitter as a marketing tool

When Twitter was launched in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, it was understood and used as a micro blogging and social networking site where every tweet had to be restricted to 140 characters. So, lengthy (not to mention, boring) blogposts about daily life turned into one liners like ‘I had apple juice for lunch’ or ‘My cat ate a rat today’ and we were spared the agonizing details. Much has changed since then. It is no more an online personal journal. There’s a lot more to it, and a lot more that one can benefit from.

Here are some reasons that make Twitter a marketing tool you must consider trying:

A media channel

Twitter can be used to announce the launch of a new product or service and it can reach a large audience. Product updates can be tweeted from time to time, keeping your followers interested. The key here is to know what you are doing. Every communication media has etiquette and it should be maintained. The best method is to provide a link/URL that will lead to the actual information. And since the character limit is 140, it would be wise to use to the services of URL shortening sites. There are hordes of them out there, but www.tinyurl.com is a really good pick.

Promotional Platform

Twitter is a nice place to advertise about new promotional offers or sales. The idea here is to not post an ad but to start a conversation. Replies @ (responses to your tweets) are extremely important to increasing your follower base and especially if you want people to take interest in your offer. The message has to be drafted in such a way that users feel like asking questions about it. If the message is good, you even get Retweets (Your original message tweeted by another user with credits to you so that people who are on the Retweeter’s list get to see your message), which means you get a chance to reach out to more people without even trying to.

Social Networking

For individuals social networking means catching up with people one knows or might like to know. For companies it means getting closer to its existing and prospective customers, knowing what competitors are doing etc. It is every important that customers look at your brand as a person with a personality. When you reply to your follower’s tweets, you give out the message that you are listening to them and are very much approachable. It is also a good way of knowing what your customers want and in what doses.

The in-thing

This may sound quite wannabe-ish but then think about it. Twitter has over 200 million users and there are scores of regular Twitterers who frequent pages of brands they like. Now, just in case they use your product (if you are a new player in the market) and look you up on twitter to get updates about you, they are going to be quite disappointed if they don’t find you. They may search you a couple of times again but if you still don’t turn up on their search results their perception about your brand might change; especially if they see all your competitors on the search results. Now, you don’t want that happening. It’s not herd mentality you need to have but to be in the herd and slowly learn to lead it.

So that’s that. It may not bring instant results (for it’s no magic) but it will definitely help you know where you stand and what you should and should not do. So go ahead, and tweet, if not for the heck of it, at least to stay abreast of the changing times and know if you need to rethink your perceptions about Twitter as a 140 character personal diary. 

Your Brand’s Data and Social Media

When your brand gets 50,000 followers on Twitter or a million likes on Facebook, there’s nothing to wonder rather than realizing yourself that what had made you this much successful among your customers or audiences.

The fact is that, by achieving all this you have gained attention of your audience. You had been successful in engaging your audience till date. This can be understood by measuring how frequently your audience interacts, how often they comment on your wall post or ‘like’ a new piece of content, video or image added by you. By measuring the rapidity of these contents, videos or images, you can come to know which type of content, videos or images will gain the attraction of your audience. Making the point very clear, the thing that you do here is, you are engaging people in an environment that you have little control over and that you certainly do not own.

Your success depends on many factors and they are your business goal, your brand, your products and services and also the interaction you maintain with your audience. Support from your fans or audience will surely help you in making a real brand value. Many of your fans in social media networks may not buy your product but they will always recommend the same to someone and this will surely help in increasing your brand value and bring profit to your business.

Communicating frequently with your customers through these social media will surely help in improving your business and brand value. Email is also a powerful medium to communicate with your customers but then always a question arise that whether today’s teenagers will be tomorrow’s email users. So it’s always better to communicate with your customer with their favorite choice like Facebook or Twitter.

The main issue that one might have to face while depending on all these social media is that, the data will be owned by the social media like Facebook or Twitter and if once any of these sites fell over permanently, a huge share of your data will be lost. Then the only hope that you can have is that, the goodwill that you had built with your customers will stay and meanwhile you can find a better way to communicate with your customers again.

These social media will surely remain to be the best medium to communicate with your customers regarding the brand value for a long time. This will surely help in having a goodwill developed among your customers and hence you can improve your brand value and also profit.

Facebook Events- Make it eventful!

You are hopping aimlessly from update to update and pic to pic on Facebook when you realize that the people you went to school with are all in town. ‘That calls for a get together’ you think. Worry not, if you do not have their phone numbers, what else is Facebook Events for? Search for ‘Events’ in the upper right hand corner search box. On the Events page click on the ‘Create an Event’ button, put in the event name, location, time, date, and the list of invitees and you are good to go!

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that easily for Company events. First and foremost, your audience does not know you personally. They should have a solid reason to show interest in your event. Secondly, unlike an event for friends where you can take a dig at friends who did not turn up, you cannot even dream of asking your audience ‘Where the heck were you?’. So how do you make your company event a success through facebook? Read on…

The event invite has to be CCE (Clear, Concise and Exciting)

KISS (Keep it short and simple) is the key but where you have to mention details do not hesitate to do so. In step 1 of ‘Create an event’ you will be asked to enter the ‘Title, Tagline, Location, Start Time, and End Time’. Choose a title that says it all in one line. You can save the creativity for the tagline. But if you can sound fun and to the point even in the title, it’s great! The important thing is, the message shouldn’t be lost. Choose your Privacy, since it is for a business event it would be Open, meaning anyone can see them and RSVP or invite others too (whether they were invited or not).

Add Details- Step 2 of Create an Event

You may want to skip it but it has a few options that can prove to be really effective. One of them is ‘Enable Event Wall’. This helps you add a message wall to your event page. Your invitees can use this space to discuss stuff about the event, whether they would make it etc. Also enable ‘Enable event, photos, videos and links’ so that people can post interesting material related to the event if any.

Invite Friends!

Step 1 and 2 done, you are all set to invite your friends over. Though you can send as many invites you like, you can send only 100 at a time. You can also add a personal note to your message, to bring in that personal touch by giving some extra information about the event, why they shouldn’t miss it etc.

Build excitement around the event

Your friends would respond to an event even if you had not made any prior mention about it. Sadly, this never happens with a company event. For the big boys, may be, for the small ones, rarely. The mantra here would be to keep the company page active. Keep posting conversational threads on your page. Hint about upcoming events, run a teaser of sorts through videos, photos or simply updates on your wall. People are going to take note and they wouldn’t feel clueless when they finally receive your invite. Motivate people to spread the invitation and keep the Event Page active. Aim to make it viral. Encourage people to click the ‘Share’ button so that many people get to know about it.

Live up to the hype

When people finally turn up for the event, they shouldn’t be disappointed. After all those discussions on the event page you wouldn’t want your guests to leave disappointed. Make sure you deliver your promises. That way, the next time you plan an event, you can be sure of having an impressive gathering on the d-day.

So the next time you are planning an event, use the facebook ‘Create an event’ tool effectively to make it really eventful!