I admit this title is a bit presumptious, but I can’t help but get excited at the progess so far of the application I just realeased onto facebook. The application is The Sentence Game which is basically a ‘plug in’ to an existing website www.sentence-game.com and since I realesed it (3 days ago at the time of writing) there is now over 650 people who have it installed, only about 10 of my friends. 650 is a small number really but compared to the other apps released around the same time that’s pretty good.
Key Ingredients
Whether or not The Sentence Game takes off, in no particular order here’s what I consider to be some of the key ingredients:
- Good Logo – not essential but will help encourge people to install when your app is new
- Use the social graph – if your app is not making use of the facebook community e.g. it is a standalone app where all the interaction is on the app canvas, then it’s going to be a real struggle to spread the word. Make sure your app has a useful/informative/entertaining prescense on the user’s profile and posting items into their feed when they perform key actions will greatly assist in spreading the word.
- Don’t spam – don’t post too to user feeds much, or post pointless/repeat messages – you might have your account disabled
- Simple is best – if you’re looking for viral then it needs to be simple so new users can ‘get’ it easily
If you’re interested, here’s The Sentence Game’s progress graph:
Lol, seems like you got it up to 9k and now it’s steadily losing people, no sticky power?
Ha!
Actually it’s our first app and it grew much faster than we expected! We had trouble coping with 100’s of simultanious users, I think that might have put a lot of people off, but there are a number of other improvements we need to make aswell.
Anyway from this experience, I would add to the list of points above:
* Plan for success – you can go from zero to hero in a few days so make sure you plan ahead your server infrastructure.