Love em or hate em, social apps are big business. How big? Check this out.
The popularity of these seemingly pointless time wasters is undeniable… According to Digital Buzz, 70% of Facebook users engage with applications. Considering there is anywhere between 400 and 500 million registered users (depending on who you ask), that’s a whole bunch of people using apps. So what ones have been cleaning up on Facebook?
And how they look now…
The stats above from the start of the year (courtesy of appdata.com) show FarmVille dominating with a bunch of others clustered behind. Compare that to the current stats and we can we see the gap has closed a little with a few more apps now attracting more than 30 million monthly average users (MAU) and Farmville down in the 60s. Regardless of who is atop of the heap, there are a plethora of very different apps getting love.
Sure the Facebook updates can be annoying “Joe scored 10 billion points on Bejeweled Blitz – like I give a crap! But if you can get over that then you can start to see the potential… Like the various ways to make money from apps (reason enough to keep the developers interested): 1) sell advertising within the app 2) Have a company sponsor the build and chuck their logo all over it 3) Have users buy credits to make their experience better.
So what is my sudden fascination with applications though? I like the idea of developing them to become part of an overall social media strategy. It doesn’t have to be about making money, it doesn’t have to be about making the most addictive game; it can simply be another way to engage with people. I believe the current crop of Facebook apps have given the entire game a bad rep but hope that is starting to change. I can see more organisations using social apps to run promotions, get it touch with their customers and try to have the new cool thing on the web. Any business that is serious about social media should definitely investigate the power of applications.
We’re delving into the world of app development @iThnk so if anyone has any tips or advice we would love to hear it. If you can point us to any good resources on the subject that would be wicked too (c’mon up that social credit)!
