Building Apps

Page 340

22_277959-ch15.qxp

324

5/5/08

11:31 AM

Page 324

Part IV: The Part of Tens

Pay Attention to User Reviews and Feedback Be sure to be responsive to the feedback you are receiving. Respond to bugs quickly and look to add feature requests from users. If you do so, you build a highly enthusiastic user base that goes out of its way to encourage people to use your app.

Promote Your App on Facebook Facebook offers many ways in which you can promote your app within the Facebook environment. If you have a budget, you can run an advertising campaign on Facebook through banner ads or a sponsored story appearing in the News Feed. Go to www.facebook.com/ads for more info. If you don’t have much money to spend, you can seek out other cost-efficient ways to promote your app on Facebook. For starters, you can become actively involved with Facebook groups that are related to the domain of your application. For example, if you have a stock tracking app, you could participate in stock-related groups. When you are regularly active in the group, you have the “street cred” to engage people in a positive manner without sounding like a used car salesman. You can also partner with other application developers who have apps that complement your own to cross-promote your respective applications. This promotion can be done through the UI itself or through cross-pollinated News Feed stories.

React Quickly to Platform Changes and Enhancements The Facebook Platform is quite literally a moving target in these early days of third-party development. As a result, you need to stay on top of the latest changes and enhancements in the platform and react accordingly. For example, I recently wanted to add a countdown timer to a Facebook page I developed. However, only one countdown timer could be added to a page instead of a profile. There were no technical reasons why the other timers could not be added, but the apps were not updated to react to this change in capability.


Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.