*supercollider

Sure, today the trendiest kids at the marketing party are iPhone, Augmented Reality and Twitter. But less than two years ago, Facebook apps were right up there with UGC as the keys to unlocking new media nirvana. Time magazine even went so far as to call 2007 the ‘Year of the Widget‘.

I’ve always loved the idea of the widget. Provide people with a social-media friendly utility, something that they can get some use out of every day, and they will reward you with oodles of earned media in return.

With case studies like Trip Advisor’s Cities I’ve Visited and Travel Channel’s Kidnap apps showing huge measurable ROI, it was hard not to get caught up in the hype. Duly inspired, marketers rushed in and created a flood of apps. And mostly they got disappointing results, got bored, and moved on to the next thing.

These days Facebook themselves generally recommend brands focus Pages instead of Apps. I think this is pretty good advice. However I still hold out hope that our promised Year of the Widget will eventually come to pass, and we are just muddling our way through the Trough of Disillusionment. Or at least we are on Facebook — app fever is alive and well on iPhone. But with an active user base of 250 million people, or approximately 10x as many people as have iPhones and iTouches, the opportunity on Facebook must surely still remain even once the hype has subsided, right?

So it was with a mixture of morbid fascination and lingering optimism that I went about trawling through tens of thousands of Facebook apps page-by-page to find every one that was created by a brand as of mid-April 2009. I wanted to see how brands had chosen to leverage the platform, and to see how their efforts were faring. And with the last point in mind, I’ve since revisited all the apps in July, roughly three months later, to compare usage numbers from then to now.

Before we talk numbers, it’s important to caveat that many of these apps are a year or two old now. Many were also campaign or tactically focused, and not relevant past a certain time period. So you can expect that the numbers wouldn’t necessarily be blinding. Still, in the face of a Facebook user base that has been growing at a meteoric rate, the numbers for branded Facebook apps couldn’t be further removed from the success of the social network itself:

• 90% of brand-created Facebook apps declined in MAU (monthly average users) versus three months ago
• 97% of brand-created Facebook apps declined in MAU against their 120-day high
  

With that ugly but useful top-line reference out of the way, there is a lot more to be mined from this, I hope. I’m hoping that everyone can benefit from this list in these ways:

1. A state of play for app-land
   A snapshot in time for how brands are using this massive social network with its still nascent platform to connect (or not) with their customers.

2. Benchmarks
   Examples are categorized by type so if you are thinking about doing a game or competition on Facebook and want to see what the benchmarks are, it’s easy to quickly pull up and reference what other brands have already tried.

3. See what’s working, and what’s not
   Why does one app have 100k users and another only 10? It’s not a simple question, but at least you can see what the winners are doing.

4. Get a gauge for what success looks like
   And you’ll see, the tail is long but thin.

There’s conclusions after the list, but now let’s get right to it. The list is sorted by the middle column, Monthly Average Users as of April 20th. As you can see the number to its left, MAU as of July 18th is almost always lower. Often by a lot.

Games

Gifts

Competitions

Branded content and media distribution

Reward

Utilies

Community

Cause Marketing

Social expression and identification

Conclusions

1. Apps rarely sustain traffic
   This is a similar situation to iPhone, which sees a big drop-off rate and struggles with retention in apps. It’s hard to get users, and even harder to keep them.

2. Despite Facebook’s continuing growth, overall app usage is in decline
   Facebook still continues to grow at a blistering pace, but fewer and fewer people are using apps.

   Facebook says this is a result of “app fatigue”. People are past of being bitten by zombies, irritated at apps that spam them and their friends, and overwhelmed by the clutter of apps and notifications, and are focusing their Facebook usage around the friend stream, photos and videos, and group and brand pages. Apps are paying the price for this shift in attention.

3. Most apps don’t have many people using them
   You probably figured that one just by looking at the list, although this is slightly misleading. The reality is most apps will naturally peak in usage before dropping off, and many of the apps on that list are from 2008 or even 2007.

   However the reality is that 98% of Facebook apps have less than 200 users. The situation isn’t much different for branded apps, despite the investment that goes into them. Out of the top 4,000 apps, I counted just 12 brand-owned apps that weren’t extensions of existing web 2.0 services like iMeem or Reverbnation. Twelve out of 4,000. That’s awful.

4. Most brands are using apps to simply syndicate existing content
   This makes sense, as it’s a lot easier for National Geographic to create a Photo of the Day app using their vast repository of content as it is for BlockBuster to create Movie Clique and hook it up to their ordering system. But it does suggest we are still at the tip of the iceberg for what’s possible.

5. The promise of real utility is there
   Although it’s hard to see amongst all the content syndication and just general clutter in the app space, you can see apps that start to make sense in terms of providing long-term usefulness to their owners.

   Blockbuster Movie Clique takes a lot of heat from it’s users for being broken most of the time, but the idea that I can queue up the movies I want to be delivered to me via my Facebook profile is a good one, especially when you tie those against my friend’s recommendations and queues.

   QOOP Photo Printing is a great idea, although I bet they wish they could simply be in-line to your photo galleries. Ticketmaster Hot Tours makes sense, especially if they add in the ability to organize and co-ordinate groups. And those are just a few examples.

6. Winners win big
   This has always been the siren call of the widget. If you score, you score huge. A relatively low upfront investment can net massive, sustained, long-term engagement and peer-to-peer distribution. It’s the holy grail of media placement. Your audience places and distributes it for you, and interacts with it regularly.

   And for some brands, they’ve achieved this. As per the case studies back in Part II, the Travel Channel gets a staggering 81% click-through from the 2.1 million monthly users of their Kidnap! app, which has increased site visits 28% and page views 38%. I recall similar traffic-driving stats for TripAdvisor off the back of their Cities I’ve Visited App. And that’s beyond the brand awareness and engagement within the app itself.

7. The future is bright
   After showing how few people actually use apps in the first place, and how even fewer use apps created by brands, how can I possible say this?

   Well, it’s a hunch. But I believe that what Facebook terms ‘app fatigue’ is simply another way of saying that we’re collectively in the trough of disillusionment stage of app adoption.

   2007 was the year of the widget. Except it wasn’t, and Facebook apps for all the reasons catalogued above have fallen out of favour with users and with brands and developers.

   The thing is though, we also know that traffic is flowing away from destination sites and into aggregators and social sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. The concept of apps still makes complete sense, in that people are going to want certain things delivered to them when and how they want them, in the context that makes sense. I do want a dashboard that has all the things that matters to me in one place. And some of those things will be about brands. But whether they will be created by brands is another story.

This concludes my four-part look at brand apps on Facebook. In case you missed them, previous posts included Creative Uses of the Platform, Key Case Studies, and Fan Created Brand Apps.

Hope this has been useful in some way, would love to hear your thoughts on Facebook, apps and the state of widgets in general in the comments.