Thoughts On FacebookCampToronto2
I attended FacebookCampToronto2 tonight at Toronto’s wonderful MaRS building. Surprisingly, much of the content was marketing-related, which was a pleasant surprise – I expected it to be very technical.
I live-blogged the event on Twitter, but in hindsight here are a few of the moments that stood out for me:
- Roy Pereira from Refresh Partners:
- There are over 5,500 approved Facebook applications
- 84 apps account for 90% of usage
- Out of the 30 cities with the most Facebook users, 11 are in Canada
- Ami Vora from Facebook:
- Facebook gets roughly 250,000 new users per day – that’s roughly a 3% increase daily
- Total users currently stand at about 45 million
- The site serves up an average of 50 pages per user per day, making it the sixth most trafficked site on the web
- Roughly 100 apps are added per day, and about 80% of users have added at least one application
- Facebook’s photo application gets more traffic than all the other major photo sites combined
- 50% of users return to the site daily
- Their event product sees almost three times as many page views as Evite
- Developers should think of privacy as an asset that enables people to surf in comfort, not as a restriction
- This was a example of how PowerPoint should be used – uncluttered slides, great use of images, minimal text
- Jesse Hirsh
- “Are we in the early stages of a social operating system?”
- Many top applications emerged early on and received ‘first-past-the-post’ momentum
- Five characteristics of the top applications:
- Original
- Infectious – vampires, pirates, zombies etc
- Engaging – provide a semi-public stage for users – allow crowd-sourcing, creativity, simple polling/surveys etc
- Integrate with existing content – e.g. Simpsons avatars
- Empowering – ratings, reviews, favourites
- Greg Thomson
- Success in a Facebook app requires about 10,000 active users, or about 250,000 installs
- He estimates that each active user is worth about $3.00 per year
- 60% of his users generate about 90% of his revenue. 30% don’t generate any
- We saw demos on three cool apps:
- Dogbook / Catbook (Geoffrey B. Roche)
- WishList (Bogdan Arsenie)
- DreamBook (Phil Tucker)
A couple of my thoughts on the evening:
- Thanks to Roy Pereira, Colin Smillie, and Andrew Cherwenka for organizing the event
- This was incredible value for attendees. For, well, nothing, we got a great set of presentations. Facebook, of course, isn’t the one-shot cure to all our problems, but I’m sure everyone was able to take away a few nuggets
- Don’t try to pass off an unsuccessful project as a case study. One presenter tried to but got called on it
- Why create an app that requires an entire site within Facebook? Why not do it outside and leverage that?
- Facebook is a social network. If you want to make use of it, make sure you work with the ‘social’ aspect and don’t ignore it
- A timely tweet (thanks to Brian Solis) of a Jason Calcanis quote this evening says it all – once again, for the vast majority these are tactics and not strategies:
“If you’re building your business on Facebook only, you’re an idiot”