Facebook Application Growth Rates

I received a question this morning asking what the growth rate of applications on Facebook are. I ended up writing quite a long response, which could be interesting for other people asking a similar question.

Unfortunately, this is similar to asking 'what's the growth rate of a website?' - an application is essentially a standard web app, that happens to exist on a social platform, and which also has many features to make it easier to share and spread virally. This allows applications being used by many people to spread organically in a cost-effective way (and sometimes to grow very, very quickly), and gives great access to the social graph (e.g to make use of friend connections inside applications), but doesn't change any of the fundamentals - people will use it or not depending on a) their ability to find out about it in the first place (which will require seeding of some kind to kick things off) and b) how useful/enjoyable the application is.

Playfish have released games that have grown to the tens of millions of users in a matter of weeks, but they have a large seeding base (their other popular games) and put huge amounts of investment and time into every single application. There are well over 200 apps which maintain users bases in the millions.

On the other side of the coin, there are thousands of applications which have failed to make it past a few hundred users in total.

From our side of the coin, our philosophy is that for branded campaigns, you should first get a brand concept that people naturally want to be a fan of; then build the fan page and seed this to initial users; and then use applications to increase the fan base and see your ROI in terms of engagement and user data/lead generation.

So - it's as long as a piece of string. Social networks like Facebook have loads of great features which can make them more engaging, and allow them to spread faster and easier than normal websites. However, lowing the barrier to growth doesn't stimulate that growth in and of itself, and you always need to have a strategy to first seed your application effectively.