Are Facebook apps worth the investment?

Following the mobile app trend in 2010, came Facebook app obsession. Not content with creating relevant and engaging content to page “likes”, brands wanted more interactive ways to communicate with their audience. 2011 also saw Facebook tighten up on promotional guidelines, preventing the running of contests on a wall. They also opened up an iFrame solution for developers to get more creative, with apps for almost everything you could think of. But in a period where marketing budgets are tightening and customers are demanding value and function of social media, I think this popularity will soon plateau. There are four reasons why I believe this to be true:

1.    Facebook Mobile/App doesn’t support apps (if talk is to be believed, HTML 5 for mobile apps is still a way off).
2.    Users don’t visit pages that much (and when they do, they view your wall, not your apps).
3.    Technical errors are rife. The lack of rigorous guidelines and app-development process leads to errors in their production.
4.    Facebook could change the goalposts whenever it likes

1.    With a large volume of media now consumed through a mobile device - 350 million globally now access Facebook through their mobile device - apps are failing to serve a need. Mobile users use their devices in both pre-purchase and post-purchase research phases, so if Facebook does not rise to the challenge soon, brands may begin to turn their back on the apps that they once loved.

2.    We usually just work with the impression data from Facebook Insights, but there have recently been more Facebook Insights coming from the brands that use pages. An article, released on the site mashable.com, shows heatmaps of page usage for numerous brand Social pages. It shows visually what most community managers suspect and mostly likely see in their insights week in week out.

Users don’t tend to dig around pages; generally they just click a page’s content above the fold. Therefore, spending time on content and imagery is probably not worthwhile as without significant marketing budget, it simply won’t get found.

Alternatively, investment could be channeled into creating multi-channel, integrated and eye-catching content, suitable for your brand wall, as well as for desktop and mobile consumption. This easily viewable, sharable content creates an association with your brand and prevents alienation of your mobile user base.

Budget previously allocated to app development could then be divided up into content creation, social adverts, fan acquisition and integration with other channels both above and below the line.

3.    Technical inaccuracies will always irritate users. With so little documentation, it is easy to see how developers are forced to guess their way through the process. It only takes a brief look through the Facebook and YouTube developer forums, to understand the effect of this. This particularly affects smaller businesses that lack the resource for Facebook’s preferred app-developer partners and have to take on the process with just an in-house designer and some patient determination.

This all takes into account what’s currently possible with Facebook. However consider the possibility of Facebook moving the goalposts just after you have invested in an app? Suddenly they disallow an app from appearing on people’s walls, or force a security restriction. It’s therefore important to build contingency into your plans and reserve some budget for cosmetic and even code changes that can occur with little warning.

There are certainly times when apps will be needed and there’s functionality on Facebook that only an app can coax out of a community. Entertainment and media businesses such as Spotify and The Guardian are using the new Facebook timeline and news feeds particularly well in order to gain prominence for their “functional apps”. I do think we will start to see companies, particularly outside of the media and entertainment industries, lose interest in the Facebook app, in favour of effective content and functionality, possibly sited on a separate platform. At least until the Facebook app for mobile devices hits the market and blows out the competition!