Best Practices for Facebook’s App Invites

Facebook introduced App Invites at its F8 global developers conference in San Francisco in March, and software engineer Ben Padget detailed some best practices for using the feature in a post on the social network’s developer blog. Product designer Todd Hamilton said in a March developer blog post introducing App Invites: App Invites is a new way to grow your applications organically by letting people send custom, personal invites to their friends and ultimately drive app installs across all mobile platforms. App Invites don’t end up on someone’s Timeline, or in their News Feed; instead, they’ll show up on Facebook in a completely new area we’ve built just for Invites. We hope this new tool helps people share apps more seamlessly, while driving installs for your app. Padget wrote in the introduction to his post: Many people start using an app because they heard about it from a friend or saw someone have a great experience on their phone. App Invites gives developers a way to accelerate that word-of-mouth discovery and increase app installs across all mobile platforms. Hundreds of developers are experimenting with this model and today we're highlighting some best practices to make it even easier for developers to get started. And he offered the following examples of the feature in use by book-discovery app Goodreads and music-streaming app Mixcloud: Goodreads placed the entry to App Invites in two prominent and logical places within the app. First, it implemented a prompt to “invite your friends” on the main Feed screen, where people spend much of their time in the Goodreads app. Second, there's a prompt at the top of the Friend List screen, a place where people naturally go to see updates from their friends. In both of these places, Goodreads uses phrases like, “Find out what your friends are reading,” and, “Grow your reading network,” to clearly articulate how a person can improve their Goodreads experience by inviting their friends. With smart placement and clear, explanatory copy, Goodreads is averaging one install for every five App Invites sent. Like Goodreads, Mixcloud has also put the entry to App Invites in a visible and logical location. On Mixcloud's root navigation screen, you can find “Invite” right under “Notifications” -- a placement that's easy for people to find on a screen that they likely visit often to see notices and updates. With this successful integration, Mixcloud averages one install for every seven Invites sent. Finally, Padget detailed the analytics features for App Invites: Once you've identified the perfect placement and added App Invites to your app, you can use analytics to see how your integration is performing. Just go to your app's analytics tab, and under “Integrations,” find “Invites.” Here, you can track sender flow opens, sender flow completions, send flow click-through rate, number of individual recipients and total installs generated. Developers: Have you tried App Invites? What have your experiences been like?

Social Pro Daily

Best Practices for Facebook’s App Invites

Software engineer Ben Padget detailed some best practices for using the feature in a post on the social network’s developer blog.

David Cohen

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David Cohen