Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- UserVoice’s Facebook Tab App Funnels Customer Feedback into Actionable Suggestions
- With Over 20 Million Users on Facebook, CityVille Is Already a Metropolis
- Facebook Widens Test of App Request Notifications, Some Users Complain
- CityVille Grows Huge on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by MAU
| UserVoice’s Facebook Tab App Funnels Customer Feedback into Actionable Suggestions Posted: 13 Dec 2010 07:04 PM PST
As all types of real world entities create Facebook Pages and drive users there instead of to proprietary websites, Facebook also becomes the best place to offer customer support and feedback channels. Get Satisfaction worked with Involver to release a customer support tab application in March, and Parature released a tab app focused on around questions in August. UserVoice, however, appears to be the first centered around working towards solutions instead of registering complaints or inquiries. Without it, feature suggestion can lead to clogged inboxes or unruly forums which make it difficult to determine the consensus of users. The company launched in 2008, has eight employees, and is based in San Francisco. It has taken $800,000 in funding in a round led by Baseline Ventures. UserVoice has registered 52,000 admins, and has collected feedback from over 16 million people across it’s different sites, apps, and widgets. The system can be licensed as a free trial or for $19 a month for minimal customization and admin capabilities, or up to $589 a month or more for a custom, white-labeled design. UserVoice’s Facebook tab application allows those who visit a Page to submit feedback through a composer reading “I suggest you…” and a prompt that states “Enter your idea (new feature, suggestion, etc)”. This helps clients harness user feedback to improve their products or services. Users can decide how many of their limited allotment of votes they want to lend an idea, and the ideas with the most votes rise to the top. This makes it efficient for admins to determine the most urgent requests, and prevents especially active users from drowning out the ideas of others — something common on standard forums.
A client’s dedicated UserVoice feedback site and Facebook tab app are synced, displaying suggestions or comments from either on both. Votes on the a UserVoice website can easily be shared to Facebook or Twitter.
In the Admin Console, ideas can be assigned a status such as “under review”, “started”, “completed”, or “declined” to inform user that the company is listening. When a suggestion is closed (completed, or declined), users receive their votes back for allocation to remaining suggestions. Admins can also leave notes on ideas for other admins, and UserVoice is testing a new ticket system for assigning responsibilities. When admins reply to ideas, their comments always appear expanded, giving them increased prominence and visibility within discussions. Setting up the UserVoice tab application is relatively simple, even though the site’s new user flow is slightly awkward. Once a user signs up for a UserVoice account, they customize the look and settings of their dedicated site, and register which Page they’ll add the tab to. What’s confusing is that the Launch step of the flow doesn’t include a direct link to the installation instructions which are buried in the Documentation sidebar tab. These instructions provide the general UserVoice Facebook app’s URL where users must click “Add to my Page” to actually install the configured tab app. UserVoice’s new iPhone app integration lets clients embed a piece of code in their app, allowing users to submit suggestions, view ideas, and vote. Unique to the integration is a prompt to rate the currently used application. If the user rates it four or five stars, UserVoice provides a link to the App Store where they can submit an official rating. Accumulating positive ratings is crucial to discovery in the crowded app store, making UserVoice a valuable tool to iPhone developers.
UserVoice allows for market research in reverse, where customer feedback find companies and naturally clusters into actionable ideas. While originally designed for web services, it has been used by the city of Santa Cruz to vote on budget options, the city of Vancouver to propose green initiatives, and a record label to find new bands to sign. UserVoice doesn’t aim to replace a traditional customer support system, but does allow feedback to be funneled in a way that’s satisfying for users and functional for clients. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| With Over 20 Million Users on Facebook, CityVille Is Already a Metropolis Posted: 13 Dec 2010 01:35 PM PST [Editor's note: Zynga launched CityVille on Facebook at the beginning of the month, an ambitious move to help the company grow beyond FarmVille and other older hits. We'll examine what's making it a hit in the article below, but the larger point it seems to show is this: after a slow year for many of the larger developers, massive and fast growth is still possible on Facebook's platform.]
It’s often said that the days of jet-fueled app growth on Facebook are over, a common wisdom that is invalidated only by Zynga, which also saw FrontierVille rapidly grow to over 20 million players earlier this year. CityVille is far faster than FrontierVille; in June, when the latter was only 12 days old, we clocked it at 7.4 million MAU. In fact, Zynga’s claim just a few days after launching CityVille that the game is its fastest-growing ever have proven to be quite correct. Even when Facebook’s viral channels were vulnerable to any use developers could dream up, Zynga’s top growers like FarmVille, PetVille and FishVille only grew about half as fast as CityVille. The quickness with which Zynga was willing to crown CityVille its best-ever suggests that it had a good idea of how CityVille’s growth might unfold. The broad strokes are pretty visible. We can see four major reasons for CityVille’s growth: Cross-promotionAlthough all game developers now engage in some form of cross-promotion, Zynga took promotion for CityVille far beyond the usual top-bar ad network. Although its efforts did start there: in Zynga’s huge, 200 million plus network, CityVille is the only Zynga game (other than the one that you’re currently playing) with an oversized button displaying its full name.
More additive to growth, there has been heavy promotion between FarmVille and CityVille. When you’re playing CityVille, it asks you to email FarmVille friends and encourage them to play; when you’re playing FarmVille, your top neighbor is now Sam, a character that pops up a link for CityVille. > Continue reading on Inside Social Games. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Widens Test of App Request Notifications, Some Users Complain Posted: 13 Dec 2010 11:39 AM PST Facebook appears to have rolled out its short-term test of app requests in the notifications channel to many or possibly all users. The change was designed to help developers by improving app discovery and user retention. After reviewing early feedback from gamers and testing the system ourselves, we believe many users will think the requests are redundant since they already appear elsewhere, and overrun their notifications channel, obscuring social notifications about Likes, wall posts, and photo tags.
The test was initiated on Thursday as a way to “drive discovery and engagement to applications”, according to Facebook. Notifications channel access was revoked from developers in February, and app requests began appearing in both Requests and the navigation bookmarks in November. Users had acclimated to looking for their requests in these channels, but developers wanted a more prominent way to lead users to their apps. Early feedback on the test from a small but vocal minority of the user base has criticized the mismatch in volume of different types of requests in the same channel. Notifications were previously a quieter channel for users to learn when friends publicly interacted with their content, but some users with many friends who play games receive dozens of app requests a day. These quickly push the traditional social notifications out of the five slots in the notifications drop-down, forcing users to click through to their full page notifications screen. Low-urgency app request notifications may be viewed as spam when mixed with high-relevance social notifications.
Other users cite how receiving a notification used to be exciting because it meant someone Liked their photo, commented on their post, tagged them in a status update, or engaged with them in some other meaningful way. Being distracted only to find someone selfishly wanted their help in a game dilutes this joy and can make checking notifications a chore. A separate app notification icon in the top navigation bar could be a better solution.
While its common for Facebook users to react to any interface change, and few who prefer changes are moved enough to comment, the complaints seem unanimously negative and somewhat logical. Facebook’s internal tests of interface changes aren’t always a good measure, as employees or designated testers may subscribe to different etiquette norms and be less likely to abuse features than the average user. For instance, some users might see the change as an opportunity to bombard friends with high visibility requests for their own gain. Facebook’s testers may have been more cautious about sending requests, leading the company to think app request notifications would be helpful, not spammy. Facebook says its seeking to “capture the network effects of the update”. Despite the early backlash from a few users, the test may be successfully improving app discovery and engagement to the benefit of developers. However, if app request notifications realign the Facebook experience too squarely around games, users may find it more difficult to stay touch with the most sustainable driver of engagement — their friends. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| CityVille Grows Huge on This Week’s List of Fastest-Growing Facebook Apps by MAU Posted: 13 Dec 2010 08:13 AM PST
As we cover in detail over on Inside Social Games this morning, CityVille is already a huge phenomenon, with 22 million MAU. Unfortunately, Facebook’s reporting is running a day or two behind, as occasionally happens.
My Year In Status is taking advantage of the end of the year, when most people start thinking back to what they’ve accomplished during the year. The app also saw huge growth last year around December, then lay dormant for most of 2010. Likewise, JibJab and even the dating app Badoo could be enjoying some effects from the season. The other app worth pointing out is Yahoo!. Between Yahoo and Microsoft’s apps, which show when Facebook users visit their web properties, Facebook’s traffic-tracking system is beginning to surface some of the web’s connections, which could be interesting for future analysis. |
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Taking on CityVille first, the game is succeeding from a combination of international growth and heavy cross promotion. We | You are subscribed to email updates from Inside Facebook To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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