All About The Facebook Feed part II, by Nick O'Neill

quick hit from Nick O'Neill's great post on 'Top 5 Viral Facebook Techniques', point #3:

News feed - The news feed is the most powerful component of Facebook. Period. 
There are two ways that applications can leverage the news feed. The first is naturally built in. Most of the time, when a user adds an application it is displayed in their friends’ news feeds. While it is not a guarantee that it will show up in other people’s news feeds (due to a number of factors pertaining to news feed optimization), this is the primary thing that helps applications spread virally.

When I launched my Bush Countdown clock I added no viral components and relied completely on people’s news feeds. This has spread the application to close to 8,500 users. While not spectacular, it is hardly something to sneeze at.

totally agree with Nick's first sentence above. as a followup to my previous Marketing Facebook Apps post & Justin Smith's News Feed Optimization (NFO) post, i'm going to try to do more posting in the near future on Facebook News Feed & mini-feed... as soon as i figure out some more interesting shit to say. 

(ps - don't hold your breath.)

Comments

[Nick O'Neill]

Wow, that is seriously an unattractive picture ;)

[Shii]

Hey Dave, speaking of viral marketing, you're such a tease and the other guys at Mint are too. I just sifted through the Googles and I can't find ANY reports of people actually being SENT an invite. So you're generating all this free PR without having to show off your product. Pssh!

E-mail I'm posting with is fake, don't send me anything, etc.

[dave mcclure]

ummm... this is a bit off topic, but:

1) Mint has ~100 people in beta now
2) they're adding more folks this month
3) yes, we know there are a *lot* more people waiting to get in

the fact of the matter is we're still working on the product, and before we scale up the beta we want to make sure everything is looking good. once it is, we'll add more people. in the meantime, we're not really seeking out much PR.

- dave

[Shii]

Okay, I guess that makes sense. I went to your blog despite the off-topicness because I wanted to call you out on your elaborate ruse ;)