Inside Social Games

The push by marketers to be “bookmarked” has been going on since the Favorites tab first showed up in web browsers. A bookmark on Facebook is the Holy Grail for an app developer: sitting in the footer of every Facebook page is the only way to be consistently “above the fold” and in the view of a user. However, more social games are also encouraging users to become fans of an app, too. More on that below.

Recent changes and trends are making these channels more meaningful to developers:

• The Facebook homepage newsfeed has defaulted from a real-timefeed (where users only typically see it if they get online within four to six hours after the item was posted) to an algorithmic feed that users may never see,
• Notifications (which at least are continuously highlighted till you click on them) are going away in the very near future, and
• A recent study of US women by Q Interactive showed that 85 percent of them use five or fewer games/apps regularly (you can make your own inferences that there are only six bookmark spots in the Facebook footer).

It would be interesting to understand the correlation between being bookmarked and visit frequency (which I think itself is highly correlated to propensity to pay). Lacking that data, most Facebook social game users can make their own inferences based on the number of promotions to “bookmark this app!” – like this one in YoVille:

Taking advantage of the recently released Bookmark Button that allows developers to put the “Add Bookmark” button anywhere on the page, FarmVille on Friday pushed a landing page that prompted users to become a fan or bookmark the app:

It’s obvious this is important enough to Zynga as this is being pushed immediately after the ubiquitous “send a gift to a friend” screen as a default. (Optimization is still to come because they obviously know that I’m both a fan and a bookmarker, but apparently not early enough to avoid defaulting me this promo).

While we can’t get the top bookmarked games on Facebook, we can look at the other continual push by developers: the number of fans of each application, on each app’s Facebook page. Gathering fans is becoming an increasingly important way for applications to speak directly to their users and improves the possibility that these updates get into the newsfeed stream.

Here are some of the top games, their number of fans, and the number of monthly active users (MAU) – then I look at the Fans per MAU to see what percentage of users can the application connect with:

One of the things that leaps out when looking at this list is that most of the Zynga titles are around 5% or lower with the exceptions of Café World and YoVille. Café World, though, is part of an overall effort by Zynga to drive fans for the application. To push the number of fans to 1 million, Zynga offered users an incentive of unlocking special higher-than-normal revenue producing menu items. Now that this has been achieved (earlier this week), they are now pushing to reach 5 million:

So what about YoVille? Currently with a 13.8% direct communication level, it’s second best-on the list to Pet Society which is at 15.4%. To a very broad extent, YoVille and Pet Society have very similar game play mechanic (except one is your avatar and the other is with a pet avatar), so it’s possible that some game play mechanics could intrinsically have better ability to drive a number of fans. But while FarmVille and Country Story are around 5%, SlashTown’s Farm Town is closer to 10%.

Likewise, FishVille is only at 2.1% compared to Happy Aquarium’s 9.9% — although to be fair it FishVille has only been out for less than a month. In these initial stages where Zynga is pushing for viral growth, the game pop-ups focus on “Asking for More Neighbors” instead of “Bookmark” or “Add as a Fan” (although both options are there as tabs). This may speak more to the launch tactics of different developers – where Zynga is very focused on traffic growth, other developers are driving more relationships early on. That said, as Zynga games mature (and the mechanisms with which you can interact with your users continue to change) these relationships become more critical.

While still a very broad metric, the Fans per Monthly Active User metric is an interesting way to look at which developers and applications are focusing on (and to some degree how much success they are having in) getting a more direct relationship with their users.