Inside Social Games

When I started looking at the recent push by developers to bookmark or become a fan of an application, I quickly realized there was no publicly available information about the number of bookmarks and what applications were being bookmarked the most. In recent discussions about platform changes, the Facebook team noted “At the moment we are not planning to make whether an application has been bookmarked query-able via our APIs.”.

Only since the beginning of this month has Facebook provided a way for developers to know how many users have bookmarked their application. Much like I looked at Fans per Monthly Active User (MAU) as a way to benchmark your ability to connect with users, a developer can now look at what percentage of MAU are bookmarked. But even this data doesn’t provide much detail as to how many of those bookmarks are actually visible in one of the current six available spots at the bottom of each Facebook page.

So how are users responding to all these requests to bookmark and what are they doing? I took a very non-scientific and not completely representative sample (42 of my friends and family) to get a very rough idea of what’s happening. The results surprised me: about half of the users had not taken the time to change the default Facebook bookmarks.

There are six visible bookmark positions on left hand corner of the Facebook footer, but five of them are pre-populated with Facebook applications by default: Photos, Groups, Events, Marketplace (new since March) and Notes. And that’s not all. If a user uploads a video, then Videos is inserted between Photos and Groups and Notes is dropped; also if a user manages or has their own Fan Page, they will have “Ads and Pages” as the first Bookmark, pushing Photos and other defaults down a notch.

When a user bookmarks an application, the icon for that application slides into the sixth bookmark spot. After that, every new application bookmarked replaces the bookmark in the sixth spot (e.g. if you had FarmVille in that sixth spot, then are asked to bookmark Pet Society, Pet Society replaces FarmVille). And that’s exactly what over a third of respondents are doing – leveraging a single bookmark spot for a non-default application.

This split was pretty similar across gender line – but users who considered themselves frequent game players definitely were more proactive in adding more non-default applications:

• Self-defined heavy game players had modified 3.67 of the six bookmark slots
• Medium game players modified 2.27 of the six slots
• Low or non game players modified 1.16 of the six slots

While some of the heavy game players had not figured out how to manipulate the bookmarks (just adding a single non-default app in the sixth spot), over half of them had modified five or six slots. Anecdotally, most game players tended to play ONLY the games that were in their bookmarks, rarely straying to play something not readily visible either through a bookmark or in their newsfeed or notifications.

What applications appear to be breaking through?

Some 60 different applications were bookmarked and visible to these 42 users. The top non-default applications bookmarked (showing percentage of all users that had it in their top six):

• FarmVille (26%)
• Mafia Wars (21%)
• Café World (14%)
• Bejeweled Blitz (10%)
• Farm Town and Cities I’ve Visited (7%)
• And ten more apps were at 6%

Again, the sample is heavily skewed here by my friends and family and the applications they play (although the numbers easily reflect the ranking by DAU), so you have to be very careful about making generalities. But this does point out where the saturation strategy by Zynga could pay off: if you can occupy two or three of the six available bookmarks, it’s that much more difficult for your competitors to break through.

Also interesting was the position where the application is in that order of six. The average user has a bookmark that looks like this:

But while FarmVille sits in that sixth spot, they actually are featured more frequently in a slot other than the last one. Here are the top three games and the frequency distribution across those six slots:

Again, a horridly small sample size, but none of the top three were ever placed in the number one spot and for the most part skew to slots five and six. Again, from my anecdotal conversations (and this pattern above) most users either don’t know how to modify bookmarks beyond adding an app to the last spot or find the current bookmark system too cumbersome and not worth the bother to try and navigate.

Fixing the Broken Bookmarks

By definition, if half the users cannot figure out how to leverage and modify bookmarks, then there’s a pretty major design flaw in the bookmarks tool as it’s currently configured. In addition, Facebook has its own issues trying to make room for its default applications into homepage real estate that can currently only support six slots.

Luckily, by the end of the year Facebook is actually planning on moving Bookmarks from the footer to the left column allowing for more potential space to display bookmarks. In this image of the proposed design, Causes, Digg and FarmVille are examples of bookmarked applications.

Details are still forthcoming as to how many bookmarks will be visible on the page but according to the Facebook team, “A user will be able to click ‘see more’ to see all of their bookmarked applications if they aren’t displayed by default.” Still, the most coveted spots are going to be those that are visible and there is no API in the works helping the developer understand what slot the bookmark is in.

While these changes may make bookmarks more accessible, they don’t help us get better data to identify industry benchmarks – that may ultimately be data only the developers themselves can view.

In the meantime, the push to get users to bookmark applications moves on. The Movies app, which is a heavy user of Notifications, sending by my estimation nearly one application-to-user notification each day, is faced with elimination of this promotional tool. In response, they recently sent out the following Notification:

Eric von Coelln was the vice president of marketing at Oberon Media, a leading multi-platform casual games company, and most recently the vice president of Marketing at PowerSoccer.com. He is now a New York based freelance consultant to games, e-commerce and social media companies — including some of the largest social gaming companies on Facebook. While Mr. von Coelln does write about some companies for which he has done paid consulting from time to time, this post is based on publicly available information and in our view is an unbiased analysis of the industry. You can find his blog here.