7 Lessons Learned in Hacking the Facebook Platform from @ankurnagpal
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Hacking the Facebook Platform: My 7 Favorite Growth Hacks
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7 Favorite Growth Hacks from @ankurnagpal. Find more at learn.growhack.com
Transcript of 7 Lessons Learned in Hacking the Facebook Platform from @ankurnagpal
Hacking the Facebook Platform:My 7 Favorite Growth Hacks
A talk by @ankurnagpal
I built everything you probably hated on the
Facebook platform.
Here are my seven favorite hacks.
Want to hear my video analysis for $1?
Click this screen and use the code “SLIDESHAREONE”
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Let’s get started.
1"
Friends with Benefits
How many Facebook friends do you have?
How many Facebook friends do you care about?
Yet most friend inviters sort friends alphabetically
We can do better
We can sort by proximity of friendship
(most number of common photo tags, profile interaction, NOT number of mutual friends)
Or the target demographic for your product?
Or by the smartphone they use?
(A beer if you figure this out)
How well does it work?
Increased the percentage of invitations accepted 3x by targeting
gifts only to friends with lots of shared photos.
Isn’t that easier (and less spammy) than getting people to send 3x as
many requests?
2"
Artificial Scarcity
Want to increase the value of anything?
Want to increase the value of anything?
Make it scarce.
Send All Your Friends a Hug!
Send All Your Friends a Hug!
vs.
You Can Send 12 More Hugs Today.
What if they still don’t believe you?
Progress bar it.
You have sent 75% of your available gifts for the day.
Making the number of friend invites scarce led to more invites
being sent.
What else can artificial scarcity be applied to?
(other than economic monopolies)
You can only spend $10 today.
You have spent 75% of your budget today.
The best (and fucked up) part?
You do not have to enforce the limit.
OMG I FOUND A GLITCH THE GAME LETS ME SPEND ALL MY
MONEY
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3"
You
This works on platforms that have a profile page and home page that
aggregates profile updates.
My Profile: Before
Ankur sent Jamie a flying kiss.Send a Flying Kiss
My Ex GFs Newsfeed: Before
Ankur sent Jamie a flying kiss.Send a Flying Kiss
Replace the target with “you” and let the human ego do the rest.
My Profile: After
Ankur sent you a flying kiss.Send a Flying Kiss
My Ex GFs Newsfeed: After
Ankur sent you a flying kiss.Send a Flying Kiss
Inability to understand social media
+The human ego
=
4"
Multiple Points of Entry
The Story of Brainfall
“Brainfall Personality Quizzes” was the first quiz app on Facebook....
and they had better content.
Yet we had 10x the traffic that Brainfall did in a matter of days.
Why?
We broke our quizzes into their own independent applications.
Examples:How Good a Lover Are You?
What Color Are You?Dr. Phil’s Personality Test*
* Hello lawyers, No affiliation with Dr. Phil
Not just personality quizzes.
Free Gifts
versus
Send Your Friends a HugSend Your Friends Bible Verses
Send Your Friends Diwali Cracker*
Works even better on mobile because of search-based discovery.
TV Show Quote Game
versus
Seinfeld Quote Trivia GameFamily Guy Quote Game
Breaking Bad TV Show Quotes
5"
Now With User-Generated Content
Multiple points of entry is super powerful but tedious to maintain.
Solution:
Have users generate your multiple points of entry.
Example: Udemy
Example: Meetup.com
Example: CrowdTilt
Now back to silly Facebook gifts.
My Solution:
Gift Application Creator.
Each user could create an independent gift application with
no more than a gift name and image.
Results:
+10,000+ applications created+ More traffic than Linkedin, New York Times and Yelp for a month.+ Viral applications that I would not have dreamt about.
The most popular applications were an unidentifiable Russian
word, friendship bracelets, blessings from God and flaming bags of
poop.
The downside?
The downside?
Penises.
The downside?
Penises. Lots of penises.
6"
A Pac-Man Story
Everyone in growth talks about the importance of data.
Test. Measure. Optimize. Rinse. Repeat.
Except data no longer distinguishes you from the competition.
Everyone measures everything.
The Data Trap:A tendency to optimize towards
the local maxima.
Solution:
Try weird shit. Often.
After getting bored of optimizing feed stories, I decided to reward
whoever brought in the most new people to my Pac-Man game....
Turns out gamers LOVED the idea of a $2,000 replica Pac-Man
machine:
Result
Thousands of new users.
Result
Top two users ended up in an ad-buying battle against their referral
link.
Takeaway
Replicating this probably won’t work. Trying crazy shit will...
sometimes.
7"
The Blacklist of Doom
OH:
Don’t worry about your competition.
Sadly
That does NOT apply to growth. Growth channels saturate.
My 30-Minute Solution
Find the Facebook user ID of 2-3 employees at every company you
are concerned about.
Step 2
Add them to a “blacklist”
Now follow the pseudocode:
If (Current User is a Friend of Anyone on the Blacklist)<hide growth feature>
BOOM.
Thousands of potential competitors blocked.
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