Drive Installs and Re-engagement to your game with Requests and User Notifications

Drive Installs and Re-engagement to your game with Requests and User Notifications

Requests and User to User Notifications are two of the main drivers of organic traffic

on Facebook developers can control.

Requests and User Notifications are sent by a player to a specific list of friends, and always carry a call-to-action that the sender would like the recipient to complete. We’ll cover all the best practices that will help your game to leverage these channels the most:

•  Send Experience: Multi-friend selector, frictionless requests, referral system…

•  Placement and Context: prominent invite button, optimal in-game placements…

•  Conversion: Targeting options, structured requests…

•  Match Maker: with a few/no Facebook friends playing the game

Links to Documentation can be found on slide 21.

Best Practices from the Facebook Policy Team

Inviting Friends: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/games/invitable-friends/v2.2

•  Apps should allow people to select more than one friend to invite in the Request Dialog.

•  Apps should not pre-select friends for people to invite. People prefer to choose exactly whom to invite.

•  Allow users to select whom to send requests.

Permissions:

•  Make sure people have granted your app the user_friends permission. Apps will not receive results from the invitable_friends API without this permission.

Multi-Friend Selector: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/games/multi-friend-selector/v2.2

•  If your app has a multi-friend selector, you should ensure that users can search for friends.

•  Additionally, you should only display the selector if you have confirmed that you can display back at least one friend.

Common Mistakes & Misconceptions Referral-Based Rewards:

•  Apps should not reward people for sending invitations. However, apps can reward people for sending invitations if their friends end up authorizing the app.

Invitable_Friends:

•  The invitable_friends API is only available for games with a Canvas integration using version 2.0 of the Graph API. Apps without a functioning Canvas integration will not have access to this API.

•  https://developers.facebook.com/docs/games/invitable-friends/v2.2

Requests:

•  People will only see request notifications for games on the platforms where those games exist. For example, if a game only exists on iOS, a request notification will not appear on desktop.

•  https://developers.facebook.com/docs/games/requests/v2.2#overview

•  When people accept requests, they are not automatically deleted. It is the developer's responsibility to ensure that requests are deleted once consumed.

Interesting examples caught on Facebook

How to increase referrals to your game?

* Creating an efficient and effective multi-friend selector

* Put invites in context as to where it makes sense * Incentivizing done right

Invites

A search box makes it easy to locate friends

Profile pictures help recognizing friends more easily

Give an indication of how many friends have been selected already

Highlight benefits of inviting friends

Sort list of friends alphabetically or use the ranked list of friends provided by the API

Make scrolling/paging through list more effective by providing scrollbars

Make it easy for players to find the right friends

Ghost Tales

Create a custom multi-friend selector

MyVEGAS Slots

Only ask for permissions to send request once

Cookie Jam -  Upon first send to a friend, the player can allow subsequent sends to be sent to the same friends, without prompting for permission each time.

-  This works especially well for turn-based games, where players can send requests for subsequent turns to their opponent without taking additional.

Caesars Casino: More friends = more gift and bigger daily bonus

Explain the benefits of playing with Friends Top Eleven: More friends = easier to get daily

gift + extra possession

Find context as to where it makes sense

Soldiers: Leaderboard is visible at all time with friends playing the game + a

slot for a prominent Invite button

Heart of Vegas: Invite More Friend Button on the daily bonus to get more rewards

Find original ways to encourage players to invite their friends

Criminal Case: Build a team of Investigator by selecting people you think are best

Dragon City: Players get 5 gems for every friend they invite that start

playing the game

Referral program

DoubleDown: $1M chips offered for each friends

invited who installs the game

Create a powerful retention loop in your game

* The right Multi-Friend selector

* Put Gifting in context as to where it makes sense * Offer the option to ask for gift

Gifts

Give the users the option to Send gifts

War of Mercenaries

-  Have a tab with the friends playing the game as these are most likely to accept gifts

-  Build a search box

-  Have Scroll bar, or easy way to go through the list (so the user can access quickly name starting with Z)

-  Give the ability to Deselect Friends easily

-  Friends’ profile pic usually help the player identify its friends easily

Find context as to where it makes sense

Hit it Rich: Big section of the leaderboard is reserved to gifting option

Candy Crush: Help your friends who are stuck

Big Fish Casino:

New users welcome pop-up to send gift to their friends and let them know they join the game

Segment players and offer requests in context

- Evaluate your players and break them up into various groups that make sense for your game (e.g. new players, players that are doing crafting, players with lots of friends, engaged players, etc.).

- Think about what kinds of things would be useful to them at their level.

- Offer specific things to each group.

Cookie Jam: Ask for extra life when the player has no more lives

Give the user the option to Ask for a Gift

House of Fun: Add context by using structured requests.

There are three possible actions, send, askfor, and turn. The send action maps to the gifting scenario and the askfor action maps to the asking for help scenario. The turn action is for turn-based games. The objects used for the first two cases can be any in-game item.

Accept and Send back a gift

Stormfall: Age of War: Accept & Return the favor CTA

Cower Defense: Accept & Send main option

Megapolis: Add Neighbors

Some apps allow players to add random players as neighbors so they can progress even with a few/no Facebook friends playing the game.

Make sure the players understand what it is and they opt-in before being suggested non friends users

Match Making

Facebook Documentation Please find below the link to our documentation to help you integrating the products:

•  Requests Overview: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/games/requests/v2.2

•  How-To: Multi-Friend Selector: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/games/multi-friend-selector/v2.2

•  Gifting and Social Trading: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/games/requests/v2.2#gifting

•  Mobile Device Filtering: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/games/multi-friend-selector/v2.2#filter

•  Invitable Friends API: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/games/invitable-friends/v2.2

•  Tracking and Improving Performance: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/games/requests/v2.2#tracking

•  Best Practices: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/games/requests/v2.2#bestpractices

Does your app have original features?

Do you have any feedback?

Email Estelle Fumé at estelle@fb.com

Would you like to showcase your app?