Using Facebook’s Social APIs? Then Play Nice.

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Jan 262013
 

For those of us who monitor social API development religiously, it was a particularly interesting several days. Facebook cut off Voxer from its find friends API last week, on Thursday they cut off access to Twitter’s video sharing app Vine and on Friday blocked Yandex’s new app Wander only 3 hours after launching!  The find friends functionality is critical to app developers because it allows new users to import their social graph to make the app social from their first use.  For many social apps, this is the difference between a ghost town and vibrant, engaging experiences.  Without access to facebook’s robust social graph data it can be incredibly difficult to build a social experience.

The decision to cut off these rival, emerging services should send a clear message to developers building on the facebook platform: be careful about your reliance on facebook.  But this really shouldn’t come as news to anyone; facebook has always had the ability to do this at its own discretion—it’s right there in their developer platform policy. As Justin Osofsky explained,

“For a much smaller number of apps that are using Facebook to either replicate our functionality or bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook, such as not providing users an easy way to share back to Facebook, we’ve had policies against this that we are further clarifying today.”

If you read between the lines here, Justin is saying ‘if you want to capitalize on our valuable social data, you’d better be adding more value to the facebook ecosystem than you’re taking.’
This line of thinking has been in place for a while, it’s just that facebook has never so adamantly brought down the hammer (which is why it has garnered so much attention).  But the truth is that if an app takes more value than it creates for facebook, it doesn’t really matter if it’s doing something explicitly against the terms of service because facebook “can change these Platform Policies at any time without prior notice as we (facebook) deem necessary.”

Really, facebook is doing what they must to survive the API wars.  After all, twitter cut off instagram’s access to its find friends API after its acquisition.  In a world where the value of data is increasing exponentially and rival social platforms are becoming more and more insular, app developers have to be increasingly thoughtful about how and why they develop on social platforms.  ‘Am I creating as much value for them as I am taking?’ ought to be a requisite question for any developer building on facebook or twitter’s APIs.  Also, developers should try to limit their reliance on any one platform; bridging data sets across these platforms
will be the best way forward.

With great knowledge (social data via APIs) comes great responsibility (a value creation mandate for the platform in question).  Creating value for customers will always be priorities 1-3, but its looks more and more like creating value for your API providers will end up being priority 4, at least if you’re building on a social platform.

Facebook Graph Search Highlights That Not All Likes Are Created Equal

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Jan 192013
 

The big news in tech this week was facebook’s launch of graph search (a good breakdown on how it differs from traditional search and how it works)  Some pundits have lauded it as a game changer, but much of the discussion has centered on whether it can really be useful.  Steve Cheney penned a much-shared missive about graph search being dead on arrival due to its reliance on ‘dirty data’.  This is due to the widespread practice of brands buying likes via ads or social marketing campaigns. He asserts,

“It turns out as much as half of the links between objects and interests contained in FB are dirty—i.e. there is no true affinity between the like and the object or it’s stale.”

Many have objected to this 50% figure and Steve hasn’t provided any data to back it up.  I’m inclined to believe it’s somewhat lower than this, but whatever the actual number is, inauthentic likes are a very real problem.  As Steve and other critics have pointed out, much of the existing like data isn’t truly reflective of a given consumers actual affinities.  Facebook will undoubtedly do what they can to address this and utilize other signals like check-ins, shares, and photos to improve graph search.  But the very argument surfaces an important truth that is often overlooked: not all likes are created equal.

Brands and publishers have long focused on increasing the total quantity of their social following without paying nearly enough attention to the quality of followers.  The introduction of graph search shines a spotlight in the importance of cultivating organic, high-value fans and followers. As facebook cleans their data (which they’ve already begun to do), the importance of having engaged, real fans and followers will only increase.  Brands and publishers need to focus on converting their existing advocates into social followers.  Doing so, will not only allow them to reap the potential benefits of graph search, but also increase their social ROI. Inauthentic or purchased fans aren’t going to revisit fan pages, they won’t have a strong edge rank to the page ensuring it won’t show up in their News Feed (already a hot button issue) and they won’t engage.  Graph search only magnifies this problem.

Luckily, brands and publishers have an existing, but often untapped source, of high-quality authentic user base: their existing customers!  That may sound obvious, but we run into publishers with millions of highly-engaged monthly uniques and just a few thousand facebook fans!  These site visitors are typically brand advocates already, they’ve just never formalized that connection via a persistent connection on facebook or any other social platform.   Creating these connections will create a marked improvement in social ROI and will be hugely valuable if and when graph search really takes off.  Blindly racking up likes no longer suffices as a social strategy.  In today’s ecosystem cultivating and nurturing authentic, high-value relationships with customers across channels (both social and on-site) is the key to unlocking the promise of social.

At Inside Social, we’re building the tools to make this possible.  We’re singularly focused on helping brands, publishers, and e-commerce companies get more value out of social.  So if you want to increase the quality of your social following and create real ROI ($), drop us a line at [email protected].

PS: If you’re a developer and interested in problems like these, we’re hiring!