Facebook & Twitter sharing buttons in app, anyone?

I don't think posting on Facebook walls is a great idea.Everybody hates spam like that, what i think could be useful is making a like button for your facebook page in the app, maybe if you have consumables in your game you could reward the user for liking!

 

Hi there
I have done a couple of experiments with integrating Facebook and Twitter
I use ShareKit 2.0 but it was a bit of hassle to get working.
I first used it in my recent puzzle game BlixBlox
The lite version has the first 2 worlds free, and then you can get worlds 3 and 4 by sharing on twitter and facebook.
But I hid the buttons away a bit and I failed to do any initial marketing so very few people looked at anyway. So all in all it was a bit of a failure on my part.
But I will try again with my upcoming game ThingsJump.
Users will be rewarded for mentioning my game in the social networks with extra gems, which they can use to get new characters with new special abilities. I'll let you know how it goes.
There is a fine line between social marketing and spam, but if it is done respectfully and people get something out of it, then its fine.

 

We will implement that feature. We will give users more and more in-game currency, so we try to give an incentive to spread the word.

 

ill really appreciate the post, thanks for the info

 

May be I am an outlier here and I might be fighting headwinds but I think this trend of "incentivizing" users with free stuff as some suggest to tweet/like is once again developers shooting themselves in the foot. They might once again be setting up unreasonable user expectations, just like it happened with "incentives" that many developers have started to do for leaving a rating (whether this is against Apple policies on rating manipulation is a gray area). I even received an e-mail once that said something like "WTF, I left a rating for you and got nothing in the app. I am going to change it to 1*". (Note: There is nothing in the app to suggest they will get something for leaving a rating). For now, this is an exception than the rule but an example of how the user expectations change.

App users start to expect something for such things; the poorer the app, the higher the incentives provided leading to incentive inflation. People who naturally like the app will continue to do anyway but the incentivized endorsements dilute those from sheer volume. Apps that don't play the consumable good game suffer or are forced to introduce them just for bribing users because they cannot compete on ratings with competitors who are doing that. And when they cannot do that, they drop the price of the app assuming it is not already at $0.99.. and so it goes.

I realize that this is a lost cause because the developer community is suddenly not going to solve the prisoner's dilemma for the good of the community. Just ranting about the situation.

 

@TouchDeveloper
You make a good point, but I don't see it that way.
If you provide something in-game for a tweet, I dont see it as a bribe or a nefarious incentive.
I see it as a simple trade: "I am a poor indie developer and have dont have the budget for a big ad campaign, so I will will give you something if you help me with marketing by using your social network to spread the word."
And with a free market philosphy, if a game is not very good and the rewards and not worth it, then people generally wont use it. So quality games with worthy awards will spread.
For example, in my new game, you collect gems with which you can unlock new characters. In addition, you can mention my game on twitter or facebook for a certain number of gems as a reward. But you dont need to. You can still unlock ALL content just by collecting gems in-game, but it will take you a bit longer.
Nobody loses and nobody is being exploited.

 

I dont click on any of these facebook/twitter type spam links, i mean my friends dont really care what iOS game i'm playing and dont want to hear about it on facebook or some silly message via twitter. If on facebook a 'friend' starts posting crap about how many cows hes got in Farmville i delete them !

If a games good i'll write a review on the app store and not just one line as i feel those small short reviews in the app store seem fake.

Even if i'm offered freebies for basically spamming my friends facebook/twitter accounts i'll refuse to do it and i'm not a fan of apps which try to do that.

I'm all for helping indie devs out (I always buy games instantly to help the dev rather than wait for price drops or for it to be free) but I'm not a fan of games which use facebook/twitter to advertise at all

 

^I don't personally spam game links to friends either but I will definitely be using them in all of my future projects. As a developer you're not doing the user a disservice by providing the option. And there will be plenty of people who DO use the links to post high scores or whatever.

As long as features of the game don't rely on the user tweeting or writing a status about the game then you're mad not to grab that little bit of extra attention you could get. It doesn't waste any of the user's time to click the "Play Again" button instead of the twitter button.

 

We added SMS and email sharing functionnalities in our first build as they were simpler. I'll definitely look into enabling facebook connect and Twitter through future updates.

 

I fully agree with this short explanation. In my eyes it is a win-win situation.

 

And therein lies the Prisoners Dilemma. It is win-win to a developer if only one developer (or a few) did it (i.e., pay for liking/tweeting) but if everyone (or a large number) did it, the developer community as a whole suffers more than if no one did it.

 

We added Facebook and Twitter sharing of high scores and chapter completions to Froggies with our last update. Of the 15k players that have downloaded the update 1 person has tweeted their highscore and I don't think anyone has used the Facebook feature.

In my opinion without some sort of incentive for the player to share or tweet their score, it's almost pointless.

 

in my experience
0.73% of my users shared on facebook.

but the way i see it - those that did are 10x more valuable to me because

1) they promoted my app for free
2) i can contact and thank them for sharing. just the personal attention will make them loyal users

so i think it's worth it.

 

Interesting stats, in other words less than 1% of users actually bother to share their achievements or interest in a game through SNS.

Possibly the genre makes a difference? Social games might have a bigger chance of being FB'ed or TW'ed?

 

I've added the Facebook sharing option, I think it isn't that hard to implement and can give you some free marketing in return.

In my game's Android version, I've even unlocked a new game mode for those who liked my Facebook fan page, and got about 500 new likes in 24 hours!
I think that once the game gets a critical mass the Facebook sharing will be more effective.

 

I've added Twitter score sharing in the latest version of Eve of Impact. The idea is that the game has a really cool end scene where the world is engulfed in flame. Since iOS 5 allows Twitter messages with images I capture a random screen from the end game sequence and tie this to the twitter message.

It looks cool and people might get a first impression of what the game is about..