Web 2.0 Mar­ket­ing Tip #62: At­tract More Cus­tomers with a Face­book Application

In many sit­u­a­tions, this sim­ply won’t ap­ply to you, as it does not make sense for most busi­nesses to cre­ate an ap­pli­ca­tion on Face­book. Nev­er­the­less, if you have the right busi­ness model and prod­ucts, cre­at­ing a Face­book app can be a great way to in­crease your business’s pres­ence online.

If you don’t know any­thing about cre­at­ing ap­pli­ca­tions, don’t worry;  we will dis­cuss the ba­sics of Face­book app cre­ation today.

While you might be ea­ger to cre­ate a Face­book app, keep in mind that you don’t ac­tu­ally have to pro­gram the ap­pli­ca­tion your­self. Rather, you can sim­ply work through the Face­book app steps we will share with you.

Face­book App Creation

One: Cre­ate a Face­book app draft. Be­fore any­thing else, there are sev­eral ques­tions you need to an­swer. These ques­tions will de­ter­mine what kind of ap­pli­ca­tion you will cre­ate. These ques­tions are:

  • What is the pur­pose of your application?
  • How do you want your fans to in­ter­act with it?
  • Do you want them to play an in­ter­ac­tive game?
  • Do you want it to serve some other purpose?

Two: Re­view your plan. If you leave your Face­book app plan and re­turn to re­view it af­ter a day or two, you will find that there are things you will want to change, things you want to add, and things you sim­ply want to pol­ish. Go through your plan thor­oughly, so that some­one who knows noth­ing about your project can un­der­stand it.

Three: Post your prod­uct on Elance. As men­tioned ear­lier, you do not ex­actly need to be the one cre­at­ing the Face­book app. Once your Face­book app plan is com­plete, you can sim­ply post it on free­lance sites like Elance and al­low pro­gram­mers to bid on it. Pro­vide some time to gather bid­ders, and care­fully con­sider of­fers that are at or be­low your bud­get. Visit the bid­ders’ port­fo­lio and set­tle on the one who has the great­est examples.

If you work through this process, you should be able to get a good Face­book app at a rea­son­able price. From there, it will be up to you to pro­mote it not only through Face­book but through your blog and web­site as well. You can even write an ar­ti­cle and press re­lease about it, if you like.