The Trader of Stories – Bell’s Heart is the first installment in the new The Trader of Stories Point’n'Click adventure series from Pastel Games. In this first episode, your goal is to help Myosotis find a new story in a mysterious little town and become a Trader of Stories. Another very nice game from Mateusz Skutnik [...]
Source: FreeGamesNews
While Facebook’s Top 25 may have seen some losses, MySpace continues its safe and steady growth for its top games, even as it tries to introduce more game-focused features. Even with last month’s expansion to include some of the social network’s game-like applications, the user losses are minimal with only three seeing a negative monthly change. This month’s list also makes room for a newcomer as we incorporate Slide’s long running app, SuperPoke!
Here are the highlights for the Top 25 MySpace Games for October 2010:
Source: Inside Social Games
Xbox 360
(198)
Xbox 360
153 days in the top 100 Xbox 360
Xbox 360 Xbox 360 (198)
PlayStation 3
(38)
Windows Vista / 7 / XP
(210) Xbox 360 (198)
I bet a lot on Facebook. I bet that its social graph will become ingrained in the internet itself. I bet that most of the big websites, including Google, will rely on it for personalization. I bet that it will become the de facto way that people get recommendations about new products and services – that it will tell me what movies to see, what books to read, what products to buy. That is why, when it comes to the promotion of my own brand, I will do just about anything to increase awareness on The Social Network. And in Facebook terms, awareness equals likes.
In early 2010, I had a regular Facebook page like most people. I used Facebook to catch up with old friends and look through people’s pictures. But the more time I found myself spending on Facebook, the more I realized that there had to be a huge business opportunity in a site where literally everyone I know managed their social life.
But common sense told me that people don’t like to be bothered with business while they’re on Facebook. They’re there to see what everyone else is up to. So, instead of creating a fan page for my company, I created a fan page for myself. Fair enough, but I still had a problem. Why would anyone besides the small percentage of my friends who didn’t think that creating a fan page for yourself was conceited and ridiculous actually “like” my page? I needed to provide something genuinely interesting for them to follow.
In poring over status messages to see what people “liked” the most, I found that simple, positive statements were the most popular. Quotes, song lyrics, and proverbs did especially well, but original content that had the same sentiment as popular sayings seemed to do the very best in terms of quantity of likes and comments. It seemed people appreciated unique, inspiring words.
So I started saying the things that I genuinely felt each day. Now, I’m not sure if this is your cup of tea; I happen to be a really optimistic person. But I found that status updates like “Surround yourself with people who believe in you” and “Take it one day at a time. You’ll get there.” really resonated with people. I was getting way more likes than I ever got on my private page.
Now, how to reach more people? The most obvious thing I could think of was to click the “Suggest To Friends” link on my fan page. I had already suggested the page to all of my 337 friends (yes, I had to individually click on each name – man, my finger was tired!), and 115 of them had liked it. My goal was to reach 1000 likes within the month.
I asked my brother if he minded if I invited his friends. He said OK, as long as I did the inviting. So I did. And that’s how I got another 100 likes. But more importantly, I realized the simple of power of inviting people’s friends.
I immediately wrote a personal e-mail to 10 people I consider good friends asking them if they would suggest my page to all their friends. 4 of them were willing to do it. Within a week, I was up to nearly 600 likes.
That was when I implemented one of the most basic rules in the Facebook Marketing Playbook – adding a landing tab introducing myself and asking people to “like” me. As I continued on my strategy of e-mailing people and asking them to suggest me to their friends, this page converted people into “likers” at almost twice the rate of the page without the landing tab.
Two months in, I had already gotten 1200 likes on the page, and people were loving the content. I was getting about 5 new fans a day naturally from people who suggested the page on their own. But this wasn’t enough for me - not if I was going to leverage my fan base to promote everything I did for years to come. This was way too valuable an effort to slow down.
I had completely run out of friends and acquaintances to e-mail. So, I did the next best thing: contacting popular people on Facebook and asking them if I could get them to suggest my page in exchange for services, shout-outs, or, as a last resort – cold, hard cash. Most people ignored my request. But some bit. And for far less money than it would have cost me to run an ad campaign, I had my first 5000 likes. I was just over 3 months in.
I kept my system going, finding people with 3,000+ friends and incentivizing them to suggest my page. Eventually, the system expanded to my asking people if they could do a status update about me on their page as well, telling their friends to like me. I had a goal of reaching out to 20 popular people per day, and found my conversion rate to be about 10%. But it was getting expensive, especially because I wasn’t receiving any return on my investment yet.
Thankfully, that was when I realized I had reached a tipping point. By month 4, with over 10,000 likes, I was able to offer people a “sponsored” status update on my page in exchange for the friend suggestions. So rather than paying people, I was able to do a trade most of the time. This made my effort sustainable again.
In the last 4 months, my likes have quintupled, a combination of putting out high quality, authentic status updates and maintaing a systematic approach of e-mailing Facebookers. The page has a light viral momentum (it’s no Double Rainbow), of about 50 likes per day on its own.
Whether there are a limited number of popular people for me to e-mail I don’t know, but I’ve also found that sending page suggestions a second or third time to the same group of friends can eke out a substantial number of additional likes (about a third as many as the first wave of suggestions yielded).
And more importantly, I’ve made enough money from the page that I have been able to recover my marketing costs and invest in an employee to send out e-mails and keep good communication with the folks that promote my pages. So far this year, my SEO and social media business has added nearly $300,000 in revenue from likers of my page who learned about my company through my landing tab.
My goal is 100,000 likes before the end of the year. I may not be the first person to make money from a Facebook fan page, but I believe I have proved that building a big audience on Facebook can be straightforward – and even profitable.
Evan Bailyn is the Founder of First Page Sage and the author of “Outsmarting Google”, a new book that will be released in stores in early 2011.
Source: All Facebook
Xbox 360 (198) Xbox 360Here is an example of a fun way to recycle old gaming nostalgia into something semi-functional and fashionable for your home. Instructables contributor Zieak discovered an old pinball machine just sitting in the dump waiting for it’s ultimate destruction and wanted to spare it. However, since the machine would have taken way too much time and money to [...]
Source: Geek.com Games
“It’s a beautiful Summer afternoon in 1977, and you’re spending it on the couch in your parents’ basement, reading old TV guides. You didn’t even bother to put on pants… Luvli’s Pizza has a large with extra cheese on the way over. You have 20 minutes to scrape together $10, or you’re going hungry. Time [...]
Source: FreeGamesNews
Friday, October 1, 2010
