Christian Hernandez: Nailing the Viral Loop
Christian Hernandez is the Director of Platform Partnerships, EMEA for Facebook.
In his talk from HackFwd’s Build 0.10 event, Christian goes into detail about how startups can use the Facebook platform to create great things. For startups, Facebook is a powerful distribution platform that allows them to tap into a massive userbase with deep demographics. Christian says that at Facebook a big part of the culture is that you can “stop for a day and hack”, to build, learn and iterate on a cool new thing. This ensures Facebook’s flexibility, constant innovation and a platform that keeps progressing and serving new things for startups to work with.
With 500 million daily active users, Facebook is not only huge but very engaging. Facebook uses the ratio of daily active users to monthly active users as a measure of engagement, and so should startups. A way to think about users on Facebook for the purposes of your startup is not only as users, but also influencers of other users. In Facebook, all users are only three degrees apart, and tapping into the influencers is key for the success of your app.
Christian points out how much more pixel real estate Facebook Apps get when compared to Facebook Ads. Creating a Facebook App that taps into the Open Graph in multiple ways and creates stories for the users. And do think about creating “stories for your users”, not “stories about the app”. The former are the interesting ones to users.
Facebook’s recently launched App Center is driven by social proximity and recommendations. The App Center is available on the mobile as well, and will be an important driver of discovery on Facebook. Stay tuned to it launching outside the US soon.
Other things Christian treats in detail are the importance of the mobile experience, and Authenticated Referrals and how they work for your app.
The talk is 26 minutes long, but very much worth watching to make sure you are doing the right things with your virality.
For more talks from HackFwd’s Build events, go to Passion Meets Momentum. Stay focused and keep shipping.
