7 lessons learned in hacking the facebook platform from @ankurnagpal

Hacking the Facebook Platform:My 7 Favorite Growth Hacks

A talk by @ankurnagpal

I built everything you probably hated on the

Facebook platform.

Here are my seven favorite hacks.

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1"

Friends with Benefits

How many Facebook friends do you have?

How many Facebook friends do you care about?

Yet most friend inviters sort friends alphabetically

We can do better

We can sort by proximity of friendship

(most number of common photo tags, profile interaction, NOT number of mutual friends)

Or the target demographic for your product?

Or by the smartphone they use?

(A beer if you figure this out)

How well does it work?

Increased the percentage of invitations accepted 3x by targeting

gifts only to friends with lots of shared photos.

Isn’t that easier (and less spammy) than getting people to send 3x as

many requests?

2"

Artificial Scarcity

Want to increase the value of anything?

Want to increase the value of anything?

Make it scarce.

Send All Your Friends a Hug!

Send All Your Friends a Hug!

vs.

You Can Send 12 More Hugs Today.

What if they still don’t believe you?

Progress bar it.

You have sent 75% of your available gifts for the day.

Making the number of friend invites scarce led to more invites

being sent.

What else can artificial scarcity be applied to?

(other than economic monopolies)

You can only spend $10 today.

You have spent 75% of your budget today.

The best (and fucked up) part?

You do not have to enforce the limit.

OMG I FOUND A GLITCH THE GAME LETS ME SPEND ALL MY

MONEY

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3"

You

This works on platforms that have a profile page and home page that

aggregates profile updates.

My Profile: Before

Ankur sent Jamie a flying kiss.Send a Flying Kiss

My Ex GFs Newsfeed: Before

Ankur sent Jamie a flying kiss.Send a Flying Kiss

Replace the target with “you” and let the human ego do the rest.

My Profile: After

Ankur sent you a flying kiss.Send a Flying Kiss

My Ex GFs Newsfeed: After

Ankur sent you a flying kiss.Send a Flying Kiss

Inability to understand social media

+The human ego

=

4"

Multiple Points of Entry

The Story of Brainfall

“Brainfall Personality Quizzes” was the first quiz app on Facebook....

and they had better content.

Yet we had 10x the traffic that Brainfall did in a matter of days.

Why?

We broke our quizzes into their own independent applications.

Examples:How Good a Lover Are You?

What Color Are You?Dr. Phil’s Personality Test*

* Hello lawyers, No affiliation with Dr. Phil

Not just personality quizzes.

Free Gifts

versus

Send Your Friends a HugSend Your Friends Bible Verses

Send Your Friends Diwali Cracker*

Works even better on mobile because of search-based discovery.

TV Show Quote Game

versus

Seinfeld Quote Trivia GameFamily Guy Quote Game

Breaking Bad TV Show Quotes

5"

Now With User-Generated Content

Multiple points of entry is super powerful but tedious to maintain.

Solution:

Have users generate your multiple points of entry.

Example: Udemy

Example: Meetup.com

Example: CrowdTilt

Now back to silly Facebook gifts.

My Solution:

Gift Application Creator.

Each user could create an independent gift application with

no more than a gift name and image.

Results:

+10,000+ applications created+ More traffic than Linkedin, New York Times and Yelp for a month.+ Viral applications that I would not have dreamt about.

The most popular applications were an unidentifiable Russian

word, friendship bracelets, blessings from God and flaming bags of

poop.

The downside?

The downside?

Penises.

The downside?

Penises. Lots of penises.

6"

A Pac-Man Story

Everyone in growth talks about the importance of data.

Test. Measure. Optimize. Rinse. Repeat.

Except data no longer distinguishes you from the competition.

Everyone measures everything.

The Data Trap:A tendency to optimize towards

the local maxima.

Solution:

Try weird shit. Often.

After getting bored of optimizing feed stories, I decided to reward

whoever brought in the most new people to my Pac-Man game....

Turns out gamers LOVED the idea of a $2,000 replica Pac-Man

machine:

Result

Thousands of new users.

Result

Top two users ended up in an ad-buying battle against their referral

link.

Takeaway

Replicating this probably won’t work. Trying crazy shit will...

sometimes.

7"

The Blacklist of Doom

OH:

Don’t worry about your competition.

Sadly

That does NOT apply to growth. Growth channels saturate.

My 30-Minute Solution

Find the Facebook user ID of 2-3 employees at every company you

are concerned about.

Step 2

Add them to a “blacklist”

Now follow the pseudocode:

If (Current User is a Friend of Anyone on the Blacklist)<hide growth feature>

BOOM.

Thousands of potential competitors blocked.

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Talk to me@ankurnagpal