March 1st 2010 is what we, as developers, have been referring to as N-Day. The date that Facebook are to remove what is probably the most viral part of the whole platform.
Notifications.
The little messages that appeared in the bottom right hand side of your screen (now the top left) telling you that ‘Anna from Bognor want to get to know you better’ or that ‘Mike has just petted your puppy’ will no longer be there. Whenever I’ve mentioned this to a friend the simple question was ‘Why?’, to which I answer (and this is a white lie) ‘No idea’.
The truth is that notifications are now just spam. In the past we saw 10% click-through rates, which have now dropped to less than 1% because of the sheer number being sent by every app under the sun. They are, however, still a great way of letting a person (whether they be friends with the user or not) know that someone has interacted with them on one of our apps. The new Dashboards will go some way to doing this, but I can’t see it being anywhere near as effective, which is where emails come in.
Facebook now allow you to request email addresses from users. The message automatically appears at the top of the screen and as long as they click the ‘Ok’ button you get either their personal, or facebook proxied, address. Now, the only issue is how you get in touch with them.
“Send an email, dummy”.
Yep, that’s right. But how do you send over 2 million emails? Moreover, how do you send those emails and make sure they get through to your intended recipient without getting added to their ‘Junk Email’ folder, and how do you do it while keeping within the law? All questions that are slightly more complicated and have created a rather large headache for developers.
You need to make sure that you have a mail server configured and that you’re using clever things like SPF, DomainKeys, RDNS, etc. I won’t go into the technical details here but all of this is hugely important if you want to make sure you’re getting to the inbox of any given user. You then need to do an API query to get each email address from Facebook and store it in your database. This will take time. We’ve just finished querying about 3 million Facebook IDs and that’s taken 5 days or so. Granted we didn’t use the most optimised way of doing things – with some effort we probably could’ve halved the time it took – but still, it’s no small task.
Now, once you have that you need to work out a way of sending the emails. I’d advise not writing your own script if you have a large amount of addresses (100k+) – instead, use an off-the-shelf product or email delivery service (smtp.com might be worth looking at). Oh, if you don’t want to do that, we can most likely help so drop me an email with details and I’ll give you a quote. /shameless plug. Lastly, and most importantly, make sure you’re within CAN-SPAM regulations.
Finally it’s a case of actually sending out your content. It’s important to note the difference between proxied email addresses and personal addresses as the content you send will most likely need to be quite different. When sending through the Facebook proxy there’s a limit on the HTML content – I found that it’s easier to send plain text with a link, although click-throughs are likely to be lower using this method. There isn’t really an easy answer to what works though so it’s just a case of split-testing layout and content to see what works and what doesn’t. Similar to banner ads I guess!
Whether emails are as effective as notifications, only time will tell. What’s for certain is that Facebook email marketing has the potential to be very powerful if done correctly.
who do you get your hosting from?
Hi Brodny,
We use a mixture of Rackspace and Liquidweb… the former are fairly expensive but give a great level of service. The latter are more affordable and, so far, haven’t given us too many issues.
Matt