The Facebook environment has changed quite a bit since I build my first application on the facebook API the day it was released (a google map mashup that showed you where your friends live). I spent the better part of 08 and 09 building games on top of Facebook with great success. (6 million users between our games, and as many as 700k users per day at one point, spending an average of 35 minutes a day on our games)

And while quite a few books have been written in the past three years growing an application on Facebook virally, the constantly changing Facebook ecosystem means these tricks can come and go. Attaining viral growth isn't as easy as it used to be, but that doesn't mean you should give up on Facebook as a way to promote and boost your business.

Here's some things to keep in mind about how the environment has changed and how to leverage Facebook in 2010:

Viral Loop

One of the guys I used to work with (who now works at Zynga) launched one of the first games on facebook called WarBook. Back then for every invite a player sent out to ask a friend to play the game, 80% of the users would return and install the game. Even by the time I started making games six months later, we were down to the single digits for return %. Today most applications shouldn't expect to see more than 0.05% return. Keep in mind that its well established that the stats shown on the Facebook developer return page are inaccurate and always show a much higher number than reality. I'm guessing that is intentional by Facebook. To get real numbers, you'll have to track things yourself.

Social Graph and News Feed

So you might be asking yourself: "If you can't get high invite return rates, then why bother?" While it might seem discouraging, the situation for boosting an existing business with Facebook is actually better than it used to be. Facebook's new social graph features let you integrate some of your content into Facebook's newsfeed. Now days the newsfeed is where a lot of application growth takes place. Finding ways to leverage the news feed means having useful content. Games which in the past were just broadcasting what a user was doing in a game are not likely to have their content published. The trick is finding content that engages users and is likely to having an action link clicked. Whether or not a news feed story is published is largely determined by how many people click on its action links.

Facebook Pages

Facebook Pages are also gaining some serious growth. Now that the users interests section is linked to the most popular page about a topic, you pages newsfeed stories will be broadcast to anyone who specifies your product as something they "Like". Right now this is a big missed opportunity for many companies. The growth from page feed posts can be huge since good content is likely to be shared. It also means people who Like your page will keep seeing your posts without having to go back to your page.

Contests

Another common way to go viral today is with contests. While more common on twitter, I've seen a lot of companies leverage give aways to get people to fan their page. Typically this goes something like this:

You post a status message like so:

"Win a iPad, post this as your status message and fan AgileProductions, we'll give away an iPad the first of next Month to a fan who posted this as their status"

This is simple yet effective. Once people like the app they will be receiving your updates and the status messages will spread like wildfire. At this point, the financial return is usually worth the give away. Especially when the give away is coveted items (like apple products).

Staying on Top

The hardest part of leveraging Facebook is how quickly the environment can change. While we may be biased, this is where hiring a company that does social marketing can really come in handy. Most of the things you will read online will be quickly out of date and finding the current approaches that work is what will help your product grow.