Application Strategy: What's your Objective?

Before you build any application, it's very important that you understand what your objectives are. Simply hoping for high usage is meaningless unless you understand what you are looking for in terms of ROI. 

As Facebook allows monetisation through advertising (unlike MySpace), or through direct purchases, it may be that you want as much interaction in your canvas pages as possible to maximise your advertising possibilities. However, many companies still have page view targets for their main website, which means that any application must be designed in a way that drives traffic. This is a difficult thing to do correctly, as the application must still be interesting enough to use in its own right before it can start driving any hits. 

This can be an issue even where the widget is purely for branding and marketing, as some companies will still demand that their online marketing budget produces website hits.

I believe that as social media spend and widgets become more mainstream, companies will not differentiate between website hits and widget hits. For content and media companies who rely on advertising for their business model, however, driving hits to a website will become more relevant as platforms which don't allow monetisation, for example MySpace, open up to widgets. 

The type of application you build to fit an objective depends on the company, budget, and user demographics and needs. This is one of the services that iNetworkMarketing performs when working with clients, however it is very important that once a company or marketing manager understands their objectives, they work with an agency or consultancy that has a good understanding of the social media world, and particularly the platform they are looking to enter, to help them to work out what type of application would fit their objective.