LeapFish has great social features

One of the great things about social media is real-time content and video.  It’s like TV, except personalized to you.  I looked at the LeapFish homepage today and I see breaking news for Yahoo and the various NBA playoff games.  This is not just what you’d typically get on a news site—it’s interactive and has pictures and video.

What would make it even better is to use Facebook Connect to make it more shareable directly.  I see Facebook Connect is already employed, but it’s not quite as obvious to me as a new user how to comment directly on that page and see what my friends are doing.  For example, I clicked on the news article on how Dirk Nowitski helped the Mavericks win tonight, which took me to a Yahoo! News page, from which then I could comment.  Perhaps I misunderstand LeapFish as a news distributor.

And it could be that the new announcements coming in just 2 days at the Facebook F8 conference will change all that, since Facebook functionality will soon be available to all pages, not just those that reside on Facebook.  Curious to see what LeapFish is able to do when that new functionality rolls out!

LeapFish has a game-like name

Sometimes there comes a point where you’ve seen so many “web 2.0” names that they start to sound the same.  I know a game company called PlayFish, which is a lot like LeapFish.  Then there’s BigFish, PlayFirst, and other guys.  This type of brand confusion can be both good and bad.

If you’re the smaller player, then this is good initially, since the bigger brand has something you can draft off of.  It’s kind of like the Chinese manufacturers that make Nike replicas, but call them Mike with a swoosh symbol—most consumers couldn’t tell.  I certainly didn’t notice the first time that I went to Beijing and saw the knock offs.  The quality was good—and sometimes perhaps better than the original.

In the case of LeapFish, they are not a knock-off, but a legitimate brand that already has traffic and some staying power.  They’re Alexa sub 10,000, so you know that’s already decent traffic.  But they’re not in the top 1,000 sites, which means they’re not able to reap the premium CPMs that come with larger brand advertisers—or have the scale necessary to really make it happen with a direct sales team and an ad platform. 

But give it time!

LeapFish can have a better fan page on Facebook

Saying that a brand should have a better fan page isn’t really saying much at this stage since so few brands even know what a custom tab is or how to create one via the Static FMBL application.  Most brands have the standard 4 tabs: wall, info, discussion, and photos.  They’re not aware that you can create a custom landing page—often called a “super tab” to mimic whatever other page they have on the regular web.

You see, LeapFish is sending their traffic to the wall, which is the default option.  And the page has no custom tabs.  With only 300 or so fans right now, it’s not a big deal, but if they got to 10,000 fans or more, such options would become more important. 

What if they placed a leaderboard on that Facebook page that showed everyone’s point status, which could then drive more interaction and participation?  Certainly that would promote more involvement by having the scores more prominent, versus only intermittently updated every day or so.  Who would play a video game that showed you your score only after waiting to the next day, versus the very millisecond that you killed that alien or earned points in whatever manner?

LeapFish Testing Part 4

To further on the concept of Ghetto Testing, LeapFish should try out other channels to promote the CashDash contest.  For example, were I running this contest, I’d definitely create a Facebook page for it and also award points to users who not only fan the page, but also those folks who post on the page’s wall and invite friends.  I see there are 20 points awarded to folks who post a tweet about the contest, so wouldn’t you think that a Facebook fan is worth significantly more?

Facebook has significantly more traffic than Twitter—about 100 times more traffic, since last time I had checked.  Plus, it is definitely a more viral and trustworthy way of sharing content.  People frequent Facebook more because of the filters that are built into it.

Thus, by adding in a strong Facebook page, connecting the site with Facebook using Facebook Connect, and adding in the fan points system, there is a lot more that can spread the virality and conversion of the LeapFish Cash Dash contest.

In our next post, we’ll discuss what aspects of a Facebook Fan Page will be most effective for LeapFish.  And if the LeapFish marketing folks are reading this, all the much better!  Love to hear your thoughts on this!

LeapFish Points Part 3

Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga, talked about the idea of “ghetto testing”, whereby a company could learn very quickly based on building “ghetto” prototypes and then finding out very quickly what users like and don’t like.  As it relates to LeapFish, I’m curious to see what they’re doing in terms of testing.

Were I LeapFish, I’d implement Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer to split test various landing pages.  I’ll bet that by having a landing page with video, their conversion rates would increase dramatically.  We made such changes to an entertainment brand recently and found average time on page to increase from 5 seconds to 76 seconds.  More importantly, revenue increased dramatically.  I believe that a video landing page would create massive differences for LeapFish.

Then again, a video requires a bit more effort.  You have to have people who are able to testify about their winnings—you have to be able to show prizes, plus do other things that increase the legitimacy of the brand.  The current page doesn’t inspire the level of trust that I believe will cause people to be comfortably converted into the contest.

Perhaps if most of the growth is viral—meaning that LeapFish is relying upon the trust of friends who are inviting friends—then they’ll be able to get growth.  However, I still believe video is one of the most powerful assets to test. 

In my next blog post, I’ll cover some of the items that they could do to further test conversion rates.

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