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.

Want to hear my video
analysis for $1? Click this screen and use the code “SLIDESHAREONE” Learn

Let’s get started.

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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analysis for $1? Click this screen and use the code “SLIDESHAREONE” Learn

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 Hug Send 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 Game Family Guy Quote Game Breaking Bad TV Show Quotes

5"
Now With UserGenerated 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 adbuying 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