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Guardian Facebook app, London (Guardian News & Media, United Kingdom). |
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Project name |
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Guardian Facebook app
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General Publication Info |
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Guardian News & Media (GNM) publishes guardian.co.uk, currently the world’s fifth most popular newspaper website, as well as guardiannews.com and the Guardian and Observer newspapers. GNM is the core business of Guardian Media Group (GMG), whose sole shareholder is The Scott Trust, the core purpose of which is to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity. Last year, GNM unveiled its pioneering digital-first approach, through which it is placing open journalism on the web at the heart of its strategy in order to increase digital growth and ensure the Guardian's long-term financial sustainability. The Guardian’s website was named Website of the Year at the 2012 Online Media Awards, and the newspaper was the 2011 British Press Awards Newspaper of the Year.
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Content |
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The Guardian Facebook app integrates with Facebook's Open Graph platform and the Guardian API, enabling Facebook users to read and experience Guardian content without leaving Facebook. When following links to Guardian content on Facebook, users who have installed the app are shown the content on a Facebook page instead of on the Guardian website, and this interaction with our content is also displayed on their friends’ timelines. This enables Facebook users to see what their friends are reading from the Guardian, and what Guardian content is proving popular among Facebook users.
This is the first time that the Guardian has launched a product which surfaces content based solely on social interaction – there is no editorial curation required.
The homepage of the app (http://apps.facebook.com/theguardian/) includes a selection of the latest and most popular Guardian content on the app, curated automatically via our API. However, most users of the app access it by clicking on a link directly from their newsfeeds - which could be any piece of content - rather than via the homepage, which is as we expected, and demonstrates the power of the social news experience.
This approach has broken new ground for the Guardian and we are pleased to say that our innovation with this app has paid off - we have watched in amazement as our content has been shared virally across the globe in real time, bringing new audiences to Guardian content, and building new relationships with our readers via this relatively simple application.
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Implementation and Working team |
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The Guardian’s digital development team worked in close partnership with Facebook to create an app for the Facebook open platform to accompany the Facebook f8 launch on 22 September 2011. The app was built from start to finish in seven weeks, in line with Facebook’s ‘move fast and break things’ philosophy.
We started with the hard deadline of the f8 launch and quickly pulled together a small, focused team to work on the project. Given the tight deadline, we had to learn fast. Our developers faced the dual challenge of working with technology that had not yet been released, but was also rapidly changing as the Facebook development team continued to work on the underlying platform.
With a few days to go prior to the launch, Mark Zuckerberg reviewed the apps being built for f8 and we were delighted to make the final cut - one of only three European companies with
a working app to launch on the day.
For all involved it was an exciting project, and the challenge of working to such a tight deadline helped to create a very motivated, creative and hard working environment, and the team pulled out all the stops to create some genuine innovation.
Because the app utilises existing digital content from guardian.co.uk, and this content is shared automatically amongst Facebook users (although this is controlled by the permissions given by the user and can be changed at any time, unlike many other social reader applications), it successfully exists without any input from our editorial team.
On launch day we published a blog post and issued a press release about the app the instant it was live, in close collaboration with Facebook. The nature of the way the apps were being released meant that the app itself was not live until after midnight on launch night, so the PR team worked extremely hard to ensure that the majority of coverage about the f8 conference, at which the launch apps were unveiled, included reference to the Guardian’s product. We also promoted the app via our existing Facebook pages, across Twitter, and on the front page of our website.
Since the launch of the app we have listened to what our users have said and used a variety of social media channels to explain how it works and to answer any questions. We continuously study behavioural patterns of usage to inform our ongoing development, and since launch it has undergone a number of improvements including the addition of picture galleries and video. Video has been particularly interesting and we’ve seen some remarkable examples of items becoming viral and being shared by millions of people.
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Additional comments |
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The Guardian Facebook app is a genuine example of digital innovation at the intersection of where quality news content meets social discovery, in line with the Guardian’s digital first strategy.
The app has been a huge success since launch, with rapid growth to 4.7 million installs by the end of 2011 and nearly 14 million installs at time of writing. The app is currently used by
nearly 3.1million Facebook users every month.
The app has helped the Guardian to reach an entirely new demographic of users - around half of installs from users who are aged 24 or below, and of course the content that these users are reading is also visible to their friends who may not have installed the app.
It has attracted a global audience, with users from 200 countries around the world. Social sharing and its network effects have truly allowed us to build a global engaged audience.
The app also opens up new commercial opportunities for the Guardian - we lined up a launch sponsor and are now exploring new and innovative revenue ideas that take full advantage of
the Facebook platform.
In the three months post launch the number of visits referred from Facebook to the Guardian website increased by an average of 380%. Although referrals have fluctuated in recent months due to changes Facebook have made to the way user activity on the app has been displayed within news feeds, we will carry on experimenting to learn about new audiences from within the Facebook ecosystem.
Following the success of the app, we have implemented many of the lessons we have learned on to the core Guardian platform. For example we have since launched social sign-in and are using Facebook in a more integrated way. One example of this is an innovative Facebook-based interactive which showed guardiannews.com users in the US how gay rights varied in different states, according to where they and their Facebook friends live.
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LINKS |
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https://apps.facebook.com/theguardian
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General contact and feedback address:
Ms. Raquel Meikle
Programme Manager Events
WAN-IFRA
Darmstadt, Germany
Phone: +49-6151-733.927
E-Mail: raquel.meikle@wan-ifra.org
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