Do you remember when Facebook was initially launched? There was no limit on the no of invites you could send while you added a new application. Some of the early adopters took the benefit of this and went viral. But now Facebook has restricted the no. of invites a user can send while adding a new application to his profile.

Interestingly with this change in Facebook policy, the marketers introducing a new application now need not just good functionality but more creative ways to make their application go viral.

There is a lot to learn from the top Facebook games like Farmville or Mafia Wars or livingsocial, cities I visited, ilike music and filxster movies. Things like rewards schedules and virtual gifts can drive viral usage to a large extent. There are certain features of the applications which make it more likely to become viral like –

Invites

Forced invites: it forces the user to invite XX friends as soon as he decides to add an application. This is being used popularly by many applications with varied success. This is already banned by Facebook

Invite after Action: Providing an option to user to invite friends post they have added the application

Features locked with adding friends: while designing applications certain advanced features can be locked for a certain level of friends on the applications.

Invite linked to direct benefit: you gain points if you send invites to your friends.

News Feed: One of the most powerful components of Facebook is news feed. There are two ways in which applications can leverage the news feed option. The first is when a user adds an application to his profile; it is displayed in their friends’ news feeds. The second way of using a news feed is by leveraging the news feed API call that Facebook has provided. Within reason, application can regularly post news items to a user’s mini-feed within their profile. While this is severely limited, at least you can get it on to your users’ mini-feeds. Every form of exposure you can get (within reason) for your application, you should strive for.

Application to User notifications: Notifications are items sent by an application to a user’s notifications page in response to some sort of user activity within an application. You can also send messages to the logged-in user’s notifications (located on the right hand side of the chat bar), as well as on their notifications page. Your application can send a number of notifications to a user in a day based on a number of metrics (or buckets).

User-to-User notifications: User-to-user notifications can be sent to application users who aren’t friends of the application user generating the notification. User-to-user notifications can be sent from an application user to the friends of the user, whether or not they use the application.

Referrals: This is the most recent form of viral marketing on Facebook. I am seeing a number of applications adopting this technique. The referrals tactic is to come up with an effective way of encouraging the applications users to market the application for you. They can market your application on blogs, websites, forums, Facebook walls, messages to friends and more. Some of the tools which can be used are – widgets, emails, RSS, Links etc

Recommendations (one on one): Used alone, this technique may not result in viral growth of your application but combining this technique with one of the others I have listed can result in exceptional results. The concept is straight forward. Reach out to people that you think will find your application useful. This technique is more for targeted applications, not for generic applications such as poke wars or zombie biting or any of the other generic applications out there.