After a drop of 4 million daily active users a week ago, nearly halving its daily engagement, SocialCam has made changes to bring its users back, proving they will not follow the dismal trend of the social reader apps before it.
Earlier [in May] we saw apps like The Huffington Post and The Guardian lose users at an incredible rate. The Washinton Post app in particular went from close to 18 million DAU on April 12, to right around 200,000 today. Washington Post's engagement officer , Ryan Y. Kellett released this tweet in explanation, "Social reader 'collapse' is b/c of evolving FB modules. Before: 'double-double,' 4-5 stories down in a list, w/ friend icon - drove growth." In other words, Facebook changed the way they presented social reader app stories in the newsfeed, grouping them instead into a "trending articles" bar that drove engagement way down.
So when video sharing apps like SocialCam and Viddy shed half of their users a couple weeks ago, analysts scrambled to find a similar explanation. Appdata recently added a warning under every open graph app name stating, "Facebook is continuing to iterate the ways that Open Graph apps interact with the Facebook Platform. Open Graph apps like social video players and social news readers are likely to continue to see higher than average fluctuations in active user counts over the coming months." In other words, we should take the appdata with a grain of salt, as Facebook can ultimately control the popularity and engagement of its apps based on the way they present them. This still didn't really answer the question as to why the video player apps were taking such a large hit.
There is much debate over the explanation of this video app data; did users want to stop sharing their viewing habits with all their Facebook friends? Perhaps they were lured in initially by enticing video thumbnails and titles, and wanted out. Whatever the reason was for the decline in engagement, SocialCam has done everything it can to win back its user base.
Just recently, SocialCam has changed their app to prevent accidental sharing, and introduced a new interface that shows users a user leaderboard. So far, based on the corresponding dates in the app data, it looks like the initiative is working, bringing users back to the app and increasing engagement.
With such a meteoric rise, many feared SocialCam would burn out and further prove the fleeting nature of app popularity, but because the company reacted to the drop in users and changed the app in response. As a result, their users have started to come back. We may not see the 8 million DAU numbers we saw earlier this month just yet, but the app's positive growth is a good sign for its future.
This is a post from Daniel Levine of Grovo.com, a field guide to the Internet where users can learn everything from how to use Tumblr to Pinterest.
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