In October 2017, Facebook bought the startup TBH, whose product was an enormously successful polling app aimed at high-school students; as part of TBH's integration into the company, they circulated memos detailing the "psychological trick" they developed to maximize their penetration into high-schools and suggested ways this could be adapted for use by Facebook itself.
TBH is a social media app that relies on groups of friends all joining in unison; this is a hard thing to accomplish — traditional advertising and endorsements results in "fragmented" adoption and "a handful of Silicon Valley socialites" as high-profile users.
To overcome this, TBH scraped high-schools' Instagram accounts to find followers who identified as pupils of the school they were following. Then they created private, per-school Instagram accounts that sent private messages to each school's followers telling them that they might be able to be among the first people to try an exciting new app. Large numbers of children would respond to this message — which had no details about how to join the program or what the app did — with follow requests, which would pile up in TBH's account.
Once TBH had critical mass, they added a link to sign up for its app to the account's profile, then flipped the account from private to public — which meant that every student who'd sent a follow request would simultaneously get a message saying it had been approved, and, having visited the profile of the account, would find the download link and sign up for the service.
TBH goosed their conversion rates by timing the flip from private to public to coincide with the last school bell of the day, when students would once again be permitted to use their phones.
TBH's Facebook memo describes ways that Facebook could adopt these tricks to sign up more children. As Facebook grays and its growth declines, the company is desperate to entice children to sign up for the service. Though they shut down TBH down less than a year after buying it, suggesting that their $30,000,000 investment in the company had less to do with the product it had created and more to do with acquiring the expertise to develop "psychological tricks" that worked on kids.
We eventually identified a psychological trick:
1. Set the app’s Instagram profile to Private.
2. Set the bio to something mysterious, e.g., “You’ve been invited to the new RHS app—stay tuned!”
3. Follow the targeted users.
4. Wait 24 hours to receive the inbound Follow Requests. (They were curious about our profile so they requested access)
5. At 4:00PM when school gets out (The Golden Launch HouseTM), add the App Store URL to the profile.
6. Finally, make the profile Public
This notified all students at the same time that their Follow Request had been accepted—and they subsequently visited our profile, looked at our App Store page, and tried the app.
Internal Facebook Note: Here Is A “Psychological Trick” To Target Teens [Ryan Mac/Buzzfeed]
(via Super Punch)
