Facebook reminds developers to keep spamming to a minimum
The social network changes its developer guidelines to ensure apps don't overload your profile with notifications.
Facebook is reminding developers that a spammy app is an ignored app. The social network announced a change in its developer guidelines today to make sure the number of notifications app developers send to app users stay at a minimum.
The two new guidelines -- not sending notifications to inactive users and maintaining a 17 percent click-to-impression ratio -- go into effect on November 9.
This means apps can only send notifications to users who have visited their apps within 28 days and apps sending a lot of notifications need to make sure that users are clicking the notifications they see at least 17 percent of the time.
If apps don't pay mind to these guidelines, Facebook may block their developers from notifications.
It's part of Facebook's emphasis on quality control on the notifications tool. The company said apps that follow the guidelines have users who click through to the app 25 percent of the time:
"As an increasing number of developers use notifications, we've found that those who focus on sending high quality notifications to active users, as we suggest in our guidelines, are seeing click through rates of 25 percent or higher, which is significantly higher than rates typically seen for other direct response channels such as email," according to a Facebook developers blog post.
As the company's gaming executives noted yesterday, the original notifications tool was shut down due to spamming, so Facebook is treading carefully to make sure app developers use the tool wisely. They said games are now seeing a 30 to 40 percent click through rate for notifications.
This, Facebook and app developers hope, mean you will actually want to come back to the app when reminded through notifications.