In this podcast we chatted with Chris Glode, Mobile Product Manager, at MapMyFitness. Chris has over 6 years experience marketing mobile apps globally, in all types of channels including app stores, carriers decks, TV, radio, SMS, online and at live events. He’s been fortunate enough to manage #1 ranked apps (free and paid) in Health & Fitness and Sports categories.
MapMyFitness is a suite of web and mobile tools and a community of runners, cyclists and all types of fitness enthusitasts. The apps MapMyRun and MapMyRide are their two biggest mobile apps but they also have MapMyFitness, MapMyWalk, MapMyHike and MapMyRace. These apps allow users to map and log their various types of fitness activities. The company started in 2005 with MayMyRun which was primarily a web-based tool which allowed users to map runs for themeselves and find runs that other people had done. When the mobile and app store scene exploded in 2008, MapMyFitness realized the synergies between GPS devices and being able to track a user's run and have those users find their content via a mobile device. Today, over half of MapMyFitness' new user traffic comes from mobile devices.
Chris also talks about how social has become such a huge part of MapMyFitness' business strategy and how it has been essential to increasing new member registrations and engagement with users who are already members of MapMyFitness.
Listen to the podcast below. Or, if you'd like to jump to a specific question; I've included the transcript of the podcast as well.
Here is a transcript of the questions and answers for the podcast:
Q: Why is social important to MapMyFitness?
A: Social is really important to us because social is really important to fitness. There's been a ton of studies about the pwoer of social connections to create motivation and accountability for fitness related activities. When we look at the stats across our member base we see that the users that are more socially active, whether its posting content to Facebook and Twitte, or making friend relationships within our site, these users tend to be more physically active as well. The social topic is a really nice fit for our suite of applications.
Q: Tell us a little bit about your background and how you guys got started.
A: We started out in 2005 when Google made the Maps web API publicly available. One of our cofounders at the time was training for a marathon and people at the time (and still to this day) drive around in the car and use the odometer to map their running routes. Our cofounder was kinda the hacker type so he decided to create and site and use the javascript API to map out a run near his house, he also drove other people to the site and used their browsers to see what the distance was for their own runs. A week later he had 10,000 people hitting the site and a bunch of requests for new features and it just exploded from there. We really didn't launch our first mobile app until 2008. We were early on in the game and got out app into stores really quickly. The newer devices for us was a great fit because the ones that had GPS allowed users to go out for a run or ride and the GPS would tell you how far they were going. This was replacing dedicated GPS devices that people were buying for hundreds of dollar with a free mobile app. This also got a whole new class of people into fitness who maybe weren't serious about GPS devices, but didn't mind carrying their fun with them to track distance and calories burned.
Q: How long have you guys been on Android?
A: We launched our Android app in early 2009. We started out with 2 applications and in just the last 9 months we added 3 more apps to our suite of Android apps. We're seeing tremendous growth in the Android platform.
Q: How does social play a big part in your applications to increase the engagement with your users, and increase coming back to the app?
A: Let me say this with the caveat that what is right for a fitness based consumer app, might not be what's right for a gaming app, or a B2B app, but I do think that what I'm about to say applies to a majority of the apps out there. For us, social is crucial in increasing app engagement and app discovery. We encourage our users to create an account because it gives us more information that in turn allows us to tailor the apps to their needs, and create a more personalized experience. Using social to reduce friction around identity type activities like registration and log in has been crucial for us. When we introduced a less frictional registration process on mobile, we increased our conversion by well over 2x. By integrating the app with social, we reduced our sign in/reg down to 2 steps, and now we get more sign ins. We now have more information about users so that we can engage them in different ways. We can use that for email retention campaigns, we can give them more data around what they have been doing and create a richer cross-platform experience for them.
Q: Tell us more about social authentication and sharing features within the app? What social networking patterns do you work with?
A: We started off with Facebook and Twitter and they've been the biggest for us because of the nature of our site. Over time we started getting more demand for being able to sign in with Google accounts, and Linkedin accounts and other types of accounts so we made the decision about using a tool where you can plug in an SDK to your app it will let you sign in across 10-15 different social sites. This is a really important decision to make because there are pros and cons to taking this approach. We use a tool called Gigya it gives developers the access to integrate social sign in once and we get access to over 15 social networks, and their stats and a dashboard on the web that gives information about what social networks are users are using. There's a variety of companies out there that have these sort of tools. Depending on the nature or your app and what you want to do, there are certain disadvantages to using a tool. As an example, when Facebook or Twitter releases a new version of their SDK you're going to be a couple of steps behind in the chain because you've got to wait for your provider to update their SDK and test it before you finally get your hand on it. So if you really want to go deep with a given social network and your app fits really well with a given social network you may be better off just focusing your efforts on that one social network, and stay on top of all the features that they offer.
Q: What are some of the questions developers should be asking themselves to see if social is a feature that they should integrate into their app? What is the decision making process?
A: Number 1: Does your business model lend itself well to have registered users? If you're a light-weight gaming application and you just want to get eye balls on the game and get people using the game, or you're selling the game for a fixed price; perhaps having people register is less important to you. But if you're a media-based business like us where having information about people from the perspective of being able to sell your audience advertisers and having other busniesses you can run on top of that, a big proponent of having people register is because there is a big benefit to the consumer and their is a big benefit to your business because you have so much more data you can use to personalize the user experience. Number 2: Do I want to require registration? If so, for what features? There is a trade off though because there is a class of user who might not want to provide that information. Although in my experience that class of user is shrinking. As long as you can prove to users that your brand and your product is reputable and your not going to sell their information or do something evil with it, they are going to be willing to provide that information as long as they're given some benefit like being able to save their information across web and mobile.
Q: How long did it take to integrate Gigya into your app?
A: For implementing and testing and you’re using a third –party SDK for social sign in; you’re looking at about 3-5 days of development.
Q: Why did you integrate social sharing into your app?
A: For us it’s about letting users publish awesome content that they’re sharing. One of the really gratifying pay-offs for using our app to track fitness whether it’s a run or a ride, is to see the stats of that workout, and where you went on a map. We have content that people are creating that they’re really proud of and they were demanding to be able to share that. One of the huge feature requests we had before we integrated sharing was let me share my content to my social network. Over time it’s driven our product roadmap because with each feature we launch on mobile we think about how it will be posted on Facebook or Twitter. We recently released a feature where users could track their friends live during their workout and being able to post that to Facebook and Twitter has been hugely popular. The ROI is easy to measure because we can look at traffic back to the site. Cross pollenation of mobile and web traffic is a big thing that we drive for in our business. The mobile initiated social posts are one of the huge drivers back to our website. So that in turn creates more registered users and more activity in the site, which then generates more downloads of our apps. We use tools like Google Analytics therefore we know that a lot of the referral traffic is coming from Facebook and Twitter. When you form your social post you have to be thinking about what’s important to my business and what is important to the user.
Q: What do you do to market yourselves in the social realm?
A: We have a social media team that handles those functions. They are focusing a majority of their time on Facebook and Twitter because that’s where our consumer base is. There is a challenge of marketing yourself on Facebook and Twitter as opposed to the content that is being created and shared by users on the social networks. You basically have to have a Facebook app to post stuff from your mobile app on Facebook. Where as the Facebook page is the vehicle you’re using from a marketing perspective to engage your audience. Linking your app and your page on Facebook is one of the more difficult things to do. Having your app be a redirect to your page is one of the better things to do.
Q: We’ve talked a lot about Facebook, but what about Twitter? Can you share some best practices for using Twitter?
A: Twitter is fun because there is a much bigger challenge in terms of keeping it concise. Figuring out how to cram the most interesting content into 140 characters is very challenging. For us we did a lot of A/B testing with different types of posts. Finding out what type of hashtags are being using in your vertical is important and include them in the Twitter post. The key to the game with Twitter is do a lot of testing, research and experimentation to really find out what content is engaging.
Q: What is your reach globally?
A: Actually for Android we just extended our Android app globally and localized our Android Market listing for various regions, and we localized the apps themselves. This has been a huge driver of international growth for us.
Q: When cross pollinating your app and your page, do you use a rewards system to encourage users to like or post content? If so, what kind of rewards?
A: It’s not something that we’ve experimented with yet.
Q: Do you outsource your Android development or do you do it in-house?
A: Initially we outsourced the development of our first Android build and it didn’t turn out so great. We have our own in house Android dev team now. We were able to take it to something we’re really proud of.
Q: A listener is playing with the MapMyFitness app now and just signed in with Facebook. Would the app use my Facebook information to find my friends who are using the app?
A: The more you can pull in people’s relationships on social and make those relationships relevant within the context of your app the more engaging the app is going to be. We’re working on a feature that pulls in connections from Facebook and Twitter and suggests these users to friend within the app.
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