[ ] Use showFeedDialog

This is number 1 reason why LivingSocial has attracted 30 monthly millions users in one month. Ride the wave too.

[ ] Encourage bookmarking

Make it easier for your users to find you later. You can even explain to your users they should slide your icon to the first slot of the six icons, this way your icon won’t disappear the next time the user adds a bookmark.

[ ] Ask for their email addresses

You want as many ways to contact your users as possible. Emailing is a classic.

[ ] Allow to unsubscribe from notifications

The number of notifications your users can send to their friends will really influence how viral your application will be. So focus on quality notifications, group your notifications together instead of sending ten times the same one and allow users to unsubscribe to the notifications instead of blocking your application or marking the notifications as spam.

[ ] Use the share button from Facebook

I am surprised how few developers use this button. It takes literally 2 minutes to integrate and gives your users another way to talk about your applications. Because in Social Whims we prefer iframe applications, we point the Share button to our About page so that Facebook can automatically use the logo and the description of the application.

[ ] Encourage to invite people

I think 99% of the facebook application have an Invite page. Great. But why would users invite their friends without incentive?

Zynga does it well in their popular Poker game by encouraging players, straight from the start page to invite their friends to earn more in the daily bonus

[ ] Spread notifications to friends

This is the lesson we learned with our Questions type applications.

Make sure your notifications can reach new users. Notifications are wayyyyy more powerful than invitations…

[ ] Encourage to become a fan

Social Whims has been doing this from day one and we are proud to say we have inspired others to do so as well. It is simply a link in the application towards the About page of the application but hides a huge potential.

In previous versions of Facebook, what this gave you was an additional way to contact your users (via Fans updates) and more visibility (when a user becomes a fan, their friends can see it), which was worthwhile enough.

Recently,  Facebook pushed a killer feature for page and application owners. Whenever you post a message, it will appear in the feed of all the friends of the fans.

Can you now see the potential of this thing? Don’t wait.

[ ] Encourage the users to come back on the application

Does your application regularly call your users back? It can be via a notification, an email, whatever you can think of. Be careful though, don’t be spammy…

[ ] Add the ShareTraffic banner

This is a banner we first developed to help our own applications reach more users but we then decided to open it up to other developers. I invite you to check this link to learn more about ShareTraffic.

Not only ShareTraffic helps attracting more users to your applications but it also helps you enter new markets (french market, spanish market, etc…)

Can you think of other items to add to this checklist? I will update the list with your suggestions.