How I Got 300K+ Users and Generated 17 Million Emojis in 2 Months on Facebook Messenger
Feelings of Incompleteness
In January of 2017, as I was going home on the subway, I observed what people were doing during their ride. Some of them read books while others played match-3 games.
Match-3 games? Why people play them? Do they want to pass their time? Why do they do this dumb thing? The answer came to me. They want to clear their screen and match colors to blast the bubbles and gain some satisfaction.
Why not put the same logic in a chat-based game for Messenger?
I decided that I could create three rows of emojis and create some sort of emoji blast game on Messenger. Sound boring? Maybe. The interactions are not as fun as in iOS/Android games, but I decided that I could use gifs to simulate the same visual effects. So I opened GIPHY.com and found some funny gifs that were relevant to my idea, like blasting fruits or shooting from a gun.
I decided to use the PullString platform, and I launched the first version of MojiHunt on Facebook Messenger in February of 2017. The first version contained 20 levels with different sets of emojis.
Ok, Cool But How Did You Promote It?
I didn’t want to spend lots of cash on this experiment so, I decided to record a screencast on my iPhone using QuickTime on Mac. I showed it to a couple of my friends (one of them said it was stupid), but that didn’t stop me from continuing the experiment.
The Most Stupid Game On Facebook Messenger?
I decided to post this screencast video on a Facebook page and make the title, “The Most Stupid Game for Facebook Messenger” to decrease the expectation from users and differentiate MojiHunt from other rich media games on iOS/Android.
I made the post and decided to spend 20 dollars on Facebook video promotion.
Holy cow! It worked. I opened Facebook Pages Manager and found out that people loved it! Over 3000 people in 6 hours clicked the link after watching this video.
Ok, What’s Next?
I thought, “What if I can ask players to put a comment on the video and share the video to their friends?” So I’m trying it. I’ve made 10 new levels and set the content locket.
Basically, it was just a stupid timer that popped up even when users did nothing, but most of them were willing to do it to access new levels, so they completed these steps:
1. Opened the FB post with video
2. Like & share the post
3. Write a comment with any emoji you like
4. Like the FB page
The results of this hack?
12,000 comments, 31K likes, 7.3K shares, 1.9M views
These were the numbers for the Facebook post, and I didn’t really expect it!
Thank You, Forbes
We were featured by Forbes about three weeks ago, which was nice.
What About Session Time?
We started with an average session time of five minutes. After we added +20 levels, this number increased to 17 minutes.
Please Don’t Go, I Love You So
The most important thing we’re working on now is retention rate. If you have content for 3–4 days, you can expect that you will lose 90% of your users shortly thereafter. So, you have to create daily content and keep users interest.
What’s Next? Poo Time!
We’ve decided to test a new idea, which we hope shows higher retention rates.
Five days ago, we launched PooBot, the bot that eats your emotions and helps you to forget about your life problems.
We’ll share the stats soon!
Have a question? Post it here. Don’t forget to like this post, ok?
