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Early Success Stories: Video and Open Graph

April 4, 2012ByAlex Himel

In less than three months, more than 3,000 timeline apps have launched that span categories such as news, food, travel, and fashion. Among these are video apps seeing increased growth and engagement by building with the Open Graph and making it easier for people to share and discover videos on Facebook and their mobile devices. Early results show that as video clips go viral, so do the video apps and websites integrated with Open Graph.

  • VEVO: The music video platform recently relaunched its site and iPhone and Android apps with a deep Facebook integration to make the user experience even more social. Since the Open Graph update, VEVO has seen exponential growth. Published actions on Facebook increased 600% from February to March, referrals from Facebook to VEVO have increased 130% in the same time frame, and 60% of Facebook referral traffic now comes from Open Graph stories. Additionally, VEVO moved to a Facebook-only registration, which has resulted in an increase of 200% in daily registrations.
  • Viddy: Viddy recently integrated its mobile app with timeline to give people more ways to share the videos they're creating with friends. Since integrating with timeline in February, Viddy has gone from 60,000 monthly active users to more than 920,000, and seen over 9,000,000 interactions with Viddy content on Facebook. Additionally, the startup, whose mobile app is among the most popular apps in the Apple App Store, has more than doubled its average daily sign-ups since integrating with Open Graph.
  • Izlesene: Since launching with Open Graph in September 2011, the Turkish video site's number of monthly active users has grown from 250,000 to more than 6,500,000. By making it easy for people to add the videos they watch to their timeline, Izlesene has seen the number of videos people view per day increase by 3X.
  • Dailymotion: The social video site integrated with Open Graph in January to make it possible for people to add the videos they watch to their timeline. In the past two months, more than 9 million people have added the app to their timeline. On an average day, more than 6 million people visit Dailymotion from Facebook, and more than 2 million stories are published back to Facebook. Additionally, Facebook-connected users tend to be more engaged with the content on the site than non-connected users.

Best Practices

  • Be transparent: On websites integrated with Open Graph, it should be clear to users what will take place on the site and back on Facebook, and it should be easy to find the login option. For example, VEVO shows the benefit of personalization immediately at the registration process, and provides users with a clear social on/off control. Similarly, Viddy's website immediately points out to the user where he or she can sign into the app and add it to their timeline.


  • Provide social context throughout: The social context should continue throughout the user's experience. For example, VEVO shows a facepile on the left side of the website that the user sees from the start, and surfaces social features with each video. For mobile apps, the social experience should extend through mobile platforms so people can engage with their friends wherever they are.


  • A/B test: Understand and constantly test how to optimize the user experience. Izlesene optimized its experience by performing A/B tests for the auth dialog. In the process, they learned users will accept the dialog if they are given more context. Izlesene added a facepile of friends who use the app, which has since resulted in increased conversion.

We're continuing to approve actions and look forward to more types of timeline apps launching soon. For additional details, please see our checklist, best practices and tutorial.


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