Mark Glaser wrote an interesting post that discussed whether social networking sites such as Facebook need to spend money on marketing & advertising. In the post, he states that the growth of social networking sites is ‘friend-driven’. From his post:
And the social networking sites are truly friend-driven and friend-powered. They don’t need to spend money on marketing, because they have the power of friends who cajole other friends to join in, who then tell 10 friends, who tell 10 friends, and so on.
I certainly agree that people enable the value of social networking sites to be fully realized. Social networking doesn’t work without the critical mass of social people.
How Successful Social Networks Market
But I disagree that successful social networking sites don’t need to invest marketing dollars. A social networking site is not guaranteed success simply because it once had many active members - look at Friendster for example.
How should social networks promote? Successful social networks invest in community design instead of spending their growth money on traditional marketing methods.
Community Design is marketing. And it trumps all other marketing options for a social networking site. A well-designed community encourages use of intuitive site functionality and creates an enjoyable user experience. An outstanding design lends itself to effortlessly spreading through viral channels.
User experience beats a marketing message any day. Hands down. The real marketing geniuses behind successful social networking sites are the people who design how site users interact with site functionality and with other users. Community design affects site users by establishing behavioral boundaries, limitations, action incentives, social opportunities, basis for connections, methods for self expression, and so much more.
Social Network Design dictates how site users behave within the social network. Regardless of incredibly useful site functionality, all functionality is only accessible by users through the tools that community designer has built into the site.
Let me provide some examples to illustrate how a community designer affects those inhabiting the created space:
Say I hire a new team member to do project work at my office. I am providing the workspace (the office) for the new team member, so in essence I am framing any output that this person produces. This person’s productivity & job satisfaction will largely be affected by how I have designed the job and the workspace. Think of how the following scenarios would affect job performance and output:
- The new team member receives their own workstation & a fast computer (good)
- The new team member’s workstation is adjacent to others working on the same project (good)
- The new team member’s workstation is adjacent to an old TV that’s always blaring Judge Judy episodes (not so good)
- I suddenly decide that all project members must work on-site in 28 hour shifts (shame on me)
Similarly, the community design shapes & frames the experiences of social network users and largely contributes to how motivated users are to return to the site.
A successful social network is designed to:
- Intuitively enable people to accomplish their tasks
- Provide a simple and easy interface for utilizing complex site functions
- Structurally encourages user interaction and community-sustainability
A Few Social Network Design Factors to Consider:
- What methods are available for users to interact with each other?
- How transparently can users see the actions of other users?
- How much socialability is built into the available tools for site users?
- What are the incentives for user participation?
F8 platform development is a marketing cost for Facebook
Facebook recently invested heavily in its F8 release and open application platform. The Facebook F8 platform enables 3rd party developers to quickly and easily contribute to a growing variety of rich user experiences for the diverse Facebook community. The near future brings new Facebook applications that offer users increasingly complex and engaging social networking experiences.
With the F8 platform, Facebook did more than design a community. Facebook designed a development platform to enable thousands of other developers to collectively design the community and therefore begin to cater to a limitless variety of user experiences preferences. The countless combinations of new and future apps will help Facebook offer The Long Tail of user experiences that the increasingly diverse number of individual Facebook users will require to continue as active members. Facebook would never have been able to develop this variety if community design was kept to a closed system.
Certainly, Facebook could never have positioned itself for this level of success without heavily investing in community design and user experience.
