Engaging Your Users To Extend Your Online Reach

With a seemingly steady rate of adoption across a handful of social networks, sites nowadays allow users to push content to a bevy of social sites. Tools like Share This allow users to select their social site of choice to distribute content. Check out the 199 options on Nielsen's Share menu! Fortunately the most popular 8 are exposed outside of the drop-down. But the real consideration is not to which social sites should you allow visitors to post information, but rather who are these users and how are they likely to want to engage? 

Take a look at Forrester's Social Technographics Ladder. It shows the breakdown of user behavior on the social web. Notice that 'Creators', those people who are actively blogging or publishing media accounted for a mere 13% of US Adults in 2006 (source: Forrester's NACTAS Q4 2006 Devices & Access Online Survey). 19% from that same pool were considered 'Joiners', people who use social networking sites. One of the key opportunities for online marketers is in understanding how to motivate and convert Joiners into Creators, thereby promoting company products and site offerings through social channels.

I've been noticing a trend lately with social bookmarking buttons that starts to address this point. During a few recent online transactions, I was prompted to post my action to one of my social networks. But instead of simply providing a button to access that social network, I was also provided canned messages from which I could choose. In essence, the site was offering to do the 'contributing' for me.

Example 1: Toms Here's a screenshot of my order confirmation for a purchase of Toms shoes, an awesome organization that provides a pair of shoes to a child in need for every purchase you make. Notice the Twitter and Facebook appeals? Clicking on them generated a canned message, the result of which you can see on my Twitter stream.

Example 2: Firefox Here's another example, lowering the barrier of engagement even more by exposing the canned messages to the user. Firefox's 5th anniversary was just a few weeks ago. You can see from this screenshot how easy they're making it for users to take action. Here's my resulting message on Twitter.

Example 3: Eventbrite A final example, below, through Eventbrite. Notice that on the sign-up confirmation page, I'm presented with a number of social networks to which I can announce that I've just signed myself up to attend an event. Clicking on the 'twitter' icon redirected me to my Twitter account with a canned message which I could, with a single click, submit. Or I could edit over the message to my liking. 

"Is it you or is it me?" -Twitter You might have noticed that these are all twitter examples. In this recent research by Nielsen on social network loyalty, you'll notice that, at the same traffic levels, Facebook and MySpace outperformed Twitter in retention rates. I believe that's because it's easier and more acceptable to be a 'Joiner' on those networks than it is on Twitter, where the whole purpose of the tool is to operate as a 'Contributor'. If sites, particularly around transactions, are able to bridge the gap between Joining and Contributing, I believe we'll see tools like Twitter sustain themselves a while longer. But most importantly, take into consideration that it's simple engagement steps like canned messages that may convert your joiners into contributors, thereby broadening your reach online.