Excellent Social Platform Engagement Checklist

Written by Matthijs Roumen on May 25th, 2010


I personally tend to dislike checklists, published over blogs that add up numbers of actions which are clearly pulled together to form an unthoughtful list. This checklist from LukeW is different. It’s a list that looks like it has been thought through over and over again to not miss out any points when it comes to engaging users in your social platform. The author itself calls it a high-level checklist for social web applications.

whether its about the most basic elements to social motivational factors, this list of LukeW has them all. Read on after the fold.

The list adds up several questions every social developer should ask himself when creating a social platform. The questions are divined in the categories Core Needs, Core Social, Basic Behaviors, Motivators and Relationships.

Core Needs

These questions address the most basic elements of any service: what does it do it, for who, and how?

• Need: what is the existing problem we are solving for people?
• Segment: who really has this need (primary audience)?
• Measurably better: how is our solution to the problem substantially better than current solutions people employ?

Core Social

Having very focused answers to these questions really matters. They attempt to address “what’s in it for me?” and why that brings people back.

• Identity: do people’s contributions make them look good/better?
• Connections: does using the product build deeper/better connections between people?
• Daily engagement: what activity brings people back every day?
• Reengagement: if people don’t come every day on their own, what brings them back?

Basic Behaviors

Have you considered how people generally behave and how your product accounts for or takes advantage of that?

• Least resistance: is there an easy path to people’s goals?
• Small commitments: how can initial commitments be small and scale up?
• Reciprocity: is there a perceived sense of debt in the activities people are doing?
• Bonding: is is possible for people to do things synchronously with others?
• Dopamine Loop: what kinds of information can people find of interest to them?

Motivators

These questions get you to think about the ways your product can encourage appropriate and valuable behavior from people.

• Status: is there an ability to increase your standing among people?
• Feedback Loops: how do people get responses to their actions?
• Social proof: can people follow the lead of others to make decisions?
• Sequencing: can activities be broken down into sequential goals or challenges?
• Ownership bias: how much will people value their contributions?
• Scarcity: is there limited availability that encourages people to take action?
• Set completion: will people be able to create collections and curate them?

Relationships

What kinds of relationships are you focusing on in your product?

• Strong ties: how does the product allow people to interact with the closest 7 (or less) people to them?
• Weak ties: how does the product allow people to interact with much more but less important connections?

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I think this list is rather complete and could be used in various sessions during the social design process. Furthermore, it could be a really useful list of requirement for the client to see an online social platform isn’t just about connecting friends and/or colleagues. What are your thoughts on this list?

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How to Better Engage Facebook Fan Page ‘Fans’

from Social Media Examiner by Mari Smith

A compelling, active Facebook fan page should be an integral part of your marketing plans. With its 350 million users and average daily session time of 25 minutes, Facebook provides an exceptional opportunity for visibility, Google indexing, live search ability, and fan engagement—whether you’re a solopreneur, a large brand or anywhere in between.
But, if you build it, will they come? And if they come, will they stay and engage?
There are two primary components to Facebook fan page engagement: 1) Sharing quality, relevant content and 2) inciting comments.  In this article I’ll tell you how to best engage with Facebook fans.
Of course, there are many other components of effective Facebook fan pages and Facebook marketing in general. However, for the purposes of this two-part post, we’ll focus on content and comments. The more comments you have, the more viral visibility and free marketing you’ll create. But your fans have to have something to comment on!

Share Quality, Relevant Content – Daily

TechCrunch recently posted a Facebook fan page study by Sysomos that revealed 77 percent of fan pages have fewer than 1,000 fans. What stood out for me in that post was this fact: “Facebook fan pages tend to beupdated only once every 16 days.”
TechCrunch goes on to say, “On Twitter, you follow someone because you want to hear what they have to say. On Facebook, you fan them just to show your support or affinity. Too often, it’s a throwaway gesture.”
While this may be true for many Facebook members and fan pages, I see a lively fan page as an extension of your blog and business – a place where you can generate real community and further solidify your brand.

1) How Often Should You Post?

• For most fan pages, there is a direct correlation betweenfrequency of posts and number of fans. Frequency is king, but there’s a fine balance – you don’t want to overwhelm your fans.
• If you’re just starting out with your fan page, I would suggest a minimum of one update per day and increase from there to several times a day (mixing up the types of posts – see below) if you’re getting a good response from your fans.
• Daily posting (at least Monday through Saturday) should yield daily comments and engagement.
• You’ll find the right rhythm with your fans. Better to start with once a day than several times a day and have your wall filled with only your own posts.
• Also, keep in mind “high traffic windows.” Depending on your time zone and the time zone of the majority of your fans, you’ll probably want to post sometime between 8:15am PST and 2:00pm PST.

2) What to Post

• I recommend a mix of your own thoughts, breaking news, useful tips, tools, resources and links from other sites in your industry and related industries. Stay on topic, stay focused.
• You could create an editorial calendar for your fan page just like many bloggers do.
• If you’re not sure what content your fans want, ask them – in a poll or status update.
• If your fan base is small and still growing, ask your Twitter followers, Facebook friends, email list, and blog subscribers. They are all potential fans. (See related post: 5 Ways to Promote Your Facebook Fan Page).

In this screen shot of Volkswagen’s Facebook Fan Page, photos from a recent auto show yielded 363 likes and 68 comments and a video trailer got 121 likes and 25 comments. These are great results, as every one of the fan actions created a post on their respective walls and out into their friends’ news feeds. Free visibility, and every line item has a link back to VW’s fan page.


3) Sourcing Quality Content

• Your own blog: Import using the Notes app or, ideally, the Networked Blogs app.
• Create your own Alltop page and review each morning for fresh content to share.
• And/or subscribe to the top 15 to 25 blogs in your industry and related industries in your Google reader and review daily.
• Create Twitter lists and scan daily for new, relevant information to share (see also 5 Creative Ways to Use Your Twitter Favorites).
• Your Twitter Favorites RSS feed imported via the Notes app.
• Your YouTube videos and/or other relevant videos.

4) Cultivating Your Style

• Most people will come back to your fan page if there’s a real sense of community.
• It’s important to be open, inviting, warm, friendly and personable. Even if you’re a large brand.
• Starbucks leads the way with engagement – you might observe their style for ideas. Though they use their globally recognized logo, you’ll occasionally see posts in first person. I think this is commendable, as it really creates that personal feel so important to social networks.

5) Mix Up the Types of Posts
Text
This is your standard status update. You get 420 characters in the publisher to say what you want. As long as you don’t have a link in the update, the post automatically changes your latest Status Update at the top.
I highly recommend using the Facebook fan page to Twitter app at http://facebook.com/twitter. You simply link your fan page to your Twitter account, then choose which posts to share as tweets (Status Updates, Photos, Links, Notes, Events). You may need to experiment to get this just right.
Your posts will automatically truncate at around 120 characters and include a bit.ly link back to your fan page. Regardless of the number of characters, the tweet always contains the bit.ly link. Here’s an example of an update I posted for this blog post:


To track stats on any bit.ly link, just paste it into your browser and add a “+” sign at the end. As of the time of this writing, this post/link had 109 clicks and the post had 23 comments, plus replies on Twitter.
Video
Video is the next best thing to meeting your fans in person. There are many choices for video updates: You talking into the camera, photo montages (try Animoto), screencasts (using software like Camtasia Studio for PC or Mac, or ScreenFlow for Mac).
When you talk into the camera, always make good eye contact with the camera lens – just as if you were chatting to one good friend. You could do a video tip per day or per week. Make sure to keep the length short and the content concise. The ideal length for videos is up to 1 minute and 40 seconds.
You can record directly on Facebook or load a file onto your fan page – see screenshots below:


Here’s a video upload example from Dell Computer’s Facebook Fan Page – a 41-second ad for their nifty new customizable range of laptops, with 179 likes and 57 comments.

Or, you could pull in the video from YouTube as a link (click the Links icon on the publisher) – and this pulls in the live video player just as if you’d loaded the video file as in the example above:

Photos
Upload relevant pictures periodically and be sure to encourage your fans to upload photos anytime they wish. Each time your fans upload a photo, the thumbnail goes onto their profile wall and out into the news feeds of their friends.
Make sure your settings allow fans to post content. Just to the right under the publisher, click Options, thenSettings:

In the screenshot below, there’s a photo on the Coca-Cola Facebook Fan Page – what’s neat about this photo is it was actually a fan-loaded image that Coca-Cola then reposted using the Share button (a great illustration of how Coca-Cola partnered with their raving fans who created the page).

Links

• Anytime you post a link in the publisher, Facebook displays a preview with a choice of thumbnails. (If you’re publishing content from a third-party app like Ping.fm, the thumbnail will be a default view.)
• You may at times wish to create an actual status update with a link in it, instead of a link with the preview on the wall. Here’s what to do: Before clicking the Share button, simply click the “x” to delete the link preview:

The post goes out as a status update with a clickable link:

Events
You can quickly create Event listings right from the publisher for any virtual or live event you have coming up. Fans can easily RSVP, as a regular Event page is created when you publish the event.
@ tags
This is a relatively new feature on Facebook. You can tag any friend, any fan page you’ve joined, any group you’re a member of and any event you’ve RSVPed to attend. You can include up to six @ tags in any update.Use the @ tagging strategically and your post will show up on your friends’ walls and other fan pages’ walls per the tag. (Just type the @ symbol in the publisher and the first letter or two of who/what you want to tag and a list drops down for you to select from.)
Notes app
This app is typically used to import your blog. However, I like the Networked Blogs app, so I actually import the RSS feed of my Twitter Favorites via the Notes app, which makes it easy to push relevant, regular content onto my fan page wall (and into the news feeds of my fans).

Incite Comments

Now that you have a wide variety of regular, quality, relevant content posting on your fan page, here are some points about inciting comments:

• For status updates, try ending with a question.
• Add your own comments as needed to get the ball rolling.
• Come back and reply often to your fans’ comments – Facebook currently doesn’t have threaded commenting, so I suggest addressing specific fans in your comments as @name.
• Do your best to respond to fan questions as promptly as possible. If you find you can’t keep up with the volume of questions, offer a free teleseminar or webinar in which you answer your fans’ top questions.

Vin Diesel has the second most popular Facebook fan page with well over seven million fans. Vin doesn’t post all that often, but when he does, each post yields tens of thousands of comments and likes. Just likeStarbucks, there’s something to learn from Vin’s style – he talks to his fans in a very warm, caring and authentic manner.

In part two of this Facebook Fan Page Engagement post, I’ll cover:

1. How to encourage fans to keep coming back to add their own content and comments and ask questions, etc.
2. Monitoring insights – what do they mean, how to analyze the numbers and adjust your posts accordingly.
3. Should you also use the “Send an Update to Fans” feature? Do fans read their updates?
4. How to spark ongoing engagement via the Discussions tab.
5. Setting up systems for monitoring and responding to your fan engagement, given that there are currently no notifications of activity or RSS feeds to subscribe to on fan pages.
6. Integrating your Twitter followers and activity into your fan page engagement.

Now it’s your turn: What types of content are you finding sparks the most engagement on your Facebook fan page? Where do you get stuck most with your fan page and what else would you like to see covered in future posts about social media engagement? Please add your thoughts in the comments below, then stay tuned for part two!

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Are Your Facebook Fans Truly Engaged?

There are five ways to keep your Facebook pages working for you - and your fans - without running into cycles or idle chit chat, says Italian digital media agency Frozen Frogs. They did some work to figure out fan engagement rate and found that:

(1.) New product releases

Let's face it, our brains are wired for novelty. Hence the love for shiny new objects.

What if you don't have a lot of new product releases? What would constitute new? How about new uses for a product? Maybe suggested by your fans somewhere else - in forums or at your blogs - that you can work with them to repost there, after vetting as necessary to make you feel comfortable.

Run a video interview via Skype of your customer talking about the new or innovative use for it, then post it. This would also pay off the fifth way listed here.

(2.) Promotions and discounts

Putting cash back into people's pockets is still a great way to get traction.

Things may be tight for many businesses at the moment. Points towards a purchase, or a way to create a community bartering system for certain parts of the service might be an interesting option.

Another idea here is to allow customers and fans to earn points towards a charity and then profile them talking about the reason why they picked that charity - there's the story again.

(3.) Eco-friendly initiatives

For real though, not green washing. Eco-friendly can be minimizing your company's footprint, supporting causes the community cares about, building a tangible and concrete story around responsible care.

Car companies have a good angle here.

(4.) Something remarkable

Think about something special and unexpected you could do for your fans. If you're a very popular brand, think in terms of access - giving them access to a unique experience they cannot get elsewhere. Make sure it ties into your brand.

Surprise fans every now and then with something unexpected. You can combine this with special promotions.

(5.) Video narrative

Telling a story visually is very powerful. There are so many ways to involve the community with video - company-driven promotions, special community profile stories, new product uses, guest evangelists. I'm sure you can come up with very creative ideas.

All of these provide higher levels of engagement. Here's the full deck from Frozen Frogs.

Thoughts? Questions? Reactions? We've got to get the Ducati people or someone working on the Ducati digital initiatives in here, don't you agree?

[engagement levels for Wired and Ducati]

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