Want social engagement? Think “barter economy”

When you’re designing your website for social interaction, it’s all about making your user a good offer.

Look at it this way. You have business goals. You’re engaging in social media in order to further those business goals. For each business goal, you should be able to define specific social media goals. (If you can’t, you’re in trouble.) Then, you need to think about how to accomplish those goals by trading in the social economy.

1. What do you want?
2. What do your social users want?
3. What will you trade?

Let’s take an example:

What do you want?

Your business goal is to get more visitors to your site and get more people taking political action. Your social media goal is to get people to promote your website, share your news items and reports, and especially to get them sharing action items and encouraging others to take action.

Translate those social media goals into social actions and objects. As a business, you want social users to:

• Share news items and other content with their social network
• Tell others about the benefits of your website
• Share action items with their network
• Actively encourage others to use the action items to effect change

What do your social users want?

It’s pretty easy to figure out what you want. Now, flip it around and think about what your users want. Your target audience is politicos and politics junkies. 

These people are generally passionate about certain issues. They like to be informed. The most socially active of these users probably like to demonstrate their knowledge.  Your core audience, the most influential users, are likely politically active and probably participate in online and offline conversations with like-minded people. They want to effect change on the issues they care about and probably enjoy being seen as a political force.

Given what you know about these customers, they probably want:

• To display their knowledge of issues
• To demonstrate a deep understanding of those issues
• To be the first to announce the latest political news
• To be able to rally others and be seen as influential

What will you trade?

Now, you take what you’ve learned and make an offer.  Apply social interaction design. Evaluate your site to see how you can structure the site and social elements to give users what they want by taking the social actions you want.

Timely updates In this example, can you give political junkies timely updates about the particular issues they care about, so they can stay right on top of the news? Do that in a way that makes it natural and easy for them to share those timely updates with their network–such as a share button next to piece of news. Consider a mobile app with text messages for the latest news, and one-click sharing of the message on the user’s social networks. You get what you want (sharing your news and links) and they get what they want (being the first to announce the latest news via their cool mobile app).

Solid information What about supporting information? Is your site structured to make it easy for users to find information backing up their position or talking points? Is the data cited? Is it easily discovered through your site search? Do you have Share buttons next to the supporting data? Give your target customers easy ways to find the information to back their arguments, and share that information online. You’ve met their social needs (to show a deep understanding and back up their position in online debates), and your goals (share content and spread the word about your site).

Share actions What about action items? If you want these active politicos to encourage others to get involved via your site, first, the actions need to be discrete, easy to use, and tied to individual issues. Second, you need to reward the politicos for sharing. If your target user shares a link to sign a petition, can you track how many people it was eventually shared with? And how many of them actually signed the petition? Tell your politico just how influential he was. He’s likely to proudly share that news with his network and work even harder to rally support. Find ways to meet your goals (getting more people to take action) by meeting your user’s goals (being known as influential).

Make the offer

Now you have a better idea of what to build. Using this process, you can design a more social site, but making it full of social offers. If you’ve done your work well, your social users will start trading with you, and you’ll all get what you want!