Recruit the right newcomers for your web 2.0 platform
Recruiting newcomers to your web 2.0 platform
When establishing a new web 2.0 platform it is important to consider who it is you want to recruit. When thinking about your target market there are a number of key design claims that should be followed in order to make adoption of your web 2.0 platform easy for new comers.
These design claims are;
1) Active Recruitment leads to a larger community of prospective members.
2) Word-of-mouth recruiting is substantially more powerful than impersonal advertising.
3) Recruiting new members from the social networks of current members increases the number of new members more than impersonal methods.
4) Making it easy for users to share content from a community site with their friends (e.g., via easy email, Twitter, Facebook, and similar links) will increase the visibility of the community among the users’ friends and thereby increase the likelihood of them joining.
5) Identifying the most influential members of a community and encouraging them to recruit others in their social networks is more effective than soliciting referrals from members at random.
6) Impersonal advertising can effectively increase the number of people joining an online community, especially among potential members with little prior knowledge of the community.
7) Recruiting materials that present reasons to join and endorsements by credible sources and sites attract people who are actively searching for and evaluating communities.
8) Recruiting materials that present attractive surface features and endorsements by celebrities attract people who are casually assessing communities.
9) Emphasizing the number of people already participating in a community motivates more people to join than does emphasizing the community need.
10) Placing the name of a community in front of people will often activate the familiarity heuristic and their liking of the community and thus their willingness to try it.
The Celebrity power of Instagram
Instagram is a photo sharing website that allows people to follow their friends, family, companies and even celebrities everywhere they go through pictures. A picture can tell 1000 words and Instgram is telling millions of users around the world what is going on. Users have the ability to share the pictures they have taken on a web based platform which can be shared across other social platforms.
Source: http://pandodaily.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/ellen_selfie.jpg?w=900&h=530
One of the success stories behind Instagram is the ability attract ‘the right people’: celebrities!
The ability to attract Justin Bieber (16 million followers), Kim Kardashian (14.5 Million followers), Beyonce (12.4 Million followers), Cristiano Ronaldo (5 Million followers) and Barack Obama is going to bring people to your platform. Instagram is a great way for fans to reach out and feel part of their favorite celebrities life. The best thing for them; they can enjoy a coffee without the crowds and the crowds. The most famous photo of all time has to be Ellen DeGeneres photo which smashed the record on twitter. Ellen decided to take a selfie with some of the top celebrities on the planet, the picture was retweeted 3.5 Million times and favorited just over 2 million times. This smashed the record previously held by President Obama.
Lets look at the 3 main design claims and how Instagram has implemented these design claims
1) Active Recruitment leads to a larger community of prospective members.
While the creators of instagram may not have set out seeking celebrity power to push their product forward they certainly latched on to that niche market. They were able to gain access to enough celebrities to begin the process of the network effect. This meant that when celebrities jumped on board they often brought their large and diverse followers with them.
2) Word-of-mouth recruiting is substantially more powerful than impersonal advertising.
Word of mouth was implemented a number of ways for instagram as adopting celebrities saw the value added from the platform and shared it with their friends. ultimately that led to an ‘arms’ race where celebrities would fight for the top place on the platform by getting the most followers. It also had a bottom up approach as fans told their friend “hey check this out, Beyonce is on instagram”. Recruiting in this way makes it easier to adopt for new users and helps them to overlook any initial flaws and be less critical to the learning curve. This is mainly due to the fact that new users see the value that is already in place within the platform. They see that their friends, and pop stars are there and no matter how buggy the platform is, or how long it takes to learn “I just want it”.
This brings me to the next design claim.
3) Emphasizing the number of people already participating in a community motivates more people to join than does emphasizing the community need.
Instagram has not always been the market player it currently is, but now that it has harness the network effect, overcome the inflection point and adapted to users needs Instagram has indeed become one of the largest social platform on the web. They have continued to recruit due to the celebrity power, but also because of the OTHER people who are on the platform. People see their friends on instagram and want to get involved. Their friends share images that have been modified through the instagram app shared across other social platforms and want to do the same. It has become a large part of day to day life as people share their life through pictures, these pictures are not just photos but stories of their life.
The Power of Web 2.0 