The content on your social media site depend on user participation, while serving a large audience of consumers. Content on social media should be easy to use by both user groups: participating and active contributors and passive readers/viewers alike.
Navigation schemes and shortcuts like lists, tagging, bookmarking and favoriting all help users find what they are looking for, while also facilitating discovery and surfacing serendipitous relations and connections. Content can also be structured to bring attention to members or to topics.
Any social software site must engage users in talk: in talking about something, and to somebody or somebodies. This talk must reveal something interesting about the member doing the talking, while also contributing the content of that talk to the site for consumption by others. It does nobody any good if a site's theme is serious, but its users are not.
Talk is the "social engine" that drives participation on your site. Users must be motivated to talk, and must find that talk interesting. And in being interesting, it should help the users doing the talking to seem interesting to others, while being interested in talking to or in front of others. There are different kinds of talk, too, including telling, sharing, opinionating, reporting, inviting, recommending, commenting, quoting, and so on.
Social software sites permit two kinds of communication. Members can post contributions to the site, or to other members. It's by communicating directly to other members, and by contributing indirectly to the site's audience, that users get noticed, distinguish themselves, attract attention, and so on. You don't get to control what members do on your site, but you can facilitate and structure user participation so that direct communication is possible while indirect communication is captured and made publicly available
© 2007 by Adrian Chan. All Rights Reserved.