Social Media User

The social media user engages through the screen, the interface, its navigation, content organization, layout and so on to become socially involved. Thus his or her needs as a user include a sense for his or her participation. Feedback from the site or service must provide feedback from other users, be this in the form of comments, ratings, page views or what have you. The user is interested in how s/he is doing and how s/he is perceived by a community or audience at large. Social media make this visible and in this are distinct from broadcast media. And sites and services can do this more or less well by writing social participation to the screen, by reflecting user actions and various reflections of audience interest back to users. Our tools and techniques for this are always in development, and we watch and borrow from best practices as a means of finding what works.

In social media, the intentions lost in translation still communicate

People are Content

• Social media make users visible through their contributions
• They structure those contributions so that the system reproduces itself out of its own participating members
• Communication is content
• Contributions communicate
• Contributions create navigation
• Social navigation communicates

Engagement

• Social media engage not just by capturing attention but by engaging the psychological: users become self-engaged
• Users are interested in their appeal to others
• Users are sensitive to audience response
• Users are interested in their success and popularity
• Users seek acknowledgment and reciprocity
• All of which motivate their participation

Presentation of Self

• The user's participation in online media is informed by his or her sense of self and self image
• Individual users actively create, maintain, tweak, and monitor their online Self
• They have a self interest in seeing their online presence acknowledged and reflected
• They use social media as an extension of themselves, often telling about and narrating biographical details and reflecting how they would like to be seen
• May be sensitive to self image, self perception, acknowledgment, status, position, success, and so on

Social Presence

• Social presence is about seeing and being seen
• Any social presence sets up the need to negotiate and handle presence availability (to others)
• Presence can be maintained with a persistent online profile
• Messaging and updating lend presence greater immediacy
• Presence tools vary in their organization of self talk, updates, distribution
• Presence tools vary in their handling of interaction, communication, and availability