Cultivating Network Effects in Your Social Media Strategy

When considering the fact that network effects play a significant role in strategic action and success in digital markets, it’s clear that cultivating and promoting it needs to be a key component of any social media strategy.

Transcript

Network effects are a powerful driver of strategic action and success in digital markets. When the value of a product, service, platform or message is amplified by the number of other people who consume or participate in it, value can multiply very quickly as more people join in. So, cultivating and promoting network effects is a key component of social media strategy.

So, how can we build and cultivate network effects and especially local network effects? Several strategies can be quite useful. First is to pursue go-to-market strategies that activate tight-knit clusters of connected groups by giving them, for instance, incentives to groups to join together or encouraging new members or consumers to invite their trusted friends or peers or family to the group. A second strategy is to build and cultivate tight-knit community, which means to encourage interaction and exchange and engagement in the community to motivate people to share and build together, building their profiles or creating common user-generated content or experiences. Another important strategy is to encourage creation – content and otherwise – because the content and community that is contributed by members or users or consumers is what creates the value for other people.

Think what about commenting sections in a publisher’s website or, think about a community or a bulletin board that doesn’t have any posts. It’s the posts that bring value to the other community members; it’s the conversation, it’s the art that’s created or the exchange that’s created. It’s also important to analyze which groups and interactions are creating the most engagement and encouraging those types of consumers to join more and more often, and encouraging those types of interactions and engagements to happen more often. Some of the most rabid communities, for example, crop up around sports teams or around common interests or around common causes. The commonality, and also the clustering or the tight-knitness of these groups, is part and parcel of creating this extra engagement and therefore cultivating local network effects and value. One way to do that is to focus on creating common goals and/or norms in the community. And another example would be to encourage social proof; to encourage people leaving ratings, or reviews, or positive social feedback. Because this encourages members of the community to post and contribute more, and provides value to the community in assessing which types of content are useful for that community to engage with and get value from.