Covering as Much Ground as We Can

I like to stay up to date with the up-and-coming web and mobile applications out there. It is important to see what is working or not for the folks who develop them as their apps succeed or flounder. Recently I started using an app called Foursquare; perhaps you’ve heard of it. It’s one of the apps in the latest crop of location-based applications that have been popping up of late. Despite having launched less than a year ago, Foursquare has had incredible success so far, securing some hefty funding and hitting some pretty impressive benchmarks.

When I hear about new apps, I usually jump in and create an account immediately so that I can get a look at things and secure my preferred alias. The problem with most social apps, however, is that they aren’t of much value to a user unless their friends are using it too, or at the very least, enough strangers.  When I signed up for Twitter, for example, it was back before Twitter had become a household name. The account sat their until my brother signed up and started Tweeting, after which the service finally became useful to me.

The story is similar for my foursquare experience: my friends who live in California came back to bitterly cold Minnesota talking about checking in here and being mayor there, explaining to me that Foursquare had become the new hotness in San Francisco and I’d better get on the bandwagon if I knew what was good for me. Ever since then, I’ve found myself compulsively checking in to every insignificant place I go. I’ve even been able to convince a friend of mine to start using it who is usually very skeptical when it comes to these social apps.  It’s worth taking a look at some of the ways that Foursquare has been so successful in gaining and retaining users.

1. Introduce Competition

The single biggest motivating factor in adoption for my friends in San Francisco and my friend here in town was the element of competition within Foursquare. As stupid as it may seem, becoming the mayor of a location you and your friends both frequent gives you certain bragging rights. Beyond that, some establishments have started offering discounts and deals to Foursquare mayors, and nothing would please me more than to enjoy a free burrito or coffee in front of my vanquished Foursquare friends.

The power of competition to keep people coming back to your application is amazing, and it has started me thinking about ways I could introduce elements of competition in my and my clients’ applications. One component of Foursquare which is particularly compelling is the weekly updated leader boards. By letting your users keep track of their activity in relation to their friends you provide a powerful incentive for them to continue to engage with your service. Think about how you could introduce competition into your application to increase engagement of your user base.

2. Reward Your Users

If there’s one thing to be learned from the rise of Farmville, World of Warcraft, and Foursquare, it’s that virtual goods have real world value.  I know this all to well as a lifelong avid video game fanatic. Foursquare rewards its users with cute badges whenever they hit certain milestones, a feature that hits right at the center of the brain’s insula. The website likaholix (now mylikes.com) attempted to solve their empty-room problem by providing powerful incentives for its users to interact with the service. Farmville allows users to purchase all sorts of virtual goods, both decorative and functional.

The divide between decorative and functional virtual goods is an interesting one to look at.  Decorative goods, such as avatar upgrades, badges, and static icons are easy to implement and can provide your users with a decent incentive to interact continue interacting with your website. Things start to get interesting when these virtual items become functional, however. The number of people buying virtual tractors to plow their virtual fields on Farmville, for instance, is staggering (800k a day or so).

The right mix between decorative and functional goods can be a boon to your retention rates and possibly even your bottom line.

3. Highlight Power Users

Being the Foursquare Mayor of a popular establishment is, apparently, a big deal. As I mentioned above, in San Francisco, where the app has exploded in popularity, some forward thinking restaurants and bars have started offering special deals to the current reigning Foursquare Mayors. How brilliant is that? Not only does this compel more people to use Foursquare, but think of all the extra traffic the establishments will receive as people jockey for mayoral superiority.

Most social web applications live and die by their power users.  These are the users that drive the most content, evangelize the product most fervently, and in the end are often times responsible for the success or failure of the application as a whole. Just ask the folks over at Digg how important power users are, for better or for worse.  If there’s one thing to be taken from Foursquare, it’s that we should be embracing our power users from the outset and providing them with the recognition they deserve.

4. Provide Great Analytics

If virtual goods and rewards are the Foursquare desserts, analytics is the meat and potatoes. The more engaged I become with the application, the more interesting my stats become. From the Foursquare analytics dashboard, I can see at a glance where I was over the past week, how often I’ve been out of the house, and make several determinations about the health of my fledgling social life. Numerous applications have popped up that allow you see statistics about your Twitter usage as well (heck, I wrote one of them). In fact, web analytics is becoming such a hot space that IBM has launched a curriculum focusing on them.

We are a visual species and we respond well to graphs, charts, pretty colors, and above all, validation. Analytics provide a visually attractive view of what’s happened in the future and often invokes images of what these graphs may look like in the future (or what we want them to look like). This can provide a powerful incentive for users to bolster their performance on your site, much like the Foursquare stats compels me to leave the house more than I normally do.

5. Make it Easy to Brag

While this may be somewhat obvious to most startups and developers out there, it cannot be overemphasized: make it easy for your users to boast and brag about their achievements by providing connections to the most popular social networking sites. Foursquare allows you to connect your account to Twitter and Facebook so that you can rub your successes in all your friends’ faces, not just your Foursquare friends. I’ve had at least 10 people personally message me on these other services asking what the heck Foursquare is, and why would anyone want to be a “mayor?” This is powerful viral marketing.

While not every web application can or even should benefit from gaming elements as Foursquare has, it is important to think about how it may bolster your startup. It could mean the difference between a service that flounders and a service that flowers.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 8:43 pm and is filed under Startups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.