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c h a p t e r12: SOCIAL APPLICATIONS■contest-driven engagement and fan recruitment is but one of the choices available to
you. Following are the primary buckets into which social applications can be organized
to simplify the process of creating a strategy that links your business objectives with
the many types of social applications that are available or which can be built.Social Graph Applications
Social applications connect people: That much is obvious. It’s what happens beyond
the basic connection that matters, and especially in business applications of social
technology. Consider Twitter: It’s possible—but rarely recommended—to buy followers
(literally, for money). Prices run a hundred dollars, give or take, for a few thousand fol-
lowers. The question is why—beyond looking popular—would you want to do this? I
sure don’t have the answer.
Instead of buying followers, what generally makes more sense is to introduce
into a social network the tools that make following happen naturally and spontane-
ously. Think back to touchpoint analysis: What is it about your brand, product, or ser-
vice that makes it talkworthy? Now apply this same thinking to your social presence:
What about it would make someone want to follow your brand on Twitter, join your
business page on Facebook, or offer up their own ideas through an ideation applica-
tion? Combining the answers to these questions with specifi c tools or applications
that make it easy for the participants in your social application to connect will grow a
stronger network than will buying one.
Facebook and Twitter, for example, both have functionality built into the plat-
forms that suggests friends or recommends interaction between friends, both of which
drive additional connections. LinkedIn offers an overt “profi le completeness” indicator:
A higher percentage of relatively more-complete profi les encourages more connections
between social network participants. When planning and building a social application
(or joining into one, as a business), it’s a best practice to include explicit indications of
profi le completion—for example, indicating the current completeness level and advis-
ing members as to what else needs to be done to fully complete individual profi les.Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day
If you’re interested in learning more about how Twitter can be applied to business, take a look
at Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day (Sybex, 2010) by Hollis Thomases. You can follow Hollis
(@hollisthomases) on Twitter as well.
In addition to the basic connection and automation tools that encourage addi-
tional connections based on specifi c personal factors—content interests or other
current friends—consider a social application like Slide’s “Top Friends” Facebook
application. Top Friends has about 8 million people actively using it: Top FriendsTwitter Marketing: An Hour a Day