How to design successful social products with 3 habit-forming feedback loops

Social products share a common ancestry and set of problems

It's been a decade after Friendster popularized the notion of the social network, and we've seen hundreds of flavors of social products. Many of them are very different from each other, showing that success can come from many variations. I've come to believe there's 3 main feedback loops that drive the success of these social product designs – here's the trifecta:

It's great when all three feedback loops act in harmony. As users act within each feedback loop, everyone's happy, and the players in the ecosystem produce and consume valuable content for the network. When this happens on a daily or hourly basis, it creates habitual usage within your product- driving engagement and retention.

On the other hand, when even one feedback loop starts to fail, reverse Metcalfe's Law goes into effect, leading to stagnation and ultimately, network collapse.

As an industry we've often talked about the distribution of content creators, curators, and consumers – it's often known as the 1/9/90 principle. But that's about the distribution of these different kinds of users, and not about fundamental motivations behind their actions. The feedback loops for social product aims to think in terms of why these feedback loops are able to create happy emotions and build up habits. Furthermore, by looking at each loop in isolation, it becomes more obvious where one could innovate- by adding a twist in content creation, consumption, or how people are networked. I'd argue that anonymity, constrained media types, algorithmic news, and other innovations all fit into these feedback loops in different ways.

Content posters that crave feedback (or utility)

First and foremost, let's talk about the folks who post content "these are the 1% and 9% part of the 1/9/90. These users might post content by creating it in a textarea or uploading a photo, or it might be more curation oriented- simply retweeting a funny link or sharing a link. Either way, they take an action that writes new info into your network that impacts the content consumption experience. The feedback loop that's important here is to reward content posters with social feedback. You publish content to your audience and then social feedback trickles in over time, drawing you back to the product. If content creation is easy enough, and the social feedback is compelling enough, then you do more. And so the loop continues.

It turns out that what type of content people post is important: Social products ultimately have some kind of content in the middle of it (sometimes called the social object), that determines the posting/consumption behavior of the content. This might be a tweet, a photo, a musical playlist, a restaurant review, or even a commerce page. It would be a mistake to assume that it's as simple as wanting this content to be as simple as possible to create, because you also need to make it a frequent behavior. You also need the resulting content to be compelling as well – it's these constrains that make this system tricky.

First let's talk about what it means to make the posting "easy" – it's not just that the tools are simple, but also:

A lot of the recent innovations in social products have focused on making this easier. One important tool is the use of constrained media types, where a tweet of 140 characters ensures a level playing ground for content so everyone can write a tweet in a few seconds. The 6-second Snapchat lowers the mental effort in taking the perfect photo. Foursquare uses our smartphones to make it easy to publish our location, whereas years ago, the effort on a feature phone would have been much higher. Similarly, the new trend of anonymity is another way to lower our inhibitions towards content creation. (I'm excited about the trend towards wearable and ubiquitous computing because they'll be tools for all sorts of easy content creation.)

The tricky part of content creation is that the output has to be compelling to consumers, and over a long period of time. If your content is novelty (for example an avatar creator), then it may thrive for a period of time but ultimately the loop will weaken and stop. That's fine for an ad campaign but not a product.

On the other hand, sometimes content can be very high cost but still be really compelling, for example long-form writing or high-production video production. You end up with a small % of creators who can actually author the content, but the end result is compelling enough that the whole thing keeps going. Yelp reviews, Stackoverflow, and others operate like this, with a push from SEO which help both creators and consumers find the site again over time.

Ultimately, the balancing act between content creation cost, the frequency/retention of it, and how compelling the output is – well that's the magic of a new product design.

The health of the feedback loop around content consumption versus social feedback is based on a number of key variables, all of which are interrelated with each other:

The tricky part to the above is that many key variables oppose one another. You can increase how often content is shown to people just by blasting out content indiscriminately, but that decreases the relevance of the content. You can make it really easy to give user feedback, but at the cost of making the feedback less compelling. All of these tradeoffs ultimately manifest themselves in the design of a social product, hopefully in the right dosage and combination.

One footnote is that content posters can also be compelled by providing a single user utility, which produces compelling content as a byproduct. The classic example of this is bookmarking- Pinterest and Delicious help you organize content as your single user utility, but once the content is in the network, other folks can interact with it. This ultimately bootstraps the network as positive social feedback flows in, ultimately replacing the "organize stuff" value proposition with a "people tell you how much they love your stuff" benefit.

Content consumers want relevant content, updated frequently

Now lets think about the viewing experience. When it comes to content consumption, I think about the things that people want to look at every day. There's not too many of them. News about their friends/family, news about the world. News about work. That's one big chunk. Entertainment, which these days might look like YouTube videos, but even easy-to-create memes. For some demographics, maybe they want to see commerce content – shopping is always fun. And if you have hobbies, maybe you want to see a bunch of vertical content about that kind of thing – whether it's about the arts, cooking, or programming.

The feedback loop for content consumers is simple: Every time they open your app or website, they see compelling content. That builds a habit for them to check in every morning, every time they're standing in line, and every time they're bored at work.

Yet the loop is easily broken – here's the usual failure states:

Lack of content and stale content comes from using a friending/following method of connecting content posters and consumers – but often, the network is underdeveloped or isn't growing fast enough. Or maybe there's not enough friend density to drive a full feed. Or even if there is a lot of users using the product, there isn't the "right" users – for instance, an adult user stumbling into a website mostly filled by teens. These are some of the common reasons why it can be difficult to evaluate new social products â€“ even if the mechanics and loops are well setup, if you don't have the right users it's hard to see the magic.

But once there's a nice balance of new content coming into a feed at about the rate that content consumers want to see it, something great happens. Then the engagement can lead to people giving social feedback to the folks who posted it in the first place – via likes, comments, re-shares – and that stimulates the production of more content.

Connecting content posters and consumers to drive relevance

The way that content consumers participate in the feedback loop is that they give feedback to content creators. But before they do that, they need to have a method of picking what content is relevant to them on their home screens:

All of the above work, with different tradeoffs. Allowing people to customize their content consumption based on people and topics is the most scalable, but the hardest to get started. It's a classic cold-star problem. To get to that, you need a critical mass of content creators who are making the kind of content that might attract a passive audience. Given that content creators are also consumers, that's why oftentimes it's the easiest to get started with a group of content creators.

The feedback loop about generating meaningful connections needs to reward the network when authentic connections are made. When you pick a new topic, or a new person, does that expose you to new content that then gives you new opportunities for people to follow? Do you have plenty of opportunities to unfollow or otherwise clean out your feed of irrelevant information? And are new people joining the product all the time, driving notifications, re-engagement, and ultimately new content into the network?

Editorial curation and leaderboards (like Hacker News) are easier to start, but have the drawback that they don't scale well. Editorial requires you hire lots of people. Leaderboards create a single public space where it's difficult to create a "one size fits all" experience that makes everyone happy.

It's also difficult to mix the two. If you combine user generated content with editorial, within the same feed, then inevitably editorial content will "steal" the feedback from the UGC. That'll weaken the loop. Instead, to really make sure that enough social feedback is being given, the goal is to make a feed with compelling assortment of content, and a lot of easy ways for consumers to interact with the content creators.

Another interesting issue on social feedback is the issue of quality. If you upload a video to YouTube, and then get 1000s of incomprehensible comments from teenagers, is that better than a smaller number of comments from thoughtful people? I suppose it depends on your own tastes, but over time, I've personally come to value the feedback of a small group of people I respect rather than trying to maximize the levels of pageviews or comments that I get.

This can be a difficult challenge because startups obviously face the pressure to grow, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to get your users to invite and add lots of meaningless connections. At the same time, if they follow too many users, or topics, then their feed will get busy and the product will lose relevance. So ideally, you have a system in place where users can add (and remove) connections to other users easily, and the system is able to suggest more relevant connections. This should also provide a better and more personalized experience around content consumption.

Building a checklist to ensure your loops are healthy

I leave you with a checklist for those of you who are designing social products, but find that your feedback loops aren't quite working. The question I'd ask is, zoom into each of the feedback loops, starting with the folks who are posting content. Ask yourself, are they getting feedback on every action they take? Is it high quality feedback that makes them feel good? Are they making enough content to be interesting? If not, the feedback loop is broken and needs to be fixed.

For content consumers, are people getting high value, meaningful feeds? Or is it a random mishmash of popular content in your product? And if the feedback loops aren't working, consider creating a small network where it all works, and grow that out, rather than forcing bad feeds on everyone that visits.

Or alternatively, consider taking a small part of another products' feedback loops, and tweaking it a little. There's many innovative products yet to be invented.

In a decade of social product design, we've seen many significant innovations around many components of these feedback loops. Facebook innovated with real names and a privacy model which helped drive closer-knit social feedback. They also invented the feed, a new way for posters and consumers to more efficiently transact on content. Twitter pioneered the follow model, which is yet another way to connect people. Instagram took advantage of much easier content creation methods on your smartphone, combined with plugging into existing networks, to bring something new to the model. And recently, anonymity apps like Secret are connecting people in yet another new way.

When I first arrived in Silicon Valley back in 2007, I remember a very smart B2B investor asked me, "Does the world need another social app?" implying that the category had been fully exploited. I think we see that in fact, given the years of solid innovation since then, there's many new social products yet to come.

(Andrew Chen is an entrepreneur and blogger based in Palo Alto, CA. He blogs here.)

To become a guest contributor with VCCircle, write to shrija@vccircle.com.

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