Startups Stack Exchange Archive

What to optimize for so that users post more content? & How does reddit, yik yak & whisper do it?

• posted by: demiculus on 2015-05-08
• tagged: user-engagement
• score: 5

I have a similar app and people love viewing the content(which is mostly posted by me & a few friends) but not many people post new stuff. I want to increase that metric.

I first want to understand why people post on apps like Reddit, Whisper & Yik Yak, what psychological need/needs are fulfilled before posting, on posting and after posting.

Then I want to know what kind of tricks or optimizations these apps have made to unconsciously make the user want to post his/her first content, then continue posting more content.

Answer 5245

• posted by: Denis de Bernardy on 2015-05-09
• score: 1

There are some usual suspects:

• Identifying how posting can fill some kind of need or desire, and promoting the app to those who actually have this need rather than to random users.
• Making the app useful even to users who don’t post, to ensure they come back to it.
• Delivering excellent UI/UX – no amount of growth hacking can help if it’s bad.
• Encouraging users to post something as part of your onboarding process. (Don’t force them.)
• Encouraging users interact as part of your onboarding process: vote, reply, etc.
• Ensuring that early adopters who post gets positive feedback: an answer, an upvote, etc. (This was key for Reddit.)
• Ensuring that early adopters stay civil – if they’re not, it puts off newcomers.
• Gamifying the process of contributing: reputation, karma, badges, extra privileges, and so forth, nearly all of which are used on this very site.
• Encouraging the process of referring the app to grow the user base – see e.g. Hotmail or DropBox for classic examples of referral marketing tactics.

The key bit, though, is reaching a critical mass of very active users.

In an online community, a fraction of the users will register, a fraction of the latter will post or come back regularly, and a fraction of that even smaller group will actively post. You don’t need scores of the latter group to keep an app or a community alive. But you do need enough of them to keep it interesting to them.

As I write this, for instance, the startups SE has about ~11k visitors per month, and ~3.4k registered users who contributed 2.8k questions and answers. A tenth of these users might be coming back regularly. The 40 or so most active users contributed nearly half of the questions and answers. The site is definitely not as busy as SO, but it’s busy enough for users such as you or I to keep coming back.

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