Social Sharing: Improving the social media experience?

If you’ve been following this year’s Le Web conference in Paris, you’ll have seen the launch of Path 2, a social network for close friends that is based on one-click sharing. This is the latest of the ‘journal’ (or ‘iPhoneography’) style platforms that’s been bombarding smartphone users with intuitive interfaces and seamless media sharing. “[They’re] definitely the future of photo-sharing” said Flickr’s head of design, Markus Spiering, on these platforms. Even Facebook and Twitter have made it far easier to share locations (through geotagging) and images (e.g. Twitpic and yFrog). You may not have heard of Path, but you’ll definitely have heard of the mobile photo army consisting of Instagram, Lightbox or Hipstamatic, or maybe Audioboo, the voice recording equivalent.

So what is it about the growing popularity of these platforms? Perhaps it’s the one to two-click simplicity of publishing ‘byte-sized’ content that’s phasing out the traditional ‘batch upload’, or the documenting and highlighting of individual moments that we deem worthy for our audience (Professor Shyam Sundar from Pennsylvania State University). One thing’s for sure, adoption is increasing (Instagram now has 9 million users since its launch in October 2010) and the number of new social sharing apps is never static.

These services, according to Wired’s Clive Thompson, contribute to ‘memory engineering’, the process of fashioning moments into useful episodic memories. Path and Instagram, for example, arrange our photos into a rich “scrollable diary”, something Facebook is rolling out through ‘Timeline’. They also provide a predefined degree of customisation (the infamous vintage effect) to the user, enhancing the look of generic mobile photos without “requiring much thought or effort” (Gartner’s Brian Blau), whilst bringing out their inner photographer. This has attracted celebrities and brands such as Snoop Dogg, Jamie Oliver, National Geographic and MTV to Instagram, giving fans a look into their personal lives.

So in what way does this affect the overall social media landscape? To Fast Company’s Howard Linzon, platforms like Instagram offer “less noise and more serendipity” to social streams. They also add variety and easier-to-consume content, further eliminating the barriers of ‘frictionless sharing’, which is something Facebook introduced back in 2006 with the ‘News Feed’. But most importantly, these platforms are a way “to show people what we’re doing rather than just talk about it” (Cecilia Liu, marketing manager at Kate Spade, who use Instagram). It makes updates more interesting and enhances the ‘richness’ of the news feed. We all want to share things, or “brag”, as Facebook expert Robert Scoble puts it (he goes on to say that we have too many platforms to brag on in a G+ post).

How can brands use it?

At the time of writing, Playboy, Red Bull, Starbucks, National Geographic and Ford are using Instagram. Mainly to run competitions, such as Ford’s Fiestagram and Red Bull Winter, where users tag their Instagram photos with hashtags on the app itself, Facebook or Twitter. Alternatively, the platform has been used to give fans a visual look into things that happen within a brand, including events, projects, activities or new products. This can go beyond Instagram and depends by the type of brand and purpose. For example ABC World News posts photos from reported areas and boasts 69,000 followers on Instagram, Burberry uses it to post new products, photoshoots and events to its 88,000 fans, and several journalists have been using Audioboo to post interviews on Facebook or Twitter.

Like people, “A brand’s personality is something to which the consumer can relate” (Investorpedia). By sharing rich media, brands make it easier to connect with their fans, especially when the sharing is reciprocal. Brands that want to tell a story or to ‘brag’ about the things they do should definitely be using social sharing tools and embrace the ‘frictionless sharing’ that social media is pushing to establish. They can also encourage their fans to create the content for them through the (hash)tagging of photos, making the brand and its feed almost fully fan-created.

So where do we go from here?  

As we mentioned in our last blog post about Augmented Reality, recent and/or emerging platforms aren’t for all brands - certain brands will represent industries built on privacy, such as banking, and some brands may simply have a disconnected audience. A brand needs to know its audience, such as whether its fans are mobile users or if they like to share content. Social sharing can only work when the key platforms (G+, Twitter and Facebook) are being used effectively. It’s much harder to make an impact through Instagram or Audiboo if your fans don’t engage with you on Facebook or Twitter, so it’s best to venture onto these sharing platforms when you have an established ‘social’ fan base.

Overall, you might notice that privacy is a common concern associated with social sharing, but look at how far we’ve progressed - when the Facebook News Feed came out in 2006, it received all sorts of criticism and now it’s a core part of Facebook’s success. Soon, the idea of continuous personal content streams will be “commonplace and uncontroversial..... social sharing online isn’t going away any time soon; it’s not just the core of Facebook, but the organising principle of the modern web” (Matthew Ingram in GigaOM).