Designing Interfaces, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9. Using Social Media

In 2009 and 2010, social media went mainstream. Companies, products, and nonprofits rushed to establish presences on Facebook, Twitter, and media repositories such as Flickr and YouTube. If they already had blogs, the streams of bite-size messages on Twitter and Facebook gave those blogs new audiences. Organizations discovered that if they published a steady stream of appealing content, customers and influencers would pay attention to them—and if a piece of content “went viral,” that organization’s brand would spread far and wide. For free!

Well, not really for free.

Organizations put in a lot of effort to establish successful social media presences. Someone has to spend a lot of time writing and disseminating content; someone else needs to spend time reading relevant conversations across the Web and responding sensitively to them. Valuable home page real estate may support these social media efforts, and pages on other sites (such as Facebook or YouTube) must be designed and tended. And someone needs to devise an overall strategy: where is effort spent, when, and on what topics?

A few best practices are emerging that can inform those efforts. Social media is still a young field, and specific recommendations will change rapidly over the months and years. Like the rest of this book, this chapter’s principles and patterns aren’t hard-and-fast rules, though ideally they will outlast 2010’s most popular sites and technologies.

This chapter will focus on one ...