5 Social Engagement Heuristics

When it comes to best practices for launching online communities and social sites, a few fundamentals come to mind: know your audience, develop a content strategy, dedicate appropriate resources to management and moderation, build optimization refreshes into your plan. This is the baseline.

However, drilling deeper into the execution process, how do we optimize the design, architecture and content strategy for social behaviors and user participation?

The essential 10 usability heuristics are a start, but I recommend another 5 specific to social engagement:

1) Participation continuum. Even the most active communities are driven by content created by a minority of the audience base. Most of us are spectators. When designing your community, ensure that pages contain a gradation of participatory content types that ranges from read to share to create.

2) Purposeful content hierarchy. When creating a site that contains a blend of editorial and community content, it’s all too easy to run amuck with mixed messages and content types and calls to action. The resulting experience for users is confusion and uncertainty as to what they should be doing or getting from the page. Even with a mix of content types, the intent of the page should be clear and cohesive, and primary content should be supported by – not at odds with – secondary and tertiary page content.

3) Participation-triggering. Pages should include both the functionality and content to support participation. This includes everything from basic functionality such as including “tweet this” buttons to more advanced functionality that allows users to rework editorial content (such as Chow.com’s “recipe hack” feature, as well as incorporating contests and give-aways and even simply asking the question: “What’s your opinion?”

4) Peer relationship-building. If the objective is to create a community, ensure that pages contain structures that facilitate conversation and engagement between peers. This includes building in prompts to encourage members to build out their profiles.

5) Multiple access paths. This is a usability fundamental, but one that is much more important for social sites, which often have paths from editorial content to community sections, but no path back.