Social Mechanics: Harnessing User Connections for Product Growth

Social apps demonstrate high retention rates and enjoy the luxury of having thousands of high-frequency users. While many businesses are not created for everyday use and rather have weekly or monthly usage cycles, we, product managers, still tend to wonder – is there a way to adapt social media strategies to our product?

Yep, there is!

In this article, I will shed light on how to grow products by leveraging your user base, user connections, and communities. I’ll demonstrate how to make the most of the network effect, build solid user interactions, or just show-off testimonials any product can have. I will also go through the examples from very different businesses to showcase how industries from B2B SaaS to EdTech harness the power of their user connections.

And lastly, I will use the AARRR framework to structure the article. Although I’m aware that this framework is losing its popularity (not credibility though!) to growth loops, for the purpose of structuring this article I’ll follow a conventional funnel to present solutions in a concise and straightforward way.

AARRR in a Nutshell

The AARRR framework—also goes by Pirate Metrics—is a renowned framework for growth product development which represents a funnel your users go through as they interact with the product:

Acquisition
Activation
Retention
Revenue
Referral

I won’t dive deep into the concept as I’m sure many of you are familiar with it, but if you feel like it, here’s a great article by Amplitude you can refer to.

Alright, let's get started!

Acquisition: Landing Pages and Product-Led Initiatives

During the Acquisition stage, your new users get to know about your product: whether they come from ads, affiliates, or SEO, you most certainly need to have a strong landing page in place. A fail-safe and easy way to leverage your user base are to feature some social proof on your landing page.

Out of the five main factors contributing to purchasing decisions, three of them have to do with community opinions. Trustpilot claims that 66% of customers are more likely to buy a product if they see reviews and ratings. We could go on and on citing similar research papers and experiments, but the bottom line is – social proof is a must. For plenty of businesses, this has become almost a standard practice; yet, many of us still don’t realize the social proof power hidden inside our product user base.

**So, what should be included on your landing page for social proof?
**

Product reviews from your loyal customers;
App store reviews;
Social media mentions;
Case studies with your customers;
Or simply your clients’ logos.

Here are some examples I like:

Intercom

What sets Intercom's main page apart from others is that they have upgraded the game: they chose 5 different use cases for their product, created separate blocks on the page for each, and included testimonials of those customers who found value in each of these use cases.

Here you can see them promoting Bot, Inbox, and Inbound conversation features with testimonials from clients:

Notion

As proof of the platform’s credibility, Notion has placed a simple but eye-catching block with clients’ logos on their main page. Another thing that grabs attention is the link to the customer stories page with tens of stories and detailed testimonials.

Aside from social proof, which is quite an easy practice, I would like to point out another approach that many companies successfully implement. We all know that the main source of new users/leads/customers is either ads or sales teams. However, more and more companies are focusing on product-led initiatives, making their product itself a source of user acquisition.

Here’s an excellent example from Slack.

While you work at a company, you often collaborate with contractors and outside service providers. What Slack realized is that communication with external stakeholders mostly takes place outside the platform—in popular messaging apps, competitor services, etc. — which harmed the user experience. Besides, there was also an opportunity to acquire all those external partners as customers.

So, Slack introduced Guest access, which allowed teams to invite users from outside. While it’s undoubtedly designed to make the user experience better with a holistic working space for employees from different companies, it is also a brilliant technique of user acquisition, and here is why:

Slack engages non-customers in their product at zero acquisition cost—there’s a high chance that these guest users might develop a habit of using Slack and choose to adopt it for communication in their company.
They collect guest users' emails during registration, so they have an opportunity to reach out to them with an offer or promotion in the future.

A simple, yet very effective approach with 65% of their paid user base actively using this feature.

This is how you use your customer base as a source of acquisition. Most social networks and messengers use similar techniques—invitation links, external photo, and video sharing, etc.—but I won’t bother covering this, as it is too easy. 🙂 There is also one significant difference: social networks use these strategies, because leveraging user connections is the key to their user activation – without them social networks have no value. Slack’s approach is noteworthy because it is a great example of how to acquire customers by delivering a product’s core non-social value.

This is also not a referral case (which I’ll cover shortly), where users invite new people for the sake of receiving a benefit or an offer and may forget about it afterward. In Slack’s case, users invite new users to collaborate and accomplish their day-to-day tasks and activities together more efficiently.

Activation: Delivering Product Value through Community

As I mentioned earlier, some products (social networks, messengers, dating apps) need to expand their user base in order to deliver their core value. But how can non-social apps use their user connections to activate users in the product?

Let’s look at two examples from Uber and Spotify and cover one eCom case.

One of Uber's unique value propositions is safe rides, where you, as a passenger, can track the driver as they arrive, monitor your location on the chosen route to your destination, and even contact emergency services. But what's truly innovative about Uber's approach is the creative, yet practical way of delivering that safety value to users—you can share the route and driver contacts with your close ones in order to feel safe or even guarantee a quick reaction from your relatives, spouse, or friends in case of an emergency.

**With this simple feature, Uber kills two birds with one stone:

Delivers one of the product’s key values—safety;
Uses social power to provide this value and potentially acquire new passengers by sharing a direct link to the app.

Another example is Spotify. We all know that one of its major value propositions is music variety—millions of tracks for any taste. However, this value proposition may also pose a ‘threat’ to the main activation event: finding the tracks you’ll love. The search process can be time-consuming, discouraging new users from fully engaging with the platform.

One of the ways Spotify solves this is by introducing friends' playlists. With11 mln user-generated playlists with the word “friend” in the title and a 35% increase in the streams of such playlists in 2022, the product was literally asking for this social feature.

The power of community helps users to extract product value, where they get suggestions from their friends’ playlists or can even listen to a special Friends Mix that Spotify creates based on their friends’ favorite tracks you might also like.

I also want to point out the standard practice among eCom products that helps companies deliver their value—product reviews and product ratings. The feature might seem pretty basic; yet, in fact, it is an effective way to activate customers and deliver the value of informed online shopping as opposed to going to malls. The numbers support this notion: reviewed items have a 69% higher conversion rate than products with no reviews. Here is a screenshot from Amazon to illustrate my point, but you can check it out for yourself on any eCom website or app.

Retention: Competition and Community Support

Retaining users through social mechanics is a common strategy in the gaming industry, where they form leaderboards and encourage users to compete. But I want to focus on how this leaderboard feature can be utilized in an unconventional industry—EdTech.

Duolingo with its leaderboard and language learning competitions is really rocking the game! Activating users and getting them to start learning is one thing, but keeping them engaged and retaining them in the products is a whole other challenge for any EdTech company. While Duolingo tackles this in many ways—daily learning challenges, thematic learning months, versatile learning mechanics—the Leaderboard feature is one of the most powerful retention tools they have.

Duolingo has created a full-fledged competition ecosystem where you have ten leagues and you progress through them by learning a language. The smart part here is also the league composition—you don’t compete against all Duolingo users at once. Instead, you all are split into small groups, so that you can see the path to victory and it looks achievable. This way you think "Hey, this isn't so tough, I could actually win this," and stay engaged with the product.

However, as you climb up the ranks on the leaderboard, you start competing with the most determined language learners, and you have to put in more and more effort to keep ranking on top and win. Leaderboards tripled the number of engaged users at Duolingo and increased learning time by 17%! You can learn more in an article by Jorge Mazal, Head of Product at the time, where he shares the ups and downs of Duolingo’s monetization journey—a great read.

Alright, but what if the product doesn’t have the potential for social competition? Are there any alternative options?

In that case, building a community is key. By following the example of social networks or UGC platforms and taking into account the numerous studies on how community-building drives retention, we can create one for our product.

Let's take a look at MyFitnessPal, a HealthTech app that knows the value of community. They understand that not only do social apps have the highest retention rates on average, butsocial influence can also triple the chances of successful weight loss.

From the user’s perspective, being part of a community means you can share meals with friends, keep tabs on each other's daily progress to ensure you are on track, and support each other—all that contributes to your weight loss. And from the product perspective, users connect with friends, increase their chances of reaching weight loss goals, derive value from the product by losing weight, and stay engaged. It's a win-win situation!

Revenue: Social Proof and Community-Led Urgency

Using the social part of your product to boost revenue and conversions can yield great results. As I mentioned earlier, social proof influences purchasing decisions of potential customers, which is why product managers are increasingly using this technique for ‘offer’ screens, particularly in apps. Below you can see a few examples of how it can be done—app ratings, user reviews, etc. I would also strongly suggest experimenting with social proof on your offer screens, chances are some configurations might work well for your business, too.

Another example, which is one of my personal favorites, but also a bit controversial and polarizing in the industry, is Booking.com's community-generated sense of urgency and scarcity. Yes, I am talking about all those popups about people booking the place you are looking at and texts about the limited number of rooms left.

While some people might criticize these tactics and label them as 'tricks', I believe that as long as customers are happy with their booking decisions and as long as it works for Booking, this is a great strategy:

As a customer, you get informed that the number of rooms is limited and there’s a high chance you won’t be able to book the place later (I checked it myself, and the apartments do indeed disappear from the website shortly after). It’s good to know the demand situation for your selected dates.
The popups indicating that other people are also looking at the same place is actually an example of social proof. When you see that other people are interested in the same place, it validates your choice, and you feel more confident about your decision.

Referral: Classic Product-Led Examples

When I think about the referral stage of the product loop, I can't help but mention some classic examples from Hotmail and Airbnb.

One of the most well-known referral cases, which is hard to recreate nowadays but still deserves a mention, is the signature Hotmail added to every email their users sent, which brought them 12 million users and $400 million in just 1.5 years. The signature read: “P.S. I love you. Get your free email at Hotmail”. This is an elegant example of how a product can be used to drive new users from outside and, at the same time, communicate your main value proposition—a free email provider (yes, at the time email services weren’t free).

But let’s return to modern times and take a look at Airbnb’s referral program. Besides offering standard discounts for invitees, they started to give away a voucher for the inviter too, which at that time no one did. Also, they made their referral program look like a gift, not a promotion, which was achieved by a personalized message that featured the inviter’s profile photo and a friendly note. As a result, referrals drive an impressive 900% year-on-year growth for first-time bookings at Airbnb.

So what can we learn from these stories? The key takeaway is simple: there is almost always a way to drive growth for your product by tapping into your users' connections and communities. After all, we, people, are social creatures, so networks and community validations matter to us all greatly. Hope the examples here have inspired you to explore growth opportunities for your own products.

TL;DR

Any business can embrace the power of social—it can be as simple as displaying customer reviews and product ratings or as creative as developing complex systems where users collaborate and counteract with each other.
Social proof can be valuable for both newly acquired users and potential customers who are making purchasing decisions; you can present it on landing pages and paywalls.
Product-led initiatives implemented at any stage of the funnel might become an effective instrument for acquiring or retaining users—from enhancing the learning experience with gamification to establishing a supportive environment for weight loss.