Jakob Nielson and his research group, Nielsen Norman Group, have done it again – letting us know how users are actively perceiving and using social software for different business tasks. This research is important as the social web evolves so that we, as web content creators, know the best ways to present and offer different types of information, especially for corporate sites. He pulls it all together in an Alertbox from October 12, 2009 titled Streams, Walls, and Feeds: Distributing Content Through Social Networks and RSS.
What does this research mean for user assistance delivered through social means?
Voice matters – People wanted a specific voice for certain corporate brands. For example, the BBC was thought that it should have a more professional voice in its messages. But for other corporate brands, people wanted a more casual style, but the biggest reason for unfollowing a company rep on a social networking site was annoyance at the frequency of posting. My thinking? Don’t post your entire release notes links via Twitter in a week – instead spread them out to avoid drowning out the other people that your readers are also interacting with. I talk about finding your voice in chapter 7 of my book, and this research finding is certainly relevant.
Consider context – Updates that came through RSS rather than social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, were thought to be more “official” and trustworthy. However, readers have a lot more control over what they see – and readers who read the second page of a stream are nearly unheard of. They don’t seek out past postings. I have seen this happen on my blog here at JustWriteClick – once a post drops off that first page of about 10 posts, it’s only seen again when someone from a search engine looks for something very specific, such as the End-user Documentation in an Agile Environment post. What else is interesting about offering RSS feeds for information is that users’ habits haven’t changed in 3 years, though RSS use is on the rise and people are selective of the feeds they track.
Keep up – Twitter and Facebook are sites that are visited daily – can you keep up if you decide to engage customers there? And is there a place for end-user documentation on these sites? My take is that you shouldn’t start unless you’re willing to keep up. And in many cases, you probably don’t need to start on certain social network sites. If your group haa corporate goals like maintaining customer support by tying the social network interaction very tightly with your end-user documentation, then Twitter or LinkedIn may be a good match. Facebook may be a match also, depending on your message. Non profits, for example, find Facebook a great match for education, training, or raising awareness. If your corporate alignment as a technical writer is with the training and education department, you may find a niche case for using Facebook for promoting learning opportunites.
Make it useful – The most successful messages had substance, were timely, and met users expectations. Message usefulness scored the lowest of all the categories. Yikes. I would hope that as more content strategists and technical communicators apply their skillset to these messages, we can increase the utility.
Write well – Writing specifically for the medium is important to get the results you want. Probably the best way to write well for the medium is to read as much content as you can in the targeted medium. Apparently you can’t just repurpose content or use shortened text snippets that point to a longer one – users won’t click through.
Mobile findings
Only 4% of the users involved in the study sought out corporate messages from a mobile device. What I might infer from that finding is that mobile devices are for necessary in-field information, not for corporate messages syndicated through RSS or posted to social networks.
Email still fits
I found it interesting that email messages and newsletters may still be the best way to maintain customer relationships. Even though the user is responsible for deleting those messages, requiring more “work” than social networking sites, users still don’t browse through multiple messages from corporate “streams.”
Nielson’s summary says it so very succinctly that I can’t help but quote it directly:
Summary:
Users like the simplicity of messages that pass into oblivion over time, but were frequently frustrated by unscannable writing, overly frequent postings, and their inability to locate companies on social networks.