Format Effect - the secret behind successful social media platforms

Network effect and buzz effect are popular words for startup marketing. Hotmail, Skype, Facebook, Slack are all tools for communication, they build their huge success on the network effect because each communicative activity requests more than one person. Buzz effect is about creating awesome product and making your customers to talk about your product with their friends or on social media platforms.

I thought there might be a third effect called Format Effect. Let me use social media platform as examples to describe this new idea. We know the difference between Skype and Twitter. One is a communication tool while another is a social media tool. Some authors gave various definitions of social media tools, one of my favorites is that a social media platform is a network around a type of social object. To follow this idea, the group can include Flickr, Twitter, Slideshare.net, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterst as members of social media.

If we take a deep look into this family, we will find all of them have a common pattern: Format, Content and Connect are three core elements for their success. Since people already talked about content and connect, I'd like to focus on talking about Format.

One of important challenges for building a new social media platform is to have a unique format design for their social object. Designers have to use a standard format to frame various content. This standard format will give benefits to designers for growing their platform in various ways. First, the format will create a new content animal which can bring novel experience to users. Second, the format will reduce users' cognitive stress after they learn how the format works. Third, the format will build their unique platform identity and make a huge difference with others.

When a user shares a creation from a social media platform to their friends or many other social media platforms, their audience will be attracted by the creation which include two levels: one is content and another is format. New audience will find both the content and format are interesting.

Users don't share your product or platform, they always share their creations. Once they share their creation, they are both sharing their unique content and your unique format. I call this effect as Format Effect.

Twitter's 140-character limit for tweets, Instagram's square picture format, Slideshare.net's embeddable social slide and TED's 18-minute talk are great examples of Format Effect.

Unique format create unique experience. If we follow this idea, we might apply it to non-social media products. For example, design unique activity format for any product.