Kevin Fair
LivingSocial – Getting It Right On Facebook
The most popular Facebook application right now, by far, is LivingSocial with nearly 28 million monthly active users. For those who don’t know, it’s an application that allows Facebook users to share their Top 5 choices about various topics. The most popular subjects include movies, books, albums etc., but the lists are beginning to get more interesting with “Things to have when zombies attack!!!!!” and one the I just saw in a friend’s feed “5 military aircraft I’ve flown with“.
From my own experience it seems as if this is the only application that most people are still using (aside from Lexulous, nee Scrabulous). Even friends that I wouldn’t expect to participate in this kind of quiz seem to be getting into it.
While Facebook seems to be de-emphasizing applications with every new redesign, LivingSocial continues to thrive. What makes it so popular and what are they doing right? Here’s what I think, and I would invite you to comment and add to the list.
Something for Everyone
Some applications have very high, but narrow, appeal. Flixster is a great app for movie enthusiasts and has consistently been in the top 10 of Facebook apps but will never be number one, because it caters to a certain interest. iLike, also in the top 10, is great for music lovers. People with a casual interest in music may use it once but may not be particularly active.
Personal But Not Private
People like having the opportunity to share information about their likes and dislikes in a casual way. LivingSocial allows users to share interests, personal history and humour in an engaging way.
Pretty Pictures
Anyone whose friends are using LivingSocial (which is all of us, let’s be honest) is very familiar with the prominent but not overblown LivingSocial updates. The pictures add a critical element to the experience.
Reading a list of your 5 favourite cult movies isn’t nearly as attention-getting as seeing the posters of Repo Man, and Blue Velvet. There was a small glitch yesterday in the compiling of the top-5 vacation spots that my wife posted and the pictures didn’t show up. There was some distress about this until she resubmitted her picks and they started to show up correctly. Tragedy averted!
High Five
Compiling a list of 10 or more takes more time than many of us are willing to devote to this kind of diversion. A list of 2 or 3 is too short to really say much about you. Five seems to be the perfect number.
Ease-of-Use
Many applications fail because they just make things a little too complicated for the average, non-technical person to use. LivingSocial gets this, and they have made everything really obvious and simple. Adding your selections is very intuitive and it requires no effort to include the picture associated with your choice.
Conversation Starter
One of the features that has made Facebook so popular is the ability to comment on anything that appears in your feed. What better conversation starter than a list of your 5 most hated sports teams? This promotes conversation and makes the application (and Facebook in general) more valuable to the casual user.
Theory of Evolution
The application depends on user-generated questions. Users quickly began to look beyond the simple ‘favourite song’-type questions and started creating new and inventive questions. The more interesting ones catch on and become viral.
It won’t be long before another application becomes the app-du-jour (or Facebook changes their site and minimizes LivingSocial’s advantage), but for now they can bask in the sun and enjoy their 30+% lead over the next most popular app.
Are there other things that Living Social is doing better than the others? Are there other apps that you feel are poised to take over? Would love to hear from you. Log in using the “Connect With Facebook” button in the right sidebar and then leave a comment.
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