Social Life Manager
Motivation
Social networking has made us more digitally connected, but our busy day-to-day lives don’t afford us the time to meet with friends. Planning events is difficult and stressful. We suck at figuring out the perfect thing to do, ensuring it’s not too expensive, and coordinating schedules with friends. And that’s just one night out — imagine trying to plan a week!
Facebook’s standalone application called Events does an excellent job of curating public events and Eventbrite serves all our ticketing needs. However, neither offers a service that manages our entire social life for the week.
Proposal
Facebook Events should introduce a feature called “Social Life Manager”. Users simply state how often they’d like to go out each week, and how much they’d like to spend. Events would then notify users about their social Itinerary for the day.
Since Facebook already has a well-curated list of all events, a payments system, and all our connections, it is the ideal platform to provide a Social Life Manager.
User Experience
Users will set up their preferences as part of the onboarding process.
First, users enter how much they would like to spend a week.
Then, users indicate how many days (or which days) they would like to go out every week.
Once users have submitted their preferences, users will start receiving suggestions that are catered to their interests, budget, and schedule.
- Using data about users and their friends, Facebook can recommend the most interesting events.
- Facebook can ensure that events don’t exceed a user’s budget.
- Facebook can schedule events based on the maximum likelihood of users and their friends being available.
Note: Users will sync their calendar with their Facebook App to improve scheduling.
So far, we’ve just improved the quality of suggested events. Next, we’ll tackle coordination.
Users will receive a notification when Facebook recommends them an event.
If your friends have also subscribed to Social Life Manager (or are using Events), Facebook can ease the coordination problem in several ways.
- Recommend the same event to a subset (or all) of your friends if they’re also using the service.
- Increase the visibility of your event in their Happening, Popular, and Suggested sections of the Events app.
Once users commit to going to an event, they can pay effortlessly with Facebook Payments.
Users can communicate with their friends who are also interested in the event via group chat and receive notifications as friends commit to go to the event.
Finally, Facebook can make getting to the event easy by syncing with your calendar, and telling you when to leave for the event, how to get there, and call an Uber/Lyft.
Of course, there are many other features or integrations that can make this experience delightful for users that we didn’t have a chance to discuss. In short, some future interesting ideas include:
- Allow users to provide feedback for recommended events (including before going to an event and after)
- Sharing experiences via Facebook Live or Instagram
- Automatically creating stories or collages after the event
Why Facebook?
Why should Facebook build this?
- Increased interaction with Facebook products, cross platform / service adoption.
- Increased revenue from payment transactions.
- Incentivize event planners to use Facebook as their primary platform.
- Take advantage of network effects.
If Facebook ever built this, they would want to track metrics to gauge product success and understand user behavior. Some obvious metrics are:
- Number of signups for Social Life Manager
- Number of events recommended
- Number of events attended
- Total and average transaction per user
But there are some more interesting metrics that can reveal group dynamics and behavior.
- Average group size
- Consumption rate user’s weekly budget — if a user is willing to spend $200 and only spent $100, their consumption rate will be 50%
- Percentage of schedule utilized — if a user wants to go out 4 days a week, but only goes to 2 recommended events, the utilization will be 50%
- Number of events people go to solo versus in groups
- Number of events surfaced with no friends going
- Number of dropouts / cancellations
- Time taken to commit to an event— Solo vs mean group response time. Use this to optimize notifications
- How did non Social Life Manager users hear about the event? — Could be funnel analysis or attribution
Managing our social life should be effortless. This is the first step to being truly connected to the people in our lives.
Product Musings is a collaboration of Product opinions and thoughts of Anirudh Narayan (@an1rudhn) and Mayur Chaudhari (@mdczone). Feedback is always welcome! Feel free to reach out.
