Leveraging Social Media: Case Study with PocketFM

Social media content is taking over the internet — literally. Twitter’s audience grew 29% YoY to a staggering 187 million users, sending out over 500 million tweets per day. On YouTube, users upload 400 hours of content every minute. Facebook boasts 2.8 billion monthly active users who spend nearly twenty hours per month on the site. Even on Instagram, 400 million people use Instagram Stories every day, and at least 2/5 of Instagram’s 1 billion user-base post Stories daily.

These staggering insights and changing user behaviour has pushed businesses to leverage social media in their user journeys to be more prevalent with the current times, be the talk among their targeted users, aware users of their product offerings and keep acquiring and retaining the right user.

But first, it’s important to understand why such a change in user behaviour pertaining to social media has been noticed.

1. Perhaps one of the strongest forces driving our motivation to share is based on our sense of identity. More specifically, the desired version of ourselves that we want to project onto the world. In a social media sharing study conducted by The New York Times, 68% of respondents said they share to give people a better sense of who they are and what they care about.
2. Because we’re inherently social creatures, we naturally form and maintain social relationships. Our desire to maintain and enrich these relationships may be another motivation behind why we share online. Given our busy lives and the limited time we have to socialize, social media provides an easy and convenient way to stay in touch with friends.
3. Researchers also theorize that we’re motivated to share content online to feel a greater sense of belonging.
4. We all appreciate high-quality content, and sometimes we want to share it to bring value and entertainment to others. In fact, in The New York Times study, 94% of respondents said they carefully consider how the information they share will be useful to the recipient. Similarly, posting irrelevant content is one of the top reasons that a user will unfollow a brand.

A few months back, I had the opportunity to solve one of the Product case studies, in which the problem statement revolved around introducing social sharing features and its GTM strategy for acquisition, virality and retention for PocketFM, an audio-sharing platform that offers a selection of 10,000+ audiobooks, podcasts, radio shows, and user-generated spoken word content in localized languages.

Before proceeding, I must mention, I am not affiliated with PocketFM in any capacity, and the views for this article are strictly my own.

Understanding User Behaviour

The first and foremost step was to clearly dissect the problem statement and the goal to be worked upon. Post that, it was essential to understand why is it important to solve the problem, how the user behaviour is especially for streaming apps and the motivation of the users to share content on social media.

User Persona

A user persona is a profile that represents a product’s ideal customer. By creating such personas, companies gain the ability to tailor their efforts and connect with the target audience to meet their needs and solve their problems.

The main purpose of a user persona is to create empathy for customers. Understanding and relating to what matters to the customers is an essential part of product management. This requires ongoing research about target user segments so to build an informed roadmap.

Here are the key benefits of defining user personas:

• Explain the “why” behind product decisions
• Focus on the needs of the most important user groups
• Prioritize features that solve actual user problems
• Implement new functionality in line with how customers will actually use it

For PocketFM, through secondary research on online trends and user interviews of users on PocketDM as well as similar platforms, three user personas could be created that threw light on the motivations and pain points of users on the app.

Building the Feature

After doing the groundwork of understanding the problem statement, the company and its users and their motivation to share on social media, we jumped straight to building the feature for our users.

The idea was not to just build a feature of sharing like any other streaming app, but to provide control to the user from the app itself on how the content would look like on stories.

We understood that stories seem to be the go-to platform for sharing such content and hence showcased that more than other sharing platforms and avenues.

Metrics to define the success of the feature had been mentioned to understand how the success will look like and what are we trying to impact through this feature, simultaneously reaching the goal of the problem statement as well.

Wireframes were able to clearly signify what and how the feature will look like on the app and how will it be used by the user.

Go-To-Market Strategy

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a step-by-step plan created to successfully launch a product to market. A good GTM strategy generally identifies a target audience, includes a marketing plan, and outlines a sales strategy. While each product and market will be different, a GTM strategy should identify a market problem and position the product as a solution.

CBR Analysis

Looking at the bigger picture of the company’s strategy and how much impact does a feature have on users and the product as well is equally important to prioritize rolling out the features to the users. Such a deeper analysis helps product and management teams decide upon the costs, benefits and risks that can come up with introducing a feature and what kind of impact are they going to make.

A cost-benefit analysis is a systematic process that businesses use to analyze which decisions to make and which to forgo. The cost-benefit analyst sums the potential rewards expected from a situation or action and then subtracts the total costs associated with taking that action.

For PocketFM, Cost Benefit Risk is done so as to make sure product teams are aligned on the efforts that would go into building the product, and they are able to align the right stakeholders to build this. It also puts in perspective what risks are to be expected.

Spotify’s annual domination of social media

As soon as the clock hits midnight to signal the start of December, then it’s officially Spotify Season. It’s the most wonderful time of the year — at least for the marketing team at Spotify — when everyone starts posting, tweeting, and messaging their most played songs and artists on Spotify.

It’s a marketer’s dream and a data collectors’ delight.

The campaign was first launched in 2015 under the name of “Your Year in Music.” In 2017, it was renamed “Wrapped,” and now every December, all Spotify users receive a pictorial insight of their year in music based on the data Spotify gathered on their music consumption.

But why such a craze? I mean, it’s just data, right?

If Spotify sent users this data in an Excel spreadsheet, the chances of them sharing it on social media would be next to zero. Well, unless their users are an accountant who really loves numbers.

To summarize, Spotify provides this data in a visually attractive and easily sharable format, which changes things. This gives users the chance to engage with their peers socially and perhaps even do a bit of humble bragging. They can also show off our music choices and pretend they are music critics. Perhaps they have uncovered a new artist and want to share it with the world. Or prove to others that they aren’t mainstream and listen to alternative music — the data allows them to show off our music identity.

And there’s a reason they clock in such huge numbers annually. Spotify Wrapped 2019 earned almost 3 billion streams from Wrapped playlists. According to Twitter, the brand campaign was mentioned in at least 1.2 million posts in December. And in 2020, the campaign increased Spotify’s mobile app downloads by 21% in the first week of December.

This gives enough reasons for businesses to understand the power social media has over every individual, and how their survival is impossible without leveraging the same in their products.