How Websites Keep Users
Have you ever wondered how sites like Google and Facebook are able to retain their user base against worthy start-ups that should be eating away at their market share? It goes beyond just building a good core product, and dives more into the psychological aspect of consumer behavior to make sure the users are “sticky” and have a hard time moving away from the core services.
The goal is simple, make the “cost” of the user switching higher every year (regardless of if it is a free service or not) and try to add value in the process. The value usually comes in the terms of additional services (like GMail, YouTube, Picasa). These services not only offer a value to the customer, but the strategy is to get them using a unified login for each service which solidifies their core use and in Google’s case the driver of their business; Search Queries. This value can be quantified as the perceived value by the user, with a funnel of all the additional services leading into the core product.
In the case of Google’s closest competitor, Microsoft the core business is their Operating System and Office Suite which drive the bulk of their revenues. Therefore their products that compete with Google can be seen as ancillary arms to their core sets of software. Illustrated below however is what Google is betting on for customer loyalty and perceived cost of switching to other cloud platforms. Google also hopes to extend this cost of user switching into the handset market and Netbooks with both their Android and Chrome OS, both of which will serve as terminals for their cloud computing offerings.
Facebook is able to offer additional value and raise the end user cost by implementing an ecosystem culture with their applications, and becoming more pervasive with tools such as Facebook Connect that allow users to only have one login across several websites. This single login allows for comments, use of services (like Chegg) and if the user so desires push the activity back into their newsfeed as a flare to their friends without having to directly tell them about it. This all plays into the “social graph” which is Mark Zuckerbergs description of our seemingly real connections and information sharing with other people online through our Facebook accounts. These snowball of information sharing and ease of access is what is keeping users plugged in, driving pageviews and referring more people to sign up for the service. Many users have simply migrating their photo sharing etc. to the platform and all those requesting to see that type of personal content are often times told by their friends and family to migrate to Facebook because “it’s just easier”.
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Good information i am also face book user so i have to know about it na.
Thanks for information Travis Ketchum