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Social Currency Example in B2B SaaS Software

There’s a common definition of “social currency” but I like to use it to describe the value someone’s social profile has when they share your product or service. Their followers click, those clicks might by, this has value…social currency.

A few months ago we added an opportunity for new users of LessAccounting to extend their free trial by sharing a link to LessAccounting on Facebook or Twitter.

Wait, wait!

What does that mean? Okay, so when a user logs into LessAccounting for the first time they’re greeted with a modal window that looks like this:

Here are couple of technical insights if you’re interested in building a similar feature into your app. This sample code is in HAML (since we love it).

Facebook

Facebook button provides a nice callback invoked once user “likes” the page.

#facebook-button %script{:src => “http://connect.facebook.net/enUS/all.js#xfbml=1”} %fb:like{:layout => “buttoncount”, :href => ‘http://lessaccounting.com/’}

:javascript FB.Event.subscribe(‘edge.create’, function(href, widget) { onShare(); // our function that sends ajax request to app to extend users free trial });

You also need to define OG meta info on the page you’re promoting so that Facebook will use it and present your site properly in the user timeline. Here’s ours:

%meta{:property=>‘og:type’, :content=>‘website’} %meta{:property=>‘og:site_name’, :content=>‘LessAccounting’} %meta{:property=>‘og:title’, :content=>‘LessAccounting’} %meta{:property=>‘og:description’, :content=>‘Bookkeeping sucks less with http://LessAccounting.com, perfect for freelancers and small businesses.’} %meta{:property=>‘og:url’, :content=>‘http://lessaccounting.com’} %meta{:property=>‘og:image’, :content=>‘http://lessaccounting.com/images/LAlogo-small.png’}

Use URL Linter to verify. Note that Facebook caches this metadata for pages and URL Linter enables you to flush them.

Twitter

Twitter integration sucks a bit. Currently, there’s no callbacks feature and since the tweet button uses iframe, you can’t do anything useful with links in it. Since the number of tweets wasn’t that important to us, a custom tweet(share) button was good enough. Another downside is that it will extend a user’s trial regardless of whether or not the user proceeds with the tweet after tweet dialog opens.

#tweet-button = linkto ‘Tweet’, “http://twitter.com/share?url=&text=So far I’m loving @lessaccounting! Check it out http://LessAccounting.com”, :class => ‘twitter-share-button’, :target => ‘blank’, :style => “display: block; padding: 2px 5px 2px 20px; background: url(‘http://a4.twimg.com/images/favicon.ico’) 1px center no-repeat; border: 1px solid #ccc;”

:javascript $(‘#tweet-button a’).click(function(event) { var width = 575, height = 400, left = ($(window).width() - width) / 2, top = ($(window).height() - height) / 2, url = this.href, opts = ‘status=1’ + ‘,width=’ + width + ‘,height=’ + height + ‘,top=’ + top + ‘,left=’ + left;

window.open(url, ‘twitter’, opts); onShare(); // our function that sends ajax request to app to extend users free trial return false; });

Answers to Potential Questions:

• No, I haven’t done any A/B testing on the design of the modal window.
• No, I haven’t thought of a way to track the RIO on this feature.
• Yes, I know I look like a chubby George Clooney.

Have you seen anyone else doing anything with social currency? Let me know. This is something that interests me.

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