Farmville is a very popular game that can be found on Facebook. In this game, you are given a plot of land on which you can purchase and plant all kinds of crops; the more crops you plant and harvest the more types of crops (and other goodies) you can purchase for later. In the last month, Farmville has had over 62 million active users. If Farmville were a country, it would be the 22nd most populous country, falling between France and the United Kingdom on the list. Social games like Farmville are instances of the kinds of social computing / social media systems that I like to study. When I see something as successful as Farmville, I start wondering what I can learn from it that applies more broadly to other types social media systems.
One of the really interesting things about Farmville is that it has some fairly strong incentives for people to keep coming back and playing Farmville. Put in more generic terms, Farmville does a great job at providing incentives for user retention. Here’s the basics of how it works: you buy seeds and plant them in a plot on your form. Then you have to wait; it takes anywhere from 4 hours (real, wall-clock time) to 3 days or more for the seeds to grow. (Note: I’m only a level 5 farmer; I’m sure there are much fancier things you can grow as you advance.) This waiting means that you can’t just harvest or keep playing right now; with the shortest growing time at 4 hours you also cannot just wait it out. Once the seeds have finished growing, you can come and harvest them for coins and experience points. However, if you wait too long to harvest your crops, then they whither and die and you lose your money.
It is really interesting to hear stories about how people adjust to this structure. They plan a lot: people plan to be at their computer at certain times so they can harvest their crops; they plan which crops to plant by thinking about when they will be available to harvest them, and they stick to their plans because there are penalties for not doing so. Basically, this structure provides a strong incentive for people to plan out how to fit this game, this social media system, into their life on a regular basis.
This is exactly the goal of user retention: we want to encourage users of a social media system to keep coming back on a regular basis, and to make visiting the site part of their daily life. When you combine this with their viral marketing incentives (to buy certain things you need to convince a number of your friends to become your neighbors in the game), it is not surprising that this game has 62 million users.
I have a guess (a hypothesis, if you will) about how we can learn from Farmville in designing other types of social media.Farmville schedules times for things to happen. At 5pm today, my strawberries finish growing and I need to return to Farmville to harvest them. This works for two reasons: 1) it gives me a reason to come back to the site later. This is an individualized reason; they are my strawberries that need to be harvested, and only I can harvest them. And 2) it gives me a reason to wait. I cannot harvest the strawberries now. I cannot accomplish everything I want to accomplish on the site right now. I have to wait, be patient, and come back for more later. This second reason is counter-intuitive: by making the site not serve all of my needs, at least not right now, I have a reason to return later. And to keep coming back. Less functionality leads to more use. Farmville retains users by not meeting all their immediate needs, but scheduling a time in the future when they can return and get those needs met.
However, they add one additional twist. They add a deadline; if you don’t come back by a certain time, your crops have withered. You can’t procrastinate your return; you have to return relatively soon if you want to actually get the rest of your needs met. This is the real key incentive that induces people to plan around Farmville. Without this, you could just play farmville in your free time, and as people get busy, free time disappears. But since your crops wither, you can’t just wait till you have free time. You have to go harvest them now (or within 4 hours). You have to plan a time in your day to tend your crops. You have to force time into your busy schedule to visit the site. You have to integrate Farmville into your life. And once a person has integrated a social media site into their daily life and their daily routines, then the site really has retained the user.
This strategy of waiting with a deadline has been used by other types of social media. For example, Facebook uses a very similar strategy to retain users. You can’t get all your needs met right now; you have to wait for more people to contribute status messages in the future. By forcing users to wait for the status messages, Facebook gets people to come back later. Many sites accomplish this by having regularly updating content; this is a well-known important feature of most social media systems. However, Facebook also uses the deadline approach. Eventually, new status messages scroll off the screen. If you wait too long to check Facebook, then you miss status messages from your friends. And its not very easy to just check the friends you really care about; most people use the “all status messages” live news feed. Since messages basically expire by falling off the bottom of the page, users feel like they have a deadline for checking Facebook. This deadline provided the incentive that people needed to integrate Facebook into their daily lives.
Also, this incentive has the interesting property that it is the strongest for people who are the busiest. Normally, it is the busiest people who can’t afford to fit a social media system into their lives. However, the busiest people are often the ones with the most “friends” on Facebook. And that means that status messages fall off the page faster as new messages from friends appear. The busiest people are the ones with the shortest deadline, and therefore the strongest incentive to integrate Facebook into their lives.
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