Activity Trackers as Consumer Social Apps: The Rise of Vertical Social
Food, whether home-cooked or produced from a restaurant, is one of the central pillars of my identity. I am always keeping up with the latest trends, trying the latest recipes, and going to as many new places as I can. In April 2022, when Beli started to expand in NYC, one of my friends, who knew how much I loved food, told me about it. After checking it out, I became hooked and have been regularly using it. Finally, a place to keep track of all my restaurants.
However, Beli wasn’t the only app to focus on a frequent, specific task that was of importance to the user. After becoming a power user on many of these apps, and seeing many others do so, the common thread emerged: These vertical social apps had a very specific purpose such as logging a restaurant, a run, a movie, a book, and sharing it with a small group of friends.
Some of the apps that started to emerge (or re-emerge) include:
Social — Bereal, Instagram Private Stories, Snapchat Private Stories, Kndrd
Food — Beli
Running — Strava, Runkeeper, Apple Watch
Dating — Hinge, Tinder
Sports — Autograph, Stadium
Books — Goodreads
Movie — Queue
Across the apps, I see five elements that differentiate the successful apps from the unsuccessful apps.
- Strong Word of Mouth
Like most social platforms, people find out about the platform from their friends. Positive word of mouth acts as a powerful endorsement. For an app that is dominated by people consuming content that could influence them to make a financial decision, like an app suggesting a restaurant recommendation, a powerful endorsement is needed to join the app. By having strong word of mouth, these platforms are able to rely on organic growth to sign up new users and boost activity to remain active. Additionally, social media is a place where people show their vulnerability and disclose information about themselves. Without the sense of trust and credibility that is made by a friend recommending something, it is very hard to convince people to join, let alone stay on the platform and share personal info. Ultimately, the strength of word of mouth can directly impact a social media platform’s success by shaping its reputation, user retention rates, and overall growth trajectory.
2. Logging Inherently Social Activities
One common theme across these apps is that the activities that are being logged are either something you do with others socially or something frequently discussed in social situations. Unlike visiting a doctor’s office, the apps mentioned are tracking activities that are social and topics that frequently come up in social situations. Otherwise, the apps would struggle to get users to join because it is boring activities that are done infrequently and the users that they are able to convince to join the platform would churn because they are not interested.
3. Easy Conversion Cost / Minimal Activation Costs
Another challenge for these apps is that people are already tracking these activities using a variety of general user tools, so they have to find ways to do more than those options. While some are using competing apps, a lot are using off-the-shelf tools that are very broad and don’t contain the specific features the users need. For instance, one common place people log their restaurants is via Google Maps. However, Google Maps is designed for logging places, not restaurants, a big difference. When logging on Google Maps, you can’t categorize restaurants or leave photos. Smartly, when Beli was creating their onboarding journey, they added an import from Google Maps. Similarly, Queue added a feature that allows users to copy and paste movie lists from their general notes, a place they identified users were tracking their movies. By keeping conversion and activation costs low, users are given a reason to join instead of a reason not to join.
4. Good Recommendations
All of these apps cover activities people frequently do and recommend socially. People recommend the food they like, the books they are reading, the music they listen to. While the word-of-mouth portion is important, the recommendation engine is where these platforms can really make sure their users are engaged (and open up opportunities for advertisements and premium tiers). If the recommendations are poor, the users will be loath to engage frequently. Whether it is a friend posting a cool running route on Strava that you want to copy, or Beli suggesting a good restaurant to try, these recommendation engines, both social and automated, are crucial to the success of the platform.
5. Consumer vs Poster
Building on the previous point, the content on the platform is key. On most existing platforms, like Instagram and Tiktok, people are consuming a lot more content than they are posting. That strategy is great for those platforms, but users tend to gravitate towards limited consuming apps — they want to be part of an app where they can post a lot of content and interact with content. When it comes to restaurants and books, these are activities people utilize frequently so adding them to an engaging app tracker becomes second nature. For these platforms, the more they can shift an audience member from being a consumer to being a poster, encourage frequent user generated content, and up the post per user per day, the more activity the users will have. For these platforms, active users are crucial to support their revenue from advertising. Frequent posting by friends will ensure that their users are active.
With so much demand for users’ attention across the various social media platforms, the success of these platforms hinges significantly on the power of word of mouth, as it serves as a compelling endorsement that fosters trust and credibility among potential users. Since these are inherently social activities, the ability to tap into them, coupled with low conversion and activation costs of logging these activities on the app, further facilitates user engagement and retention.
Additionally, the quality of recommendations the app gives to users plays a pivotal role in keeping users actively engaged with the platform because bad recommendations make people distrust the app. Trust is key. The shift towards encouraging users to be posters rather than consumers fosters a vibrant ecosystem of user-generated content, which in collaboration with the recommendations boosts engagement. A combination of strong word of mouth, effective recommendations, and active user participation in posting content is essential for ensuring the success and longevity of social media platforms centered around logging daily activities.
