Reaching the Social Network Tipping Point
Posted by Nick O'Neill on February 19th, 2008 5:00 PMEveryday countless new social networks are launched and there are new entrepreneurs that are brainstorming the next hot social network. The development of a social network is only the first hurdle in obtaining a critical mass. Chance are when you set out to develop the site it is going to take at least twice as long as you were originally planning. I’ve personally developed a social network from scratch so these are wise words from a once over-confident developer who thought he was building the next big thing.
The majority of social networks crash and burn before they ever reach the tipping point. The real challenge with social networks (and most businesses in general) is knowing when you are beating a dead horse or when you simply haven’t gained enough exposure. There is no perfect science for deciding what state you are at in the business cycle and all you can do is go by your gut. For most people reaching critical mass is the biggest challenge. So here are a few thoughts on how you can reach the tipping point for launching your social network:
- Find a niche that hasn’t been targeted that also has a high demand and dominate it - This one is pretty much left to seeing an opportunity and going after it. Timing is critical. I can thank timing for the success of my AllFacebook blog. One extremely useful tip I would say is use freely available tools to simply test out your concept before heavily investing in building a custom solution. The site doesn’t need to be perfect to determine that there is a strong deman.
- Have a big name investor - Want to get a great kick start? Launch your social network and announce that Peter Thiel invested in it. That should get you an article in the New York Times and the longtail resulting from that single article should get you an initial base of users.
- Get a marketing budget - For those social networks that are not an instant success you’ve got to market it! One of the standard marketing practices I see with these sites is giveaways. I don’t think that’s necessarily the ticket. When I launched my social network years ago I made a script that crawled the web and collected band names and phone numbers. That’s definitely a spam tactic but close to 5 percent of recipients registered for the site. Pick and choose your marketing tools but make sure not to overspend in any one area. Diversification and repetition is key in marketing.
- Participate in the conversation - Rather than trying to get people to come to your site, go to where they’re talking. On blogs, at events and on other community sites, directly target people that would be perfect members of your site. If everybody is your target market then your market is too big and you might want to go back to the drawing board.
- Hire a community manager - Conversation is critical if you are going to build a successful social network. Get someone who is actively engaging all new users. You also need to make sure that the person who you hire is interested in talking with your community members. Not every community manager is fit for your social network.
- Define what success is - Make sure you have tangible goals set. Don’t aim to have 200,000 users if your market size is only 20,000. Create a time line with obtainable goals and go after them. When you go to your investor and are explaining why you only have 5,000 users explain that it’s because your market size is only 150,000
If that doesn’t work for your investor use the advice of my good friend Shipigler:
Have any other useful tips that have worked for you in obtaining users to your social network?
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