Generate Buzz (and Traffic) by Understanding Your Community
A great article in the NY Times explains how dating site OKCupid uses data gleamed from their site about how their members interact to fuel their new blog. Those blog posts, in turn, generate tons of publicity and traffic to the site:
“A [single] post last month that set out to debunk conventional wisdom about profile pictures brought more than 750,000 visitors to the site and garnered 10,000 new member sign-ups, according to the company.”
That’s a load of visits, and–at 1.3%–a decent conversion rate as well…
What would you do for 10,000 new members for your social network?
The rate at which an interesting and revealing blog post can go viral, thanks to other blogs and social, media is astounding. The impact can be more important than getting traditional media coverage.
These aren’t bland blog posts about some new feature, your latest redesign, or your new VP of marketing–leave those to the corporate world.
These are snapshots of how real people are interacting.
The founders at OKCupid happen to all be Harvard mathematicians, so crunching the numbers to understand how, say, your photo affects the number of responses your profile will get, make sense. And, it’s the kind of inside information that users (and potential users) find helpful, and the rest of use find fascinating.
Of course, getting the most out of profile photos makes sense in the context of a dating site. What about social networks? What topics get the most responses? What’s the relationship between members with the most friends and how they interact with the site?
Look for these patterns and try to understand what they say about how the network interacts.
(HINT: As the community leader, you need to be aware of these things as well, to reward valuable behaviour and encourage more interaction)
And remember that lists not only are a great way for your members to engage with each other, but the results can also make great fodder blog postings.
So, what are your members loving? What are they hating? What myths are they disproving?