Growing a Social Network

Many new founders of social networks, community, and Web 2.0 sites have seen the success of such sites as Myspace, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, Craigslist, etc and are amazed at how quickly and relatively effortless they grew. I think this has lead to a mindset among social media entrepreneurs that if they build it, the site will grow itself. In addition, some might think the growth of those sites were just pure luck. In my opinion neither of these are true, and that there is some method to the madness of growing a community site.

Growth can never be achieved 100% organically

By organic growth, I mean growth that is created by your existing user base (one friends invites 5 friends who all invite another 5 friends…etc). The majority of people think that the top sites 100% magically grew this way.

It’s not a big surprise when you consider the founders of most of these sites have blatantly lied in major publications. How many times have you read a quote from Zuckerberg that Facebook just started out as something among his friends and grew magically from there? Same goes for Kevin Rose from Digg, or the Myspace crew. Guess what…it is all bullshit!

Zuckerberg from Facebook had access to the Harvard Student email listserv and sent out mass emails, Myspace founders used a few tactics including spamming and affiliate programs, Kevin Rose, Digg founder, plugged his site on a cable TV show that he was a host of watched by 100,000 people, Yelp.com paid initial users to post local reviews, and the list goes on.

Bottom line, no huge community can be grown 100% organically. In fact, I think the number is about 99% organic and 1% other. Not surprisingly, that 1% is the most important part of the equation because it is what leads to being able to grow organically. There is a point of critical mass to every community site to where the community can be self sufficient, but a site can never be self sufficient at the very beginning. A lot of the top sites used various methods mentioned above to achieve this critical mass, whether ethical or not.

Focused Growth

So does this mean to reach critical mass all you have to do is spam the hell out of people? Absolutely not. The sites mentioned above focused non-organic growth on either location, subject, or a subset of people. This was strategy for some, just plain luck for others. Facebook focused at Harvard, Myspace focused on the music crowd, Digg focused on the technology crowd, and Yelp and Craigslist focused on the San Francisco area.

Focused growth is essential to the success of the 1% stage, and site as a whole. For example, for a social network like Facebook, 1000 new users at 1 campus is immensely more valuable then 1000 new users across 100 campuses. A network of 10 people at one campus is useless to the 11^th user, but a network of 1000 users at one campus is very valuable to the 1001^st user.

This example isn’t restricted to location. It can easily be applied to a content subject as well. Digg for example only offered Technology as their initial category. This was to make sure that every story submitted also matched the interests of their user base and was therefore valuable to everyone. New communities need to find the appropriate initial subset of people to focus on, and recruit as many as possible, as quick as possible.

Observant Expansion

As these sites grew, growth into other areas was not random but rather very observant. It always depended on user demand. This is essential to get out of the 1% phase as it sets the stage for self sufficient growth. For example, Facebook allowed students to request a new campus by entering their email address. As soon as a campus had a minimum number of email addresses they would open up that campus, email all of the users who requested it, and instantly have critical mass at that campus. Sure, Facebook could have opened all campuses at once, but where is the value in having 1000 campuses available with only a few members at each? Craigslist does something similar by only opening up a new region after they have received sufficient user demand. Yelp was able to do the same after they found that all of their San Francisco members wanted to review places they had been to in LA.

The key is to devise an observant method that lets your users decide where the site should expand to next. Eventually the hope is that the model becomes self sufficient and growth is completely organic. It is very tempting to want to expand across the nation over night. But you must remember just because you allow everyone to sign up, doesn’t mean they will, and even if they do, your network may not be valuable to them just yet.

[tags]Social Networking, Social Network, Social Media, Brian Balfour, Facebook, Myspace, Yelp, Craigslist[/tags]