How to market social networking site?

I have set up a revolutionary new social networking website and we are starting to think about marketing, we have done the standard directory submission and word of mouth advertising and press releases. Does anyone know what sort of advertising works with this sort of website??

Hope someone can help.

Thanks
Kieran

 

Well the best way is to advertise it in other Social Networking sites and related Discussion Forums.

You are invited to put a Free Ad in my Forums DiveWebb WebMaster Forums, in the "Social Networking Sites" Board, if you wish to!

Try to find out similar forums and submit there too !

 

Thank you so much for your advise and your offer i will gladly take you up on it.

 

Social Networking sites are very difficult to market through normal SEO. Most (if not pretty much all) of the big Social Networking sites spread through word of mouth (Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, Myspace, etc.) - mainly friends telling friends (and inviting friends).

Why not regular SEO - cause almost nobody searches for the keywords "Social Networking". You would be better off marketing your site using keywords like "chat" and "dating". Remember with keywords, you should start with something specific that has not too much competition and then over time broaden your scope.

You will definitely want to make your index page as invititing as possible, clearly expressing what makes your social networking site better than what is already available. You will also want to make it easy to sign up and easy to invite friends. In fact, you may even want to include a point system that gives points (and eventually prizes) for members who bring in their friends.

And I wouldn't bother spending coutless hours trying to post your link in every existing social networking site. I tried that once upon a time and never did get any actual members

The biggest mistake I ever made was advertising a social networking site in Facebook. People would check it out but not register (they were already a member of the most popular social networking site where all their friends were). I was getting about a 1 in 10 signup rate. When I switched to Google Adwords, I was getting about a 1 in 3 signup rate.

Best of luck.

 

The best place to get a small burst of registered users would be to go to forums of similar niches, join there and send out PMs or post threads relating to your site. It'll get a lot of attention through sent PM's if there's a lot of members on the forum, and many of them will probably register and become daily users of your site. It's a small growth, but you have to start small and just keep working up

 

Always the goal for marketing should be reaching out your targeted audience.

Find out the related forums, social networks. And then participate there actively without spamming.

 

If you have a look at the site, it doesn't actual have a specific niche. I would agree with your post if this was a social networking site for a specific niche like say soccer fans or people with disabilities. However, this is a general social networking site so I don't think this strategy would work so well. Joining forums and sending out pms to individual members can take up hours and hours and give you very few if any actual members.

I'm not saying that this site should have a specific niche. The problem with targeting a specific niche is that it can only send you so many visitors a day.

There is nothing more frustrating then spending a year to get to #1 in the search engines for your niche related keywords, just to find out that these are only sending you a dozen or so new visitors a day. Trust me, cause I was there. I swithed to broader keywords and now I'm getting 50 times the earlier result.

 

Did you at all read the thread before replying?

 

I would say just try and market everywhere, then. Starting off here on Digital Point forums is a great place, but also marketing on Digg, Facebook, MySpace, etc is a great way to gain more registered users.

 

Pauls Quality Backlinks

 

Yes, I agree that quality (and relevant) links are key. However, you first need to know what keywords you are going to optimize for. Once you've picked your keywords, you then need to acquire quality links from sites related to these keywords. You also need to use these keywords in and around your anchor text (mixing it up so as not to keep it always the same).

I've seen sites acquire dozens and dozens of quality links. The problem is these sites did not try to optimize for any specific keywords. As a result, these sites were number 1 in the search engines for only their names. I don't know about you, but I want to be found for more than just my domain name.