Web 2.0 Mar­ket­ing Tip #53: Draw In Members

In the pre­vi­ous Web 2.0 mar­ket­ing tip, we talked about cre­at­ing a so­cial net­work of your own. Have you de­cided on cre­at­ing one yet? This step can be very ben­e­fi­cial for you and your busi­ness. How­ever, this step can be very tricky. Af­ter all, the ques­tion still stands: How do you get thou­sands of peo­ple to join?

How to Get So­cial Net­work Members

Be­fore you think about get­ting thou­sands or mil­lions of mem­bers, you must first aim to get a hun­dred or more peo­ple to join. There are var­i­ous meth­ods you can em­ploy. Some of the best ways are:

  1. Look for mem­bers in broad and pop­u­lar net­works like Face­book and My­Space. You can do this by seek­ing out peo­ple who look like good matches for your net­work and then ca­su­ally ex­pos­ing them to the net­work, so that they can de­cide whether or not to use it. It will ac­tu­ally be best to per­suade your close friends or some ac­quain­tance shar­ing sim­i­lar in­ter­ests to join.
  2. Make a „Get More Mem­bers” Cam­paign on Twit­ter.” TwS­ince your Twit­ter mar­ket­ing cam­paign will re­volve around cap­tur­ing peo­ple who al­ready work in your niche, most of the peo­ple who are fol­low­ing you on Twit­ter will al­ready be good matches for your network.
  3. Search for new mem­bers on blogs in your net­work. There will al­ways be peo­ple in­ter­ested in the niche-based so­cial net­work you have cre­ated, and a lot of them will be talk­ing about this in­ter­est on their blogs; you just have to find and cap­ture them by com­ment­ing on their sites and in­clud­ing a link to your new so­cial net­work as well as your con­tact info.
  4. Par­tic­i­pate in niche fo­rums where your crowd nat­u­rally hangs out. Fo­rums are vir­tual com­mu­ni­ties where peo­ple who share sim­i­lar in­ter­ests come to­gether: that is ex­actly why they are great places to get new mem­bers for your so­cial net­work. Your goal here is sim­ple: you must par­tic­i­pate in dis­cus­sions with­out bla­tantly pro­mot­ing your site. Use the sig­na­ture and make sure to have a good, catchy line that makes peo­ple cu­ri­ous about your new so­cial net­work. As you build your rep­u­ta­tion, start invit­ing peo­ple to be­come mem­bers of your new so­cial network.

What­ever you do, re­mem­ber that cre­at­ing and pop­u­lat­ing a so­cial net­work is not a triv­ial task. How­ever, if you de­cide that it is a good route for your in­ter­net busi­ness, then make sure you spend the time and re­sources to make it work.