Techniques for Getting Traction with your Social Site

I was doing some research on the topic of gaining overcoming the chicken-and-egg problem and techniques for getting early traction on a social site.  I stumbled across a relevant question on Quora so I figured I would share my insights (for what it’s worth).

Below is a copy of my answer to "How do social sites (examples - Hunch, Foursquare) go from 1 to 100k users? What techniques/methods are used to grow early?“

——

Target Influencers
- Focus on influencers within specific communities to drive WOM and evangelism of the product
- Almost every product starts with a core audience (Crossing the Chasm)

Indulge Early Adopters and Listen
- Promote early adopters and make them feel special
- Engage with early adopters and listen to their feedback wherever they leave it (ex: Twitter, forums, blogs, Get Satisfaction, etc.)


Make it Useful w/o Users
- Early adopters’ friends won’t be on the service so it must be useful w/o them
- The initial user experience may not be focused on friends (Hashable as an address book, Foursquare as a game, Instagram as a way to publish photos across various social networks)

Ride Waves
- New technology opens up opportunities for disruption (ex: iOS and the app ecosystem, HTML5, smart phones)
- Cultural changes limit but also introduce new interactions and user behavior (ex: location sharing/checking in, increased internet video consumption, gamification)

Provide the Pickaxe
- Similar to riding the wave, provide the tools needed for publishers (ex: YouTube’s video publishing, Soundcloud embeddable audio player, Wordpress blogs for writers)

Create Exclusivity, Scarcity, Urgency
- Private and invite-only betas increase user’s desire for access and can help generate some hype
- Emulate a land grab by providing users the ability to claim "land” on a first-come-first-serve basis (ex: About.me’s vanity URL registration before launch, Convore’s chat room creation/moderation)

Give Users Tools to Evangelize
- Embeddable widgets that allow users to distribute content across the web, particularly powerful when its their content (read: expression)
- Make sharing easy, fun, and intrinsic

Fake It
- Fake user activity early on to make the product feel desired and active (ex: Dating sites w/ fake user profiles and messages)
- Fake technology before its built in order to validate the value of the feature or interaction - allows for faster iteration (ex: Aardvark manually categorized and directed questions to users initially)

Seed Content and Communities
- Seed user profiles with personal content to add immediate personalization and usefulness (ex: fflick aggregates Twitter user’s movie mentions, Squarespace provide blog importing tools)
- Create communities around a specific entity (person, brand, etc.) to encourage those entities to claim ownership and engage (ex: Get Satisfaction, LinkedIn company profiles)

And of course, create a badass product with effective engagement, re-engagement, and viral design.