What is the best strategy – independent social network or Facebook application?
Many start-ups with interesting ideas still think in the wrong box. They think: Oh, I have a great idea, let’s create my own social network. So they set up a database, create a nice design, and then wait for users. A good example is Brian Carr’s website ShareAGoodDeed. He wants to people to share nice stories, he has some traffic, some attention, but no users.
I just started a website called Share A Good Deed (www.shareagooddeed.com) whose premise is to have users sign up and write about the good deeds and random acts of kindness that they see each day. Regardless, I’ve been able to get the site up on Digg’s homepage twice within the last four days, and have had a whopping total of two people sign up.
I was wondering if some of you would be willing to check out my site and tell me what in the hell I’m doing wrong. I mean, over 20,000 visitors and two people sign up? That’s just not going to fly…
What creators of Social Networks don’t realize is that there are so many things that contribute to the success of a Social Network. Starting with a short, memorable URL, a catchy design, an easy user-interface, an unique added value for the user. Sometimes a better strategy is to implement a good idea is to write a user-application for Facebook.
James Hong from the American Flirting and Dating Social Network Hotornot.com wrote how his Facebook-application has increased the traffic to the site:
A significant portion of our Facebook traffic is actually from our Hotlists product rendered as a Facebook Application.
The Product Directory actually drives more installs than I would have thought, though the Add Application News Feed Story drives less than I would have expected.
Josh Catone from the ReadwriteWeb (via Robert Basic) cautions against fast conclusions:
But just how most Facebook apps spread is likely to remain hazy until more data can be gathered from multiple app developers.
Yet as Widget-Analysist Lawrence Coburn writes, the immediate value of developing an application is maybe not the application or the traffic itself:
So how do you take advantage of web publishers’ willingness to pay premium rates to build out their distributed presences? The easy answer is to grow your own app / widget footprint as big as you can, as fast as you can. All things related equal, the bigger your own footprint, the more installs you will be able to drive for other publishers.
