marketing, social-networking, networkingI’m working on a question answer website about family, relationship, dating and all other social relationships in my local languange.
I used an open source platform and it’s going to be something like the Stack Exchange sites. This kind of websites need lots of questions and lots of answers to be useful. How can I reach that point? Should I register fake users and post some fake answers every day?
One option could be to import the questions from the former SE and invite its former users:
http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/44577/relationships-and-dating
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/stack-exchange-cc-data-now-hosted-by-the-internet-archive/
https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
Also, look into why it failed. It’s not a given that there’s a real demand for such a site, or that there are users who are avid enough to act as psychologists on a day to day basis.
There is a real use for such a site, but generally users tend to stay when there is activity and quality.
For example:
I am an avid user of Quora, and been using it since some time now, both asking and answering.
So, this is what generally happens. Whenever a user creates a new Quora account, and follows a topic which he really loves and want to learn about.
And if it turns out that there are just 5 people following the topic with about 2-3 questions in that, the maximum he can do is to ask a question and hope it gets answered. But, as there aren't any avid followers, his question doesn't get answered or gets a very low-quality answer.
So, he gets disappointed and frustrated, and thus leaves the site.
So, for retaining customers in the site, the site needs to have activity. Users should feel nice, they should feel that activity. For that, get some of your friends to ask and answer questions randomly(by randomly, I meant time interval and not off-topic ones). Make sure the answers of the users get answered as fast as possible along with encouraging comments and additions/suggestions.
Now, you have retained the user. But, the above is just an onboarding growth hack and wouldn't work for returning users. Now, you have to make the user active.
Gamification is a beautiful concept used excellently by top B2C companies including Quora, StackExchange, etc. It is simply making the experience look and feel like a game.
Quora: Quora shiny badges and credits which the user gets, makes him get more active and earn more of those.
StackExchange: This site is a perfect example of an excellently crafted game. The reputation has levels and each level rewards you with privileges, and badges; which make you want to contribute more. (This answer is also as a part of the game).
So, we are done with the user acquisition and user retention. The better your user retention hacks/strategies work, the steeper your growth curve would look like.
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