
Ask HN: How would you promote a social network start-up? - kuvkir
Hello all!<p>My bosses have just bought a social network website with 20K+ userbase and 80K pageviews per day, it is basically a copycat of facebook for Russian market. We have large social networking websites here in Russia like vkontakte.ru, odnoklassniki.ru with tens of millions of users, so the competition is quite high. Our goal is quite ambitious – to get a decent market share and grow our audience at least to 1M users in the first year. The problem is that our marketing budgets are relatively small and absolutely not comparable to those big players.<p>Ideas that have come to my mind are referral contests like "get more friend signed up and win an iphone", cross-promotion with our friendly websites, sending invitation to users from email accounts, maybe some kind of viral videoclips...<p>Any more ideas how to promote a website like this?<p>P.S: I don't have any realworld marketing experience, I'm actually the CTO of the project but would like to contribute to project success as well.
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rythie
Well what's the name of it? Surely everywhere you go, you should be telling
people about it as a start

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olalonde
Build a ChatRoulette like feature.

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wlievens
"Russian ChatRoulette" could be either a horrible or fantastic idea!

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olalonde
Actually, the original ChatRoulette was built by a Russian.

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revorad
The Vaynerchuks have some very good advice:

<http://mixergy.com/wine-library-tv-gary-vaynerchuk/>

<http://mixergy.com/aj-vaynerchuk-vaynermedia/>

<http://vimeo.com/4671951>

In one word, _care_.

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benwerd
And in another, _differentiate_. Build something different, or adopt a
different focus; don't just be a clone.

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revorad
That's true, but it's easy to make something no one wants just for the sake of
differentiating. If you care, you differentiate only if it actually matters to
your customers.

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foulmouthboy
Obviously, if you're just going to copy Facebook's offerings, you might as
well copy Facebook's launch plan and marketing. Their high level marketing
strategy is very well documented and most of the tactics can be inferred.

Secondary suggestion: Pick a niche and focus on it.

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ankeshk
Buy all the Russian school and college name domains. Allow members to add
content to those domain names (Ning style) if they have joined that particular
school group - from your social network website itself.

Then do the same thing with Russian city names.

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bgnm2000
Start innovating. Figure out a core offering and stick to it. Read rework by
37signals, it might help you out.

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dejan
what's the relation of rework and innovation? Can you quote some stuff? I am
considering this book, but to me it doesn't seem like it has anything
innovation, especially since 37signals didn't really do anything innovative.
Can't count open source framework there, as by itself it's just a framework.

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kimfuh
What's your target demographic?

