From Visitor to Registered: Signups in Social Networks

I get these emails all the time. You probably do too: invitations to join yet another social network. Like Dostagi:

Dostagi, a new social network site opens its doors
Dostagi, a fast growing social network, today announced to open its doors to the Turkish, Dutch and English speaking community to start building their friends network. On Dostagi.com the members can create a profile, upload photo’s and connect to friends. By providing information that is relevant to their lives, Dostagi.com becomes part of the members daily routine. With Dostagi members communicate with each other, breaking down location barriers, making it easy to stay connected with friends around Turkey and abroad.

Dostagi.com is the Internet leading social network for Turks in Turkey and abroad. Dostagi.com is the first social network to fully focus on the people in Turkey and those with a Turkish background. With the intuitive Turkish user interface it is easy to build a friends network and to stay in touch with friends, (former) schoolmates, (former) colleagues and anybody else one knows and want to stay in touch with.

The member can create a personal profile, upload photos, link to videos and communicate with their friends. Further, it is very easy to send a personal message or a public message at their friends ‘homepage’. This all together leads to an exciting and rich user experience.

“Dostagi.com is built to make it easy for people to share information with their friends. By presenting people with information that is relevant to their lives, Dostagi.com becomes a part of many people’s daily routine” according to one of the founders of Dostagi.com. “Our members can interact easily with graduated schoolmates, former colleagues and communicate with people outside of their schools and work environment via Dostagi.com.”

Dostagi is completely free of charge and will continuously expand the website with new features listening closely to their users.

About Dostagi.com
Dostagi is a social network that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. Dostagi is used to keep up with friends, upload photos, share videos and learn more about the people around them. All that’s needed to join Dostagi is a valid email address. Dostagi is completely free from charge. Visit www.dostagi.com for details.

What a poorly convincing email! It tells me nothing, no unique proposition except that there are Turkish people on there. Which is midly interesting – my best friend in England was from Turkey and I love Kushadasi and Istanbul. But there are no backstories, no examples of user generated content, no explanation of who is online, no Leaders,

Well, Facebook can get away with such a limited introduction, but I doubt these guys can.

Even Facebook eventually had to adjust their front introduction page to have more information including a friends search engine, as they no longer rely on strong real world word of mouth through college students. Hint to Dostagi: make that User List menu, your landing page!

If you’d like to have a checklist of social network features,

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this is a very brief summation of my one day courses – and similar to the one hour preso’s at WebDirection07 and not-for-profit keynote. Don’t forget to do the quick exercise at the end. 🙂