Steemit needs more members.
More importantly it needs more active users, and it needs to improve its retention rate.
A common recruitment method for many online platforms is a referral reward system.
Steemit doesn't yet have a referral reward system and as far as I know there are no near term plans to implement one.
Because of the money aspect of steemit it is very likely that a standard referral reward system would be subject to gaming and exploitation. A referral system would have to be carefully crafted to avoid the obvious pitfalls.
Recruit a friend
In the meantime there is nothing to stop any of us recruiting friends, family, work colleagues etc.
I am sure this is how a lot of people got on to Facebook back in the golden, innocent days...
"Hey, you need to get on this great new social network Facebook. Everyone is joining it."
It was effective. People joined Facebook in massive numbers. And most stayed because their friends and family were there.
Steemit is different. Many, or even most, of us probably don't have any real life friends or family on steemit.
Reading a recent post by @stephenkendal, Stephen highlights that the join-up rate for steemit has begun to drop recently. He had set a target of 650,000 members on steemit by the end of the year. That is looking doubtful now.
There are 28,000 active users on steemit at present.
Imagine if just half of the active users managed to recruit one new member every fortnight until the end of the year. That would be another 100,000 members.
I've been on steemit for 100 days. I am now feeling confident enough about the platform to start showing it to friends and family. I know enough to demonstrate how steemit works and I have a bit of voting power to support new people I bring on with encouraging upvotes. I can mentor them and keep them going through the difficult first couple of months.
Some will already be recruiting their friends to steemit. Some will not want to as they like to keep their steemit life separate from their real life.
I suspect many would recruit if there was some incentive or financial reward to do so.
A 'built-in' referral reward system in steemit isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Perhaps some clever devs could build a 'referral reward app' that could do the job - but without the required access to the steemit signup process I can't see how that would be possible.
Maybe therefore the quickest and most practical option is to gamify the process with a contest.
How would the Recruit a Friend to Steemit contest work
Still a work in progress but this is how it could run :
- The contest would run monthly.
- There would be a monthly contest post. If you want to enter the contest that month you register your interest as a recruiter in the comments on that post.
- Once you have registered on that post you go out and encourage friends, family, work colleagues etc to sign up to steemit through the usual ways.
- When one of your recruits has been activated ask them to do an #introduceyourself post and include at the bottom the line "I was recruited to steemit by @yourname"
- At the end of the month there will be a monthly recruitment tally post. In that recruiters entering in the contest will need to post a comment listing all the new members they have recruitment during the month.
Prizes
There would be prizes for the people who have recruited the most new members in that month.
A big part of this recruitment method is that it should improve retention. So to encourage recruiters to help and mentor their recruitees there could be a follow up 3 months later with another prize for the recruiter who has the highest number of their recruitees still active.
Questions to answer
This whole process needs a lot of human glue to make it work, and it could be rather labour intensive if too many people entered. Therefore I would suggest making it country specific to start. That would keep the numbers manageable and would overcome potential language issues. If the contest model does work it could be replicated in any country.
There are still questions to answer about the concept :
- Would it be worthwhile?
- What would be the prizes? Who would provide them?
- Are there any obvious flaws, weaknesses or exploits in the system? If so, how can they be overcome?
- How could we stop recruiters 'buying' recruitees by persuading random new members to edit their intro posts to include their "I was recruited to steemit by @..." line ?
- Would too many people enter to make it unmanageable manually?
So that's my 100th day anniversary idea for helping to grow steemit.
If people think it a worthwhile idea, and if anyone can help with the prizes, I will be happy to run an initial trial contest to see how it goes.
Over to you my fellow steemit citizens...
If you found this post useful or interesting please do upvote, resteem and follow. Thank you.
You might also be interested in some of my other posts :
Calling Wales, Calling Wales - any steemit citizens from Wales or living in Wales?
SteemTowns - connecting the virtual with the reality - would it be possible?
[graphic by @pennsif]