So i decided to build a social media website. It's called DIZKOVER dot com. The site was inspired by stackoverflow, reddit, old digg, pinterest, twitter... so it has some of its social features. You can follow channel, people, comment, downvote, upvote... etc. What you follow is what delivers to you. I used to use Joomla but this time I developed from scratch since I want several nifty features. I'm a computer programmer usually on long term contract jobs and for the past several months i concentrated working on this site. So i basically quit my day job. My initial idea for the website, is for people to discover what's interesting on the web by displaying what is "popular" and "most discussed". People can start a channel, which is basically an interest or topic. Then other people can post on that topic. Most voted post goes to the top and it can be filtered by today, week, month... Basically any date range. Like the old Digg. Anyone can post anything. Original article, links, videos, pics. Except adult. It automatically parse link, youtube, vimeo, images... Etc. So the site is more in line with content discovery/curation. I'm not making any money on this site. But the past 4 weeks, the traffic started to climb from 200 to 2,500 daily visitors mostly coming from google. Thats over 1,000% traffic growth in one month. And I believe it's still climbing. But the bounce rate is high at 70%. So i've been thinking hard on what i should change, design, features to add... so visitors will stick and post more often to the site. If not a lot of people post to the site then it fails as a social media site. My other option is just follow what buzzfeed, upworthy, mashable does and get writers on board. Currently, i'm working on reputation system where people get reputation points based on his activity. I guess my other plan in the future is make the system open source. The system is basically like a forum software but more social. I'll appreciate any feedback, suggestions, critic. Thanks.
I may not be your target market, but when I go to the site, I am not sure what it is about. I see a lot of posts/pictures and many options to click on, but it is not organized and intuitive to me. That could be why you have a high bounce rate. People come to the site and are not sure what to do? Perhaps you should add a big button that says "Get started here" where you can explain a bit more about what to do on the site?
What I'm basically trying to do is a social media site. So it doesn't really have a niche topic. It's similar to Reddit and old Digg version if you guys are familiar. There's also a newcomer called Snapzu. Anyone can post anything and the community decides which one goes on top. My whole idea is when you go there... you should "discover" (why i named dizkover) something really interesting. This is based on your interest and site "trends" which is determined by other members activity... voting, commenting, tagging. This will only happen if a lot of people are using the site. So visitors needs to login to customize their interest by following channels and people. Basically when you login, you see the interests you only want to see. You can either select "most popular" or "most commented" in your interest. And you can go to channel or tag level. For example, you can filter to see most popular post which are tagged #ThisContentRocks ... anyone can tag any post. So hundred members can tag a post #ThisContentRocks or #ThisContentSux ... which basically say their opinion on the post. So this is similar to how Twitter pick trends... but in my site's case... it's not retweeting... it's just tagging which act as a label or bookmark on user profile who tagged it. Right now the most popular channels are the ones you see at the top. It's popular because that's what members are following and where they post to. (e.g. Snapchat, Videos, Interior+Design). So I would say my main target audience here are content providers/marketers who would like their content discovered. I think you are right. I think with a lot of features I put on the site it became complicated to new visitors. I need something there that people will understand what the site is really about. And I think the "Get started here" is a pretty good suggestion. Thank you for your feedback and suggestion.
Wow... 25% of my visitors are Android users.... and I just found out why my bounce rate is so high. The site was not displaying on Android devices! I put an AJAX code a month ago that is not functioning properly on Android devices. I removed that piece of code and now the site works on Android. So in reality my bounce rate should be around 45%. So for all of you... check whether your site works on Android.
Hey man I hope you are doing awesome. I admire to your website. It's nicely designed but the idea seems little old, don't you think? Why not ask yourself why is Reddit and similar websites are on moribund? Small number of people still use Social Bookmarking, am I right? I bookmarked your website. I'm more than happy to help you promote it by writing a review on my online magazine marketing website but I'm still not sure how far can go. The problem is that lot of people will use just to get backlinks and it is not niche targeted. Everyone could post a link so your website will be linking to lot of crap websites which leads to...Ban hammer from Google. Watch on that!
I hope you are doing awesome too and thanks for the design complement. About Reddit, I thought it's still going strong... including imgur. But anyway, my website is not just like Reddit if you really dig into it. People have their own profile page and I'm building a messaging/chat feature. So what I'm really trying to offer is a "social media platform"... not a niche website which is what everyone does. I guess my only problem right now is giving the website a unique identity to differentiate itself in the field. Right now, I see a huge traffic growth. The site is now getting 3k daily visitors just today... it was just 2k last week and just 200 last month. I see a lot of traffic going to different channels. "Channels" are basically niches within the site... so the website is actually attracting a lot more diversified visitors. About people posting links... they are basically the ones who will help the website grow. I monitor all posts and I delete links that are inappropriate. Since the site is now getting a lot of traffic, another option I'm thinking is to turn it to a media blog site... similar to what Mashable, HuffingtonPost, or BuzzFeed. But I would have to turn off the open public submission and hire an army of quality writers instead. Then maybe charge a fee to those who wants to post and promote their content. Thanks for your feedback! If you will review my website... that would be great. The thing is, it's still on beta and I'm still working on other features.
I'll be waiting to see how website will move forward and then boost it nicely with a review. Since it's still in the beta, I won't take risks and post links on it. I wish you only success.