How to estimate the size of a Social Network: Google Trick

Okay, so many of us as social network marketers want to be able to see what the size of a social network is. Most all social networks do not share their membership size unless they are trying to brag about how big they are.

Nowadays with the giants out there weighing in near half a billion, it's easy to consider a 2 million user social network a small fish. Nonetheless, most of these "small fish" social networks are niche networks that fit a specific target of who you might be trying to market to, thus yielding excellent results with less legwork involved.

Size isn't everything, but I'm going to give you this little method of finding out the size estimation of the number of user accounts on a social network.

1. Go to the social network in question and find a link to a user profile page
2. After you have your link, let's say: http://www.okcupid.com/profile/username you're going to identify the unique part of the url, in this case... "profile"
3. Go to google and type in: sitekcupid.com inurlrofile
4. Look at your results, make sure there are no extra results that are not profiles (i.e: false positives) and tweak your google search to take out unwanted pages if there are any. My final result with the "okcupid" example search ended up at: sitekcupid.com inurlrofile -inurl:quizzy -inurl:tests
5. The number of results on your final search is your number of user accounts that have been indexed by Google. If the site is anywhere in the millions of users, you can bet google has been all over their site. OKCupid.com is a network of about 13,300,000 as quoted by google on the day of this writing.

In the end, the most important thing to a social network marketer is how many active currently online users there are on a network per day. This varies widely from network to network. So when you're going after the "small fish" networks trying to get some good payouts, remember this little trick when you're trying to choose one out of the tens of thousands of networks in the social ocean.

 

Thanks for the info! I will use this going forward.

 

good advise , thanks for that

 

cool info... useful

 

great advice, thanks alot.

 

Hi,

Well the information was really useful for me and i have read it completely.. i still have a small doubt .. is that really important for all of us to get connected to all these social networks.. don't you think that we are only the traffic drivers who drive traffic to their website and why cant we all have only some of the best social networks which are shared with our friends too...