User Acquisition in Dense Social Networks
Smart phone applications are quickly becoming incredibly pervasive. The number of total downloads has grown 8-fold from 2011 to 2015, from about 25 billion to over 200. Applications are quickly expanding into all parts of our lives: from simply phone calls and texting to navigation, money management, and even dating. One of the largest dating apps that recently sprang up rapidly was Tinder. However, because there are so many applications capable of handling so many parts of our lives, apps like Tinder often have a hard time gaining traction in a marketplace that is so thoroughly saturated with similar applications. Tinder, like many of the other apps that have made it big in the last few years, used some relatively novel user acquisition strategies to combat the inevitable overload in the market. We can see how some network properties such as Triadic Closure likely played large roles in their recent success.
One of the largest challenges apps like Tinder faced is that the functionality of the app is very limited with a small user base. The added wrinkle in Tinder’s equation was the geographic nature of their app: users can only see other users within a certain radius (think within a few miles). Consequently, virality is essential to the potential success of their product. Given that fact, in addition to the large effect a social network plays on virality, we can investigate how Triadic Closure was likely utilized in Tinder’s successful growth strategies.
One of the most successful tactics Tinder employed was targeting college users as part of their early acquisition campaigns. Apart from the obvious social implications of that user base, they demonstrate two key properties that a network should have that preempt virality: proximity and overlap. Because of the geographic, centralized nature of a college campus, most students at most schools spend a substantial portion of their day in very close proximity to a very dense population of almost entirely other students. This proximity is one of the main factors in the intense overlap college social networks demonstrate. By intense overlap, I mean (in a social graph) that each node has a relatively high number of mutual connections with each of its neighbors. While overlap in general lends itself to facilitating Triadic Closure (in relatively obvious ways), I will now focus on one community where this is even more true and consequently, where Tinder found itself to be even more successful.
Tinder spent a large part of their early user acquisition efforts focused on the college Greek community. This focus also has dramatic social implications for the perception of the product, but that is not what I will focus on. More importantly, the focus caused the user base to be even more clustered in its early stages, stressing proximity even more. Additionally, Tinder focused on making pairs between fraternities and sororities. This caused a “ping ponging” between the two groups: imagine a strong friendship between one member of a fraternity and one of a sorority. In this scenario, it is very likely that someone in the fraternity is a close friend with another fraternity member (or visa versa with the sorority), and consequently it is an environment that organically breeds partial triangles (triangles from the notion of Triadic Closure) that are begging to be completed. When a new edge is inevitably formed (say to a new fraternity member), there is a high likelihood that a strong link exists to at least one new person in the other organization, which is likely to cause a “ping ponging” back and forth between the sorority and fraternity, quickly taking over the entire population in this manner. In this way, there are many “triangles” that are dormant, but are quickly created when introduced to the impetus of one missing link being formed. Consequently, the density and high-frequency of overlap among the college community makes it especially susceptible to the principle of Triadic Closure.
(main article): https://parantap.com/tinders-first-year-growth-strategy/
http://www.appvirality.com/blog/tinder-ignited-dating-scene-mobile-app-way/