Study Curve

You are absolutely right about having a niche. What I have run into is that people love the site, but they are waiting for it to get bigger. They are not spreading the word because it's not big enough/popular enough. It's a catch 22 if you know what I mean.

When dealing with social networking sites, you must target a niche and have viral aspects to your website. It is also impossible to compete with websites such as Myspace directly.

Take Facebook for example. Their niche was college students, and then after they gained enough popularity they expanded into a more general niche.

It doesn't matter how good your SNS is if nobody's using it. The point of social networking sites is the social aspect, and if nobody knows about it, that ruins the main aspect (social). Brainstorm as many viral ideas as you can, and run with it.

When you say proposal, what type of proposal are you talking about?

Oops, I accidentally just rated an answer 0 and that wasn't meant to happen, oops!
I remember when I first joined Facebook, back in the day when you had to have a university or college email to join... At first, no one knew what it was, but I continuously sent out invites to people in school and it started to grow. Ease of use is HUGE when it comes to these kinds of things... A trained monkey could have figured out Facebook. It was a popularity contest that turned international...
I think you should definitely get in tough with university student groups. At my school, we have the Central Student Association that really got Facebook moving when it first came out.
You should definitely do up a proposal and tutorial and send it to Student Governments at universities and see if they would help in distribution...
This definitely seems pretty cool... and I can see, in my 10 minutes since joining, that there is potential for a similar start up to that of what Facebook's original platform was... to create a student communication network to allow in creating and sharing ideas and assisting each other in education related issues.

other than word of mouth, reach the people where they are. networking sites target people already on the internet, therefor your reach needs to extend beyond your word of mouth circle. try making videos for youtube, dailymotion, etc. with your networking site address on the front and tail end of the video. cost=free. ROI=lots of random new visitors and more mouths to spread the word.

That's great advice!

Contact library associations (American Library Association, Music Library Association for example) and get the word out to librarians. They get asked academic questions all day, every day.

It's hard to get the word of mouth started, but I agree that it's the best way and it will just take some time. It's funny being compared to facebook and Myspace because that was never the intent. I love Myspace and facebook, I just wanted to create a tool to help with academic type issues because I know that the others aren't set up for that. Do you have any specific ideas to get word of mouth going more quickly? I have visions of having a huge user base so that any question or help you need would be instant.

Word of mouth is the best way for sure!

I'd say through word of mouth and getting people into it....Like cause I know from my school alone now just in the last week we've had like 10 people join and getting to be more. I think it's a great idea for like we're using it for in our media center to help each other out with questions and stuff.