[Case Study] 8 Factors Behind Formspring’s Rapid Growth

Formspring encourages people to find out more about each other in a simple and fun way. It starts by directly asking people original questions in anticipation of their entertaining or revealing responses. Responses can range from straightforward to surprising and can lead to understanding something more about the people you know or find interesting.

Formspring was launched in November 2009 by the designers of online form builder Formstack as a side-project. On February 9, 2011, Formspring announced on its blog that it was approaching 22 million registered users. In June 2011, Formspring added a “Share” option in which users can share a response with their Facebook friends. As of June 30th, the app recorded 25 million users.

According to comScore, Formspring had an estimated 1.1 billion pageviews in January, up 65 percent from September, and almost back up to its peak of 1.3 billion last May. Formspring also attracted an estimated 19 million unique visitors worldwide in January.

Some of the possible reasons for Formspring’s rapid growth:

1. One reason for Formspring’s growth since September is that it really appeals to college students.
2. People love services that are ego gratifying, especially big social media users, and having your followers ask you questions is very ego gratifying
3. Questions are very search friendly and Formspring gets people to ask lots and lots of questions that all have unique permalinks.
4. Formspring.me  integrated well with other social networks, making it easy for uses to share information with each other.
5. The way Formspring.me  was  adding features, creating  integrations and tweaking the UI probably has a lot to do with its growth.
6. Formspring  gave users the ability to export questions and answers to WordPress
7. Instead of looking at people’s  facebook profile or twitter feed you  can ask them questions and browse what others have asked them. That is what formspring offers users,and people are curious to learn about others that way.
8. Another feature that the Formspring team says has been instrumental in its growth is the ability to ask a single question of all your followers at once and then see all the responses in a single interface.