How did social networking sites like facebook, myspace become popular so fast?

[YES MAN]

what kind of marketing do they use? It's not like they have a certain niche they're selling that could use good SEO. is it mostly thru press release? word of mouth? i don't see any advertising or ad banner for these sites either. where are their referral traffic come from?

[TimmyH]

No.

They have good SEO now! But in the beginning they virtually had none.

Facebook grew out of Harvard and was mostly word of mouth through colleges. MySpace was more about the music industry pushing self-publishing. Neither of them ran SEO campaigns. Search is useless to them they don't get any of their traffic from search.

[Choicex]

Viral marketing, this is when a product or service is so good that it creates its own demand and popularity by 1 person telling another , who then tells another etc....etc

Word and popularity spreads like a virus, fast and exponentially.

Viral marketing is the 'holy grail' of the internet.

If you hit on an idea and have viral marketing work for you, you will have huge success.

[jjt]

word of mouth is the fastest. look what happen to the movie avatar. they did no no real advertidsing yet it went to number 1 very fast

[Dotcom]

word of mouth is fast just spreading the news overall to their friends and they will share that news its going on and the news will be popular