The Rise of BodySpace ? From a Single Idea to One Million Members
The Rise of BodySpace – From a Single Idea to One Million Members
Boise, ID (PRWEB) August 09, 2011
In only five years since origination, the world’s largest social fitness network, BodySpace, has acquired over one million members. BodySpace is the powerful social networking site belonging to Bodybuilding.com, the Internet’s most-visited bodybuilding and fitness site and largest online retailer of nutritional supplements. In honor of the one million member mark, Bodybuilding.com CEO Ryan DeLuca looks back at BodySpace’s remarkable growth story, and ahead to an even bigger and brighter future.
In 1999 when DeLuca first started Bodybuilding.com (long before social networking), he signed up for online mailing lists where readers would send in various questions, and then once a week they would receive a digest of all the questions that were answered. He loved the notion of being able to have a dialogue with others who shared similar interests. With bodybuilding, health, and fitness enthusiasts sharing such a naturally strong passion, it was a no-brainer that Bodybuilding.com would be the perfect place for an online community.
Bodybuilding.com first started with message boards and saw immediate growth in that community. The Bodybuilding.com Forum is now the 18th most active message board on the web (as ranked by Big-Boards.com). When MySpace.com came along DeLuca quickly began thinking about how a similar platform could work for Bodybuilding.com. After a bit of brainstorming, DeLuca decided on the name BodySpace. His mission was to ensure every BodySpace feature would help members achieve their goals.
“BodySpace fit perfectly with what people needed to get in shape. It’s not just knowing you need to work out, but having social accountability and positive social influencers around you. I quickly realized this would be a major tool for helping us meet our mission, a competitive tool to help bring people to our site and stay longer,” DeLuca explains.
The success of BodySpace has gone beyond transforming lives (although this is what DeLuca is most proud of) and has actually become the premise of a best-selling book, Body by Design. User demand also encouraged DeLuca to invest in a mobile app for the BodySpace community. Launched in January 2011, the Bodybuilding.com BodySpace Mobile App has achieved approximately 500,000 downloads.
While excited about his success, DeLuca is looking forward to the future of BodySpace with a major platform redesign on the horizon (first roll out in January). The cosmetic update itself will completely change the look and feel of the social site. It will be more modern and will incorporate distinct BodySpace branding. The navigation will also be improving; many basic Facebook-type features will be built in, along with a vastly-improved workout tracker, a new nutrition tracker, more long-term supplement tracking, visually interactive progress charts, goal-setting features, and more. DeLuca’s favorite new BodySpace feature? Users will be able to select a body type of a fellow BodySpace member they wish to obtain and will be able to see their exact workout, nutrition plan, supplements they’re taking, and follow what they’re doing daily, in order to achieve similar results.
Three years from now DeLuca sees members using BodySpace as their virtual personal trainer. Users will be able to get personalized recommendations about what they should do next to achieve their goals.
“So the big idea is we’ll have ten million people entering data and some of them are just like you and have similar goals. Kind of like Netflix – if you like this movie, and we all like the same movies, then I’ll most likely like this next movie. There will be algorithms in the back end to tell you other people like you changed to this supplement and got better results, or actually worked out one day fewer and got better results, or whatever. It’ll be tracking what you and everyone else is doing, and will give you personalized recommendations on what you should change to achieve the best possible results. It will virtually take the guess work out of what you need to do to change your body,” shares DeLuca.
For more on Ryan DeLuca’s interview, please go to http://bit.ly/RiseOfBodySpace.
To join the world’s largest social fitness network, please go to http://www.BodySpace.com
Bodybuilding.com offers more than 13,000 health & fitness supplements and accessories to help more than 7.5 million people every month achieve their health, fitness and appearance goals, as well as over 35,000 pages of FREE information, including more than 20,000 articles and videos, expert online trainers, and new content added daily.
For more information: http://www.bodybuilding.com
Contact: Crystal Matthews
Email: crystal(at)bodybuilding(dot)com
Phone: 208.472.9311
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