So let me start by saying that I love Steemit! My brother is a bitcoin/alt-coin enthusiast, and he recruited me to Steemit last week. After he explained the idea behind Steem/Steemit, I immediately saw the huge potential the site had to offer. I asked him to buy me $250 of Steem right away (which is a somewhat large investment for me). I held onto my Steem for a few days, and started to read more about it. I consumed the whitepaper in two days, and talked to my brother about how it all worked. After learning about the relationship between Steem and Steem Power, I decided that Powering Up was the way to go. I signed up for an account to converted my Steem to SP. Once I was on the site, I got drawn in to the content/posts. I got super excited about it, and convinced my artist/creative friend to sign up too. Within a few days of signing up, he created a post that got up-voted to $979.08. (Holy cow!) Needless to say, he is hooked now too. The two of us have pretty much spent every waking moment on Steemit, and we are loving it!
I love how Steemit is designed to reward users who add value to the community. Not only that, but they have thought of so many different ways that people can add value, and factored them all in. There is one way of adding value that I think is currently underrated though, and that is recruitment. Don't get me wrong, I intent to recruit the heck out of Steemit. I am pretty much telling everyone I can about it, any time I can find a way to work it into the conversation. Still, Steemit does financially incentivize pretty much every other type of value adding behavior, so why not recruitment?
People who like the community will naturally recruit others to join, but there are certain types of recruitment behavior (like buying keywords on google) that excited Steemers may not do for free. There also isn't currently much incentive to share your post on other social media sites like Facebook, because the earning potential from sharing it there is fairly low considering someone would have to go through the process of signing up, plus up-vote your post, just for you to get a low SP vote on your post. If Steemit had a way to build in a life-time recruitment bonus (say 5% of the Steem your recruit makes, including the Steem that they make off their recruits), then it would be that much more rewarding for people to recruit others to join.