There's a saying along the lines of "the amount someone spends talking about themselves is inversely proportional to how interesting they are". Beyond first dates and keynote presentations, this opinion directly affects social network services.Users drop off at an accelerated rate from accessing/signing up for a new site to actually using it. Even if the sign-up process is super slick and the site is easy to use and helpful with telling users how to get started, more often than not companies forget one significant thing:If the first impression is a ghost town until the user interacts with the service more (e.g. adds friends, follows feeds, etc.) - that will be their impression of your service and most likely their last login to it.For Pownce, a social network I was a community manager for, this was a known weakness. I don't have the data to show the drop-off rate from users who signed up for Pownce, but as with any social network, there's always a large divide between active users and total users - and keeping the divide as small as possible plays a large role in the longevity of a site.
(original screenshot via Chris Messina)Comparatively, when users sign up for Flickr, they're shown the activity that is being created by other users on the site immediately:
(original screenshot via Chris Messina)Additionally, Flickr always shows content other users are contributing on their service on your personal dashboard, regardless if you've added friends or uploaded photos of your own. In this way, Flickr is communicating that they have a live and constantly active ecosystem to participate in - making the user feel less uncertain about adding to that activity and interacting with the site.The recommendation being - don't use emptiness as a motivation for users to interact more with your site, even if you have super friendly instructions. Displaying example content not only shows that your site isn't dead inside, it shows users what's interesting without saying it.
Side note: I've been looking for other blog posts or links to data that discuss the ratio of sign-ups to returning users. My insight on this topic has mainly come from discussions with various social network developers. If you know of any links I should check out, please leave a link in the comments!