Getting widespread media coverage for your niche social network can have a big impact on your membership numbers.

But how do you get the media’s attention?

One great strategy for social networks is to give the media a peek into your community, and make a connection between how people interact within your network and extrapoloate it to the larger world.

Dating sites have been doing a great job of this over the years, and the media laps up these stories like nothing else.

Case in point: Dating site/social network Badoo recently put out a media release ranking cities by the number of online flirtations initiated per month by the average user in each. Simple enough premise, and certainly an easy to find metric.

Clearly, this hardly counts as a “study,” but it’s exactly the kind of fun, light — and most importantly, space-filling — story the media loves.

The headline, “Social Network names Athens as The Most Flirtatious City in The World,” was eye-catching, and within days Reuters picked up the story and sent it to all of their affiliated outlets, many of whom published it word-for-word! At last count, over 80 outlets had run the story.

So what are your members doing that may make a similar story? Are they acting in ways that confirm stereotypes, or confound them? Do your membership numbers show a surprising number of men taking up knitting, or shocking number of women drinking Scotch?