How many times everyday do you hear about social networks? Oftentimes, the social network tag is accompanied by one of three sites; YouTube, MySpace or Facebook. YouTube isn’t even a social network at heart… but anyway.
In participating in quite a few networks, I have drilled down a few of the main things that it takes for a social network to succeed.
Steps to creating a social network:
By no means are these limiting factors, but they are areas of concern if you are thinking about building the next Myspace. If there is one thing the web has taught us, it is anything goes.
Social networks must have a niche market
Every popular social network started as a niche. MySpace was for undiscovered rockers. YouTube was a video dating site. Each site started as a niche.
Today, there are countless networks opening up everyday. What is it that makes yours stand out? How is your different? The funny rounded corners and pastel colors don’t mean a damn thing. What market does your site hit?
Social networks need to add value
What exactly does your service provide? Is it a collaborative wiki about community development? It better not be. Your site won’t be going anywhere. Not because people don’t care about community development, but because they don’t care to put in the hours to populate your site for you!
Some of the best examples I have seen recently are eJamming.com and Stockpickr.com. eJamming is a site that lets you network with other musicians and perform live across a broadband connection. You can record tracks, have concerts, and do pretty mush anything you damn well please. It truly is a miraculous application. I am not a musician, but I can appreciate the complexity.
Stockpickr.com is a site geared for investors looking to diversify their portfolios. The software takes your profile and compares it to others and recommend investments that you might be interested in. It is a nice way to see what else is out there without spending hours wading through the Bloomberg network!
Social Networks need to cater to an individual
The social aspect of the network needs to be apparent; things such as delivering mp3’s, photos, video, etc. In order to succeed the community needs to be able to share.
This really depends on what your niche and added value are. In the previous example, Stockpickr would be remiss to cater to video uploaders. That isn’t their core strength. Their strength lies in their community’s stock portfolios. Couple thousands of portfolios and a bit of data analysis, the service can recommend great picks for their members.
Social Networks need to promote communication
In every successful network, there is some form of communication. This includes blogs as well. The communication comes from the comment line. In the social networking environment, the communication is derived through personal messages or adding friends. Although adding friends is usually used in a shitty way, it can be of benefit.
This can be anything from blogging platforms to RSS feeds. Rating systems to messaging. Anything that promotes user interaction, really.
The tricky part of ‘promoting’ communication is building the services in that allow people to communicate with one another. Building areas to upload in a site isn’t really a big deal, but inter-site messaging can be a bit difficult to code and keep up.
Social Networks need to be profitable
This almost sounds like an oxymoron, because the common consensus is that social networks will just become profitable. Unfortunately, nothing is farther from the truth.
Advertising doesn’t cut it alone. How many visitors a day do you think it will take before you even squeak out $1000.00 a month? Quite a few.
Adsense and YPN are great for monetization, but you need to differentiate your forms of revenue. Some banner ads, some text links, some Chikita, stuff like that. It doesn’t make sense to devote 14 hours a day to a site if you are not paying your mortgage.
Some More-Transparent Social Network Thoughts
Have a successful community already
For companies like NewEgg.com or a site like ProBlogger.net, just implementing a social network will have huge success because they would be leveraging their user base. And people want in on the action. It goes without saying that employing a social network when you have a great number of followers makes everything quite a bit easier.
Allow customization of the social network
I am hard pressed to say that social networks need to allow for customization because then we get Myspace. The ugly, non conforming entity that the network has become. I think it would be interesting to have some sort of ajax style drag and drop box system though.
Free signups - Paid extensions
The free signups are a tried and true method of getting lots of visitors to actually create a profile. The trick is, and we can thank the dating sites for this, is to offer paid functionality. Functionality that adds value which a user might be willing to pay for.
In Closing
As I said before, this list is by no means everything that must be done. I just wanted to point out a couple areas that might be useful for people to consider when building a social network.
If I have forgot anything, please feel free to let me know!