what is a social networking site :How to Make Your
what is a social networking site: 1. Decide on the theme and goal of your social network
For upon | There are a lot of reasons why you would want to set up a social networking site. You’ve seen the success of huge sites like Facebook and MySpace and want to give it a shot yourself, in a specific niche. You’re absolutely right, every niche community out there is a social networking site waiting to be born.
Whatever provides your motivation, you’ll need to make sure you can ask the following questions:
- Do you know the niche in which you would like to start up and do you already know others inside the same sector?
- What is your budget?
Choosing your niche…
Starting your own network on a specific theme or niche will be very difficult if you do not have at least a basic knowledge of the niche. It’s no good creating a community site for ex-pats in Detroit if you haven’t got an inkling of what the ex-pat community is like, for example. Some people will say that community sites are self-provisional. This is true for a fully functional community with active members. Nothing could be less true however for a new community site that only has you and your next-door neighbor as members. Try to pick a theme that you are passionate about if this is your first community site – research and providing content will be a lot easier. Knowing people that are willing to help you to spread the word and willing to pump life in the community beforehand is a great advantage. If you don’t know people like this, hit the forums, Facebook and try to get them on board to help you.
Before starting any site, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you think the audience in a specific niche would like. As an example, the audience for a site built around e-readers would definitely need a manner to review the latest e-readers and could perhaps have a small marketplace, where members can sell their second-hand e-readers or other gadgets. A site like FMyLife for example understood that the site needed to be designed to allow quick commenting and easy reading of people’s stories.
Decide on the niche, then decide what the audience in that specific niche could enjoy. Look towards niches. You can create social networking sites around anything. Bear in mind that successful social networking sites are not really creating communities – most of the time, the community already exists. The site helps them organize, achieve something, share things. Think carefully about what your target niche needs, and listen to them once it gets going.
Deciding the goal
Once you have the theme, decide on your goal. This actually usually goes hand in hand with the theme. If you are a small business selling car-cleaning products, you’ll be setting up a review site with the goal of becoming known as being a brand that listens to and interacts with its market. if you’re setting up a community site for voluntary workers in Africa, your goal will be non-commercial and based around using the great organizing potential of community websites (we only need to take Barack Obama’s campaign as an example). If you are an affiliate marketeer, you could create a community around the theme of insomnia – with the idea of creating a firm membership list to which you can promote and sell products afterward. Although your goals will inevitably evolve as your community evolves, try to make sure you already have a basic idea of what it is you want to achieve. This will help you in understanding the functionality you need and help you in selecting the correct software.
Defining your budget
Whatever your goals and theme, you’ll need some sort of budget to make it work. Depending on how you wish to create it, your budget will vary. Let’s take a look at the typical costs:
- Hosting plan: anywhere as of 5 USD – depending on how large your community gets. To startup, I suggest Rochen Host – a great hosting provider in the UK that has 24/7 customer support, even on Christmas day. Once your site becomes too large to handle that budget, you can count on them to upgrade you in a correct and efficient manner.
- Plugin script – a complete social networking software solution that you can download and upload as the platform for your site. As of 250 USD onwards (see the link in my signature for some top solutions)
- Logo/graphic design – can be easily found as of 50$ onwards.
Optional costs
- Programmer: if you want to customize your social networking software, or create a platform from scratch using open-source software like Joomla or Drupal, you’ll need a good programmer who knows what they are doing. There are a lot of low-cost providers in India. Always try to get them to prove what they are worth beforehand and try to find out from their existing clients how they perform. Cost: as of 500$ for large developments, as of 80$ for small changes to existing software (guidelines).
- AdWords campaign: marketing your site on search engines can easily be done using Google AdWords. If you are going to choose this option, you’ll need a minimum of 500 USD to get a campaign going for a few weeks
Depending on what you outsource, your costs will rise. It is however perfectly feasible to set up a great-looking social website for as little as 355 $. A small investment that can have fantastic returns.
2. Deciding on the social networking software
We’ve already briefly spoken about social networking software solutions. For pretty much every type of social site, whether it be video sharing, information sharing, user review, music sharing, it is possible to buy an affordable out-of-the-box social networking software solution.
As a guideline, stay away from free open source solutions unless you have the time and knowledge to develop everything yourself. In that respect, Joomla and Drupal are probably the most powerful systems available. It’s free but will take you a while to understand if you having no prior coding knowledge. Hiring a programmer to build everything for you can turn out to be quite expensive.
3. Building the primary content and getting people to participate
If you are an existing business or website that enjoys a lot of traffic already, you could use your newsletter to actively promote your social networking site. If you are starting from scratch, however, things will get a little more complicated.
In both ways, you’ll need to decide on an efficient manner to put interesting content on your site to attract search engines and visitors. As a must, you need some good articles on the subject. A great way to create good content is to include a “news section” on your niche on the site that you update on a frequent basis. To grab all the news, subscribe to an RSS feed from Google or other sources and summarize what you find interesting, and throw it onto your site. People will come back just to see what’s new.
If you have previously contacted some people to help you, make sure they get active once you have some primary content. Put the social network of Facebook, on Digg, Squidoo, Twitter, get your contacts to invite their contacts, etc. Once the ball is rolling, it will become viral. the difficult part is the beginning.
If you have some good content and a couple of members, consider creating an AdWords campaign if you have the budget. It should be a one-time effort – if the campaign works, you’ll end up with enough members, and the viral effect will take place.
4. Listen to your audience and adapt
What makes sites like Facebook and Twitter huge is that they allow people to develop stuff onto the network they provide. Facebook apps, games, polls, you name it. This allows the users to develop their own community. As a new social networking site owner, try to learn from this. Always listen to your users and try to give them as much freedom as possible to take initiative. This is what will make your social networking site a success.
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