Create a Social Media Platform: Here’s How

Social community platforms have changed the world and they influence the relationships and economic aspects between people. Since Facebook was developed by Mark Zuckerberg, the social community sector has been booming. Mark was the trigger that this industry needed, accelerating a new way of thinking among entrepreneurs—taking risks and driving the development of social networks because they were considered new and promising. Nowadays, Facebook has about 2 billion users every month, while Instagram is used worldwide by 700 million visitors, and 328 million people tweet every month. Facebook has done a good job, and it’s very difficult to design a comparable platform that achieves similar success. Nevertheless, even today, new social network platforms can still be created, but creators should follow some unwritten laws and rules.

Create an Online Community: Key Points at a Glance

Build Your Own Online Community: What Exactly Is a Social Network?

A social network is an online platform that connects users and organizations through multiple interaction options. It allows sharing photos and videos, leaving comments, chatting, and more. The first real social media platform on the market was Facebook, which remains the market leader to this day. However, there are now numerous other platforms, such as Quora, Reddit, LinkedIn, or Xing. Various industries of social networks have emerged. While Facebook, for example, is mainly used privately, Xing and LinkedIn are business networks. Reddit is a social network in the form of a forum, and Quora is a network for questions and answers. Another well-known platform is Twitter, now called X, a microblogging service for quick messages, videos, and news.

How Do You Create a Social Media Page or Social Network?

To create a social network, you first need to prepare a concept with all the desired functionalities and define the appropriate technical infrastructure. In the development process, you choose between CMS systems and custom programming using programming languages like PHP.

There are other ways to create social networks using ready-made solutions. However, these do not provide the necessary flexibility and scalability required by complex websites such as social networks. Therefore, these solutions are not professional and, in the long run, cannot offer a solid foundation for developing a professional social media network.

Building Social Media: Finding a Niche

There are already many different social networks. Instead of trying to become a direct competitor to Facebook or Instagram, first attempt to identify a specific niche. An example might be developing a local social network for communities in specific regions or a social network for artists. The aim is to offer something more specific than existing solutions—even if that focus is much narrower.

It’s much easier, especially in the early phases of popularizing the project, to position yourself in a niche because you can gain loyal users much faster. In later phases, you can certainly expand the social network.

Identify with Your Community

If you want to be sure your social network project becomes a success, you should be able to identify with your newly created community. So, as a student, it makes less sense to build a social network community about 80-year-old war veterans, and a stockbroker isn’t the best advisor for pig farmers. The closer the creator feels connected to their project, the more passion, effort, creativity, and know-how will be poured into that community. Additionally, there’s a natural understanding of the needs and preferences of that online community. Anyone who has spent a long time on the subject will find the brainstorming for the project easier than someone who is completely inexperienced. 

Twitter has a narrower focus compared to Facebook—the platform is more focused on political issues.

Identify Target Groups

Identifying the right target groups will help you offer the right features and services that matter to them. This way, you can quickly gain new users and—more importantly—retain them in the long run

How Exactly Do You Define Your Target Group? You Can Choose Among the Following Options:

Online Research

The internet is full of interesting information, and practically all kinds of numbers and statistics can be easily found, collected, and analyzed. This also includes demographic data, psychographic data, and behavioral analyses that can be used to identify the target group. There are numerous resources for all relevant data, which can be found once you dig deeper.

Test and Learn

Another method to obtain relevant data about your target group is to offer a demo version of the social community network project. Through user participation, the operators can collect and evaluate relevant data from users, giving them an overview of typical target-group behavior. This path is far more expensive, but the data collected is 100% usable.

Planning

Define the Features and Functions

The precise description of the features and functions is closely linked to the quality of identifying with the community. What the community needs and wants shapes the features for developing the social network website.

What do you want your community members to do? How do you want to secure private data? 

Once you have all the necessary information about your target group and strategies, and you know the features and functions required, you can pass these insights on to your team. But before that, you need to check if you have everything in place. Here are some checkpoints that absolutely need to be clarified.

The Platform or Social Media App

When developing the platform, it should be clarified beforehand whether it will solely exist as a social network on the website or whether a mobile app will also contribute to its success. Such features need to be decided before talking to the developers. Whether they are necessary is shown by the data collected in target-group market research. Developing an app is always advantageous but is also quite expensive and not recommended in the early stages. It’s best to first create a web-based social network and confirm that there is market demand before incurring additional development costs.

Social Media Builder: Data Base Volume

It’s unfortunately impossible to estimate website traffic with 100% accuracy; predictions can only approximate real outcomes. Accuracy also depends on the development team. Here are some recommended database options:

•   Use MySQL or PostgreSQL for your structured data
•   Databases from NoSQL like MongoDB for better load handling

Your Own Social Media Site: The Structure Setup

When creating the platform, developers should also plan future development based on growth forecasts. Some general rules should assist in setting up the website. But what’s most important for a social community network platform is to stay involved in social activities and spend time on them.

Customer Support for Your Own Network

Besides customer service, there are also various other projects in your life. You may have to free yourself from technical difficulties if customers point out that some of the features do not work as intended.

Security of the Social Network Website

The security of a platform is very important for many users who don’t want their personal data randomly disclosed. Careless handling of sensitive data or images has ended careers, so a platform for social community enthusiasts should secure its users’ data especially well.

Scalability

When building a social community network, creators should also consider future growth. Back in the day, Facebook was not prepared for its massive growth. Nowadays, growth should be more controlled.

Design

For a social community network, a simple and minimalistic design is enough because users don’t want to look at it; they want to shape it themselves through their data and images.

When designing a social media platform, creators should consider the following points:

•   Elements of the standard profile
•   Chat options and features
•   News feed design
•   Connect buttons
•   Engagement buttons
•   Comment area
•   Social group options
•   Settings page design

A very important point is the so-called user experience (UX). You must ensure that the social network is very easy to understand and use. Conduct multiple tests with potential users to come up with improvement ideas faster. Usability tests must be carried out regularly so that the user experience on the social network can be optimized as much as possible.

Instagram impresses with a clear and beautiful design.

The Activity Stream 

Today, the activity stream is the core of every social community website. Facebook introduced this feature first, and ever since, it’s been considered an indispensable standard. Users should post every moment what they’re doing and how they feel, which is the appeal of social media websites. For this, you can use Joomla’s plug or the Drupal activity stream module, both of which do an excellent job.

Create Status Update Features 

Status updates are extremely important for every social community user because they want to express their feelings and thoughts at any time of day. The better and easier the tool for this is to use, the more successful the website will be. This is why it should be a core focus in development.

Enhance Data Viewing Quality

Users come to social media websites to showcase their photos, opinions, and other data, and to see what other users publish. Therefore, the data-viewing options should be designed to be as high-quality and pleasant as possible. Easy usability is also important. However, certain rules should be maintained so that not all personal data is publicly accessible. Yet, as much data as possible should be made public. This data should include:

•   Popular stories from the last 24 hours
•   Popular stories from the last 7 days
•   Popular stories from the last 30 days
•   Popular stories from the last year

Growth Strategy

How do you build a social network in a market full of competitors? First, you must plan your growth strategy and define your target group. Once you’ve collected all the important data, the potential users must find out about the platform. It sounds simple, but this part is also tricky. Initially, you need to align the platform consistently with your target group because your entire success depends on it.

There are two ways you can start

Start Small and slowly expand your base. Facebook also started locally and small, using data from a high school yearbook. The more popular it became, the more it expanded. Entrepreneurs can manage and calculate this risk well.

Think Big

Although you should start small, you must keep future growth in mind and work toward that goal. Accordingly, marketing should address the widest possible audience. Twitter was successful with this strategy.

TikTok has grown into a huge social network. The reason for this lies in focusing on short videos as content, which works very well with its corresponding target audience.

Interested in developing a professional online platform? Our agency offers a free initial consultation.

Reaching the Right Users

After everything has been said and done, regarding the definition of the target group and developing features, the next step is to attract the right users. There are many tools that will help you break into the market. Facebook was created in a university environment and is a pioneer of the social media industry.

The Following Points Should Keep the Main Costs Under Control:

Email Marketing

An email database is essential to implement an affordable and efficient marketing concept. Email marketing is very cost-efficient—you can capture email addresses through a newsletter sign-up on the website and then use them in your email marketing strategy. Regular updates can also improve user retention on the platform.

Blogging and Articles

Consistent blogging will spark and continue the conversation about the new social community platform. Moreover, creating high-quality content is one of the best SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies for improving your ranking in Google’s search results.

Engage with Your Customers

To increase visitor numbers, every type of contact connection should be utilized. People need to be reached as often as possible to build a community.

Paid Advertising

Paid advertising such as Google Ads can work wonders and should therefore be used as often as possible. The same goes for marketing in general. Advertise, publish blog posts and newsletters, and show your presence. 

Build on SEO Strategies 

SEO is just as important for social media platforms as it is for other e-commerce websites. Keep both on-page and off-page optimization of the social network in mind.

Gather Feedback and Optimize

The social network must be continuously optimized and adapted to the market’s dynamics. It’s also recommended that you regularly collect feedback from your users via surveys directly on the platform. This feedback must serve for further improvements to the platform, as well as be considered when planning new functionalities.

Satisfied users means they spend more time on the social network and thus are more likely to click on ads, resulting in better revenues for you as the operator.

Monetization Options

After you’ve created and marketed the network, you can ultimately make money with it. There are various methods, such as subscription plans or advertising.

Subscription Plans

This option is generally not so popular, especially in the early phases of marketing a social network. Leading social networks are free, and if you charge people to use your platform, you’re already at a noticeable disadvantage compared to your competitors. Fewer people would use the platform, which would lead to lower earnings from the ads placed on the platform.

Nevertheless, you can apply subscription plans to certain advanced features while keeping access to core functionality free. There are also possibilities for subscription plans aimed only at certain user groups, such as companies seeking greater visibility.

Advertising

This is the most popular way to monetize social networks and also offers the greatest revenue potential. Since the leading social networks are free, they provide easy and free access to a huge amount of content and interaction opportunities for multiple users. Meanwhile, user activities are analyzed by algorithms to define their interests and categorize them into specific user groups. Companies or similar groups wanting to place ads can deliver them via the platform to those users who have the highest probability of conversion. This way, they can achieve an excellent return on their marketing budgets.

The more people on the platform, the higher the income from delivered ads. This results in excellent synergy effects between a free service model, which can capture user activities and thus assess interest in certain products or services, in order to serve relevant ads to those users. 

Also, a rising demand from companies wanting to place ads on the platform can lead to higher prices for each ad click.

Therefore, the focus of a social network operator must be on attracting as many users as possible to the platform and then monetizing them through ads.

Conclusion and Summary

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