Create a Social Network: 10 Tips for Building a Successful Social Community Platform

Social Community Platforms have changed the world and 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 catalyst this industry needed, spurring a new way of thinking among entrepreneurs about taking risks and driving the development of social networks, as these were considered new and promising. Meanwhile, Facebook has around 2 billion users every month, while Instagram is used by 700 million visitors worldwide and 328 million people tweet every month. Facebook did a great job, and it is very difficult to design a comparable platform that achieves similar success. Nevertheless, even today new Social Network Platforms can be developed, provided the creators adhere to some unwritten laws and rules.

The Essentials at a Glance

What is a Social Network?

A social network is an online platform that connects users and organizations through multiple interaction options.

How Do You Create a Social Network?

To create a social network, you must first prepare a concept with all the desired functionalities and define the appropriate technical infrastructure. In development, you choose between CMS systems and individual programming using programming languages such as PHP.

There are also other possibilities for creating social networks with ready-made solutions. However, these do not offer the necessary flexibility and scalability demanded by complex websites like social networks. Therefore, these solutions are not professional and cannot, in the long run, provide a good basis for the development of a professional Social Media network.

Find a Niche

There are already plenty of different social networks. Instead of becoming a direct competitor to Facebook or Instagram, try to first identify a specific niche. For example, you could develop a local social network for communities in specific regions or a social network for artists. The goal is to offer something more specific than the existing solutions—even if the focus is much narrower.

It is much easier, especially in the early phases of the project’s popularization, to position yourself in a niche because you can acquire loyal users much more quickly. In later phases, you can of course expand the social network as well.

Identify with Your Community

If you want to be sure that your Social Network Project will be successful, you should be able to identify with your newly created community. For example, as a student, it makes less sense to build a Social Network Community around 80-year-old war veterans, and a stockbroker is a poor advisor for pig breeders. The closer the creator feels connected to their project, the more passion, effort, creativity, and know-how will be invested in that community. Additionally, there is a natural understanding of the needs and preferences of this online community. Someone who has dealt with the topic for a long time will find brainstorming for the project much easier than someone who is completely inexperienced.

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

Identify Target Audiences

Identifying the right target audiences will help you offer the right functionalities and services that are important to them. This way, you can quickly gain new users and, more importantly, retain them over the long term.

How exactly do you define your target audience? You can choose between these 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. In addition, demographics, psychographics, and behavioral analyses can also be used to investigate the target audience. There are numerous resources for all relevant data that can be easily found once someone digs a little deeper.

Testing and Learning

Another method to obtain relevant data on the target audience is to offer a demo version of the Social Community Network project. By using it, the operators can collect and analyze the relevant data from the users, thus gaining an overview of the typical behavior of the target audience. This method is much more expensive, but the acquired data is 100 percent usable.

Planning

Define the Properties and Functions

A precise description of the functions and properties is closely connected to the quality of the identification with the community. What the community needs and desires shapes the features during the development of the social network website.

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

After you have obtained all the necessary information about your target audience and strategies, and you know the required features and functions to relay the insights to your team, you must first check whether you have everything in place. Here are some checkpoints that should definitely be clarified.

The Platform

When developing the platform, it should first be clarified whether it will exist solely as a social network based on the website or whether a mobile app should also contribute to its success. Such features must be decided before the conversation with the developers. Their necessity is determined by the data collected from the target audience research.

The development of an app is always advantageous, but it costs a lot of money and is not recommended in the early stages. It is best to first create a web-based social network and confirm that there is a demand in the market before incurring additional development costs.

Data Base Volume

It is unfortunately impossible to estimate the traffic of websites with 100 percent accuracy; rather, they will approximate the actual result to some degree. However, the accuracy also depends on the development team. Here are some database options that are recommended.

•   Use MySQL or PostgreSQL for your structured data
•   NoSQL databases such as MongoDB for better load handling

Structural Setup

Also, when creating the platform the developers should consider the future development based on the growth forecasts. Some general rules can help in building the website. But the most important aspect for a Social Community Network platform is to be present in social activities and invest your time.

Customer Support

In addition to customer service, there are various other projects in your life. You may have to overcome technical difficulties when customers point out that some of the functions or features are not performing as expected.

Security

The security of a platform is very important to many users who do not want their personal data to be published indiscriminately. A careless handling of sensitive data or imagery has ended careers before, so a platform for Social Community enthusiasts should secure its users’ data to the highest standards.

Scalability

When building a Social Community Network, the creators should also consider future growth. Facebook was not prepared for the immense growth at the time. Nowadays, growth should occur in a more controlled manner.

Design

In a Social Community Network, a simple and plain design is sufficient, because users do not want to just look at it, but rather shape it themselves through their data and images.

When designing a Social Media Platform, the creators should also consider the following points:

•   Standard profile elements
•   Chat options and features
•   News Feed design
•   Connect buttons
•   Engagement buttons
•   Comment sections
•   Social group options
•   Settings page design

A very important point is the so-called User Experience (UX), that is, the user experience. You must ensure that the social network is very easy to understand and use. Conduct several tests with potential users to arrive at improvement ideas quickly. 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.

Activity Stream

Today, the Activity Stream is the core of every Social Community website. Facebook was the first to introduce this feature and since then it has become an indispensable standard. Users should be able to post at any moment what they are doing and how they feel, as that is the charm of Social Media websites. For this, you can use Joomla’s plug or the Drupal activity stream module, both of which serve their purpose excellently.

Create Status Update Features

Status updates are immensely important for every Social Community user, as they want to be able to express their feelings and thoughts at any moment of the day. The better and easier the tool for this is to use, the more successful the website will be. Therefore, this should be a key focus of the development work.

Increase the Quality of Data Viewing

Users come to Social Media websites to present their photos, opinions, and other data, and to see what other users publish. Therefore, the presentation of these data options should be designed to be of high quality and pleasant. Ease of use is also important. However, certain rules must be followed so that not all personal data is publicly accessible. Still, as much data as possible should always be publicly available. This data should include:

•   Popular stories from the last 24 hours
•   Popular stories from the last 7 days
•   Popular story 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 audience. Once you have gathered all the important data, the potential users must learn about the platform. It sounds simple, but this part is also delicate. Initially, it is necessary to consistently align the platform with your target audience, because the entire success depends on that.

There are two ways to get started

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

Think Big

Although you should start small, you must keep the impending growth in mind and work towards it. Accordingly, marketing should address as wide an audience as possible. Twitter was successful with this strategy.

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

Attract the Right Users

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

The following points should help keep the main costs in check:

Email Marketing

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

Blogging

Consistent blogging ignites and sustains the discussion about the new Social Community Platform and beyond. Moreover, creating high-quality content is one of the best SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies to improve rankings in Google’s search results.

Engage with Customers

To increase visitor numbers, every form of contact should be utilized. People must be engaged 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 frequently as possible.

Leverage SEO Strategies

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

Collect Feedback and Optimize

The social network must be continuously optimized and adapted to the dynamics of the market. It is also advisable to regularly collect feedback from your users via surveys directly on the platform. This feedback should serve to further improve the platform and be taken into account when planning new functionalities.

Satisfied users mean they spend more time on the social network and, consequently, click on more advertisements, resulting in better revenue for you as the operator.

Monetization Options

After you have created and marketed the network, you can ultimately also make money from it. There are various options such as subscription plans or advertising.

Subscription Plans

This option is generally not very popular, especially in the early phases of marketing the social network. However, the market-leading social networks are free, and if you charge for using the platform, you are already at a significant disadvantage compared to the competition. Fewer people would use the platform, which would also result in lower revenues from the advertisements displayed on the platform.

Nevertheless, you can offer access to certain advanced functionalities with subscription plans while keeping access to the core functionalities free. Furthermore, there are options for subscription plans that target only specific user groups, such as companies that want more visibility.

Advertising

This is the most popular way to monetize social networks and also the one that offers the greatest revenue potential. Since the market-leading social networks are free, they offer simple and free access to an enormous amount of content and interaction possibilities for multiple users. At the same time, user activities are analyzed by algorithms to define their interests and assign them to specific user groups. Companies or similar user groups wishing to advertise can deliver their ads through the platform to those users most likely to convert. This way, they can achieve an excellent price-performance ratio for their marketing budgets.

The more people on the platform, the higher the revenue from the displayed advertisements will be. This results in excellent synergy between the model of a free service that captures user activities, assesses interest in certain services or products, and delivers the appropriate advertisements to those users.

Furthermore, increasing demand from companies wishing to advertise on the platform can lead to higher prices for each click on the ads.

Thus, the focus of a social network operator must be to bring as many users as possible to the platform and then monetize them through advertising.

Conclusion

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