Before the inception of Facebook, getting together online or building social bonds via the medium of the Internet was unimaginable. Mark Zuckerberg changed the paradigm of human networking and opened multiple avenues for others to develop an impressive array of online community portals such as Twitter, Instagram, and Whatsapp just to name a few.
Thanks to the monumental work by Zuckerberg et al, development of an online social media community is a relatively simple process. One can build a strong and commercially feasible community website by going through a well-defined process as elucidated in this article.
Define a community
If you study most of the online community platforms, you will understand that each network is targeted at satisfying specific needs of society in terms of socialization. The first step of community identification has great significance as it helps you create a solid foundation for the assured commercial success of your business venture.
You can either identify or create a need by researching the population in terms of its demography and other characteristics. Triggering a need can be a complex process unless you are well versed in the social or psychological behavior of the targeted population.
Right identification or creation of needs is required for assuring immediate response to the proposed platform. If you spend some quality time in knowing about various factors that influence the demography as a consumer, then you will have a solid idea of the foundation of your social network platform.
For example, AngiesList.com was created to fulfill the community’s need for a site that offers verified reviews of different services. Need identification will also help you design your ad campaign for generating interest in your platform.
Setting up of functions and features
Unless you have a deep understanding of multiple aspects of the community in terms of its likes, desires, wants, and needs, it would be difficult for you to define or outline network’s various features as well as functions.
These steps are vital for outlining the broad vision and defining security aspects of the social media platform. Identification of community needs must be performed precisely to ensure proper set up of features as well as functions.
These will also help you decide user functions and also the functions of the administrative team. The second step involves a large number of sub-steps that will help build a strong foundation for your social media website.
Identifying right technological resource
The entire gamut of functions and features of your social media platform needs the robust support of technologically powerful resource. Technological consideration is vital to provide a right support to the platform for the performance of its features.
At this stage, you will have to appoint experts and consultants for guiding you to select relevant technological solutions from among a broad assortment of available technologies. Choice of right technology must be based upon answers to a well thought out list of appropriate questions.
Answers to such important questions will provide a clear vision that helps compare some of the most commonly used CMS applications including.Net, Ruby on Rails, or Drupal to name a few.
In-depth analysis of some of the major social media portals can also help you appreciate the technologies that are powering performance of their sites.
Vital pillars of social media platform
Every platform that allows its users to get engaged and remain associated with it for a longer period of time must provide a perfect ecosystem to facilitate its growth. You need to understand the significance of the three highly resourceful and important pillars for ensuring success and earn profits.
Service orientation – Customer service is a key to the guaranteed customer satisfaction as it breeds and supports long-lasting relationships. You can easily assure customer support by engaging with a reputed hosting service provider. The established vendor is sure to support your website with round the clock technical assistance as and when it is required.
The promise of a secured environment – It is pretty obvious that a secured online environment has immense potential to reassure your visitors about the safety of interacting with each other. The recent apology by Zuckerberg following the leak of user data is a proof of how important is the security aspect of a social media platform.
Room for growth – If you have a great idea and have a proper platform to engage visitors, then your platform is sure to grow in terms of its user-base. This underlines the significance of a scalable platform to ensure the seamless performance of the social network platform for years to come.
Ushering the right prospects
Your social media platform must be designed to have relevant features and functionalities to attract defined set of visitors. The relevance of features as far as the nature of visitors is concerned is a critical factor here.
In addition to the conventional marketing aids such as word of mouth, you need to leverage advanced tools such as paid ads, email marketing, and other modern resources.