Everyone is familiar with the major social media success stories, platforms that will greatly impact human relations and the economy. However, social media channels were created only because their CEOs were smart enough to recognise an opportunity at the right time. Nowadays, it’s easier than ever to create a social media platform using these unwritten rules of social media.
How to build a social media network website?
- Identify your community
If you don’t want to simply shoot in the dark and likely experience financial losses you need to identify your community. The process of identification should be done during the brainstorming stage. In order to create a social media platform, you need to meet certain needs of the users. Identifying likes and dislikes of your community will assist you in better understanding the psychological factors that affect them as a consumer and what you can do to get their attention. Sometimes the need for what you are offering won’t exist on the market, that’s why demographic and psychographic data will give you the power to trigger and create that need.
- Define the features and functions
The definition of the features and functions is strictly related to the quality of the identification of your community. Your community’s wants and requirements will shape and outline the features of your developing social network website. What do you want your users to do? How will you define the privacy of the data?
The overall vision of your website is important so using macro scans that will break things down into categories such as user functions, administrative functions, and advertising is crucial.
Defining the type of data that will circulate, what users can post, how they will register, and what automation you should use is only the beginning. There are a lot of things to be considered at this phase.
- Choose the appropriate technology
Identifying the features and functions of your social media network will determine the platform and where you can create your own network. The biggest issue at this stage is the doubt about what method will be effective in order to create a social media platform. Evaluating technology is something that must be done by professionals in order to be effective, so hiring a consultant to help you compare technologies is a great way to proceed. It will save you time as well as money in the long run.
If you opt to do it on your own, then you need to prepare a list of relevant questions to ask. You can apply different CMSs to do this such as Ning, Drupal, Ruby on Rails, or .Net
These questions will let you to see if their technology and solutions support your idea.
The final thing you can do is analyse existing social networking platforms and the building technologies they have used. This learning process will help you figure out various issues and opportunities for your social media network.
- Structure
Once the user-specific features are listed, you must prepare your growth environment. Certain general rules apply for building all web pages and are of huge importance in order to create a social media platform since you are trying to keep users on your site for longer. There are three must-have features that you need to incorporate into your plans if you want your social media network to be successful and profitable.
Customer service – Partnering with a hosting company can change the course of your business as they will deal with technical and other issues related to your platform.
Security – Use reliable security systems that will make your users feel like they can do everything on your social media platform without worrying about privacy intrusion and data leaks.
Scalability – When you start building a social network from scratch you have to consider growth. For example, when Facebook was first created, they did not know that it would grow to this extent but Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg was prepared for growth even so. Your social media platform should be able to expand easily and quickly to keep pace with the growth in your business.
- Design activity
What is a social network site without an activity stream? Nowadays, activity streams are the core of every social media website. Facebook introduced this feature first and since this social media conglomerate sets the standards on the market, the concept went mainstream and affected everyone in the sector. The fascination people have with their friend’s activity is real. We are curious to know what they are doing, how they are feeling every moment of the day. Failing to develop a quality activity stream can affect the appeal of your social media network. This is the focal point and the driving force behind the success of launching a social network. You can use Joomla’s plugins or Drupal’s activity stream module to create an activity stream easily.
For example, the activity feed of Ning allows you to connect your network to Facebook, Twitter or to add RSS feed. That way, users always stay tuned with the comments, likes and shares, which are shown in their news feed. You can publish content in the form of tweet or post, and decide what to show in your activity feed, and who can see your updates. These features let you highly customise your network.
- Create status update features
To create a social media platform that is effective and attractive, status updates are crucial. Social media user wants to express their feelings and thoughts freely anytime of the day. You need to design the perfect tools that will make the status updates a pleasurable and easy experience. Even though Facebook popularised the activity stream, Twitter made the status update another mainstream aspect of social media sites. Status updates are incredibly addictive and people can become immediately hooked. If this feature is not user-friendly and easy to use, they will abandon your social media platform immediately.
What can you do to design the perfect status update tool? It really depends on the values your social media is built on. Twitter made an amazing move by limiting status updates to 140 characters. The developers were grateful for that decision because it made their work so much easier. Of course, you have to make sure to add comment adding options on the status updates as interaction with other users is very important.
There are a lot of open-source microblogging platforms you can use for developing quality status update features. If you are using content management system like Joomla, it is easy to make a content type that has a limited number of characters.