나만의 소셜 네트워킹 사이트를 만드는 방법은 무엇입니까?

Large social networks seem to have filled the entire information space around Internet users. So if you decide to make a social network site, you can feel a little scared because of many high-profile names. At first glance, big tech fully controls the market and does not give other players a chance to reach it.

This common concern among many potential startups often causes the abandonment of developing a new social network. But the fact that prominent players have complete control over the entire industry only means that niche markets have been overlooked and open to conquer.

Countless opportunities in niche social media markets lead us to the main question: how to create a social media application that stands out from the crowd and holds its position among giants. Many remarkable niche social apps have proven countless times this is a fact. Despite entering a seemingly crowded market, they all garnered millions of users and became highly successful.

It has no sense to look for secret knowledge about social networks. If you have come up with a unique concept suitable for a particular niche, combined with original ideas and excellent content, you already have an outstanding plan. As long as you put your users' needs first and like your product, your social network application will succeed.

To create a successful application, you need to understand how it should work. Social interaction implies the presence of three functions as a minimum: user profile, communications, content, and feed. Different social networks may have other names for these functions, but their meaning remains unchanged - to help shape and maintain sustainable social ties.

Profiles are unique personal accounts needed to search for other users among the entire audience. Users always have the opportunity to personalize their profiles change statuses. Sometimes, users can promote their profiles on social networks, especially dating sites. A good social network makes profile personalization quick and easy. According to statistics, each user already has nine accounts in various social networks, which already have enough data. Therefore, allow users to import their data from other accounts and free them from unnecessary actions.

Social media applications are all about connections. If you create a social media application, you need to develop strategies that allow your users to communicate. But, profiles will be an abstract entity without a powerful search. The search will enable users to search for people with similar interests group people into communities with similar likes and values.

Social networks form not only group user relationships but also individual ones. Therefore, a built-in messenger is essential in keeping the user inside the social network.

Think about how your users interact with content. How do they create, search and share content? Keep in mind that all modern networks are content and traffic generators, so you need to think about content types to process on your network. Your choice will significantly affect the requirements for the created system for storing and distributing data on your social network. Each user has unique needs, look for a way to meet them, and your social network will be successful.

Newsfeeds are a stream of content that your users see. This is a showcase of the social network and what users came to your site for, so it should be as exciting and entertaining as possible. You need to keep your users in your application as long as possible.

All active users together fill newsfeeds with their messages. Therefore, the design of your application should simplify the creation of a personal feed as much as possible. In addition, it would help to allow users to focus on the audience covered by their messages and create content to involve them in networking.

Creating an individual feed is not as easy as it seems at first glance. Everything would be primitively simple if you show new messages only from familiar groups and users. But in this way, the possibilities of expanding social contacts would be minimal. Therefore, the social network should acquaint with new users and communities based on similar interests. And, of course, artificial intelligence functions can help do it in the best way.

Start creating your application as soon as you have a concept you believe in and understand how social media applications work. Here are some professional tips to help you create a successful social networking site:

First of all, imagine yourself in the user's place. Who are you creating a social network for? What needs do you meet? After all, it is satisfied users who make the project successful. Therefore, carefully choose the niche of the social network.

There is no reasonable reason to create a new universal social network to compete with Facebook. A niche social media application that serves a small group of people will be more successful than a wider one. This phenomenon is because it is easier for people to contact people with similar interests. Of course, the number of users of a niche social network will always be limited. But it's still a more effective way than finding users with uncertain interests in an unlimited audience.

Make your social network application as easy to use as possible. Simplicity will be the standard of quality. Do not change if you find something that works very well during the development process. Instead, simplify it even more. Your users should perform the least number of actions when interacting with your application. Make your pages easier and strive to increase the speed of the application. Try to exclude use cases in which interface responsiveness is lower than the speed of user interaction with elements. We'll talk about it in more detail below.

It is not always possible to benefit from someone else's positive experience. Nevertheless, almost always, someone else's failure is an excellent example of what not to do. Therefore, it is necessary to monitor competitors in the market, not only at the stage of choosing a niche of the social network. Adapting the social network to changing environment is critical in its survival. Feel free to use the best other people's ideas, but try to implement them better. Simply copying a unique function is not enough.

In addition to adapting to a changing environment, trends need to be monitored. The tendency is your plan to develop a social network for the near or distant future based on sustainable, albeit small, environmental changes. It would be best if you had an excellent instinct not to make mistakes and not take steps in the wrong direction.

Here's a simple example. In the past, trends such as instant messaging and live video streaming have revolutionized the social media space. But, for example, today's trend is fleeting or disappearing content. So after Meta announced its plans to create a metaverse in 2021, many other companies hurried to tell similar projects. But does this mean that this is the primary trend to follow and make efforts to follow it? Most likely not, because Meta is talking about promising monetization opportunities for its multibillion-dollar audience and not about technologies available to all.

Fortunately, the world is not closed in the Metaverse, and there will always be vast opportunities for thousands of niche social networks. A slightly abstract example is a personal computer. Businessmen and gurus of the 70s of the 20th century called the idea of home computers utopian. However, two decades later, it became clear how they were all wrong. Therefore, when assessing trends, you should not rely only on the opinion of experts in your plans.

These small tips were the first and most important part of the claim to your corner in the vast space of social networks. What to do next? Of course, look for practical opportunities!

The phenomenal success of social networks caused the birth of a new virtual economy, where intangible objects became mass commodities. In recent years, the most prominent social networks have reached an unprecedented level of capitalization and lost their attractiveness from the venture capitalists' point of view.

As a result, investors began to look closely for new growth points, and niche social networks became the object of their attention. Of course, as you know, demand creates supply. But let's leave for dessert the question of how dominant social networks are built and discuss other opportunities.

The earliest platforms for social networks were well-known CMS systems. They gained popularity as tools for creating websites long before the mass arrival of social networks. The social component of those websites was limited to the ability to comment on photos or news.

For more socialized projects, there were forum scripts. Forums are much closer in their fullness to social networks, as they store huge content, text, and partly multimedia. However, their structure is far from perfect, and user interaction methods are very primitive. But in the absence of other opportunities, such CMS has become the basis for low-budget social networks projects. And add-ons like BuddyPress made them as similar as possible to universal social networks.

But the external similarity is very deceptive. The CMS web engine itself is not designed to organize horizontal interaction between users, so the authors of the popular BuddyPress warn about its limited use. Yes, you can create a campus or university social network and even a niche marketplace. But the possibilities of servicing a slightly larger project and implementing unique functions are absent. You can probably already answer whether it is possible to make your social network on such a CMS engine.

The congenital defects of CMS engines make them unsuitable for the application under consideration. Moreover, there are many questions about the security of such projects on open-source. Of course, the open-source concept is excellent, but the problem of critical vulnerabilities and their availability for hackers remains unchanged.

If you can't correct the shortcomings of this approach, you need to create a new one. How to protect the project code from hackers and allow the customer to configure the functional part as in the CMS? This dream became real after the advent of Drag & Drop solutions on SaaS platforms. The lovely idea of selling Software as a Service was initially focused on the business sector and, in general, did not involve specialization in social media sites.

But the enhancement of virtualization technologies and the reduction in the cost of services in data centers made it possible to stream the creation of social networks on SaaS platforms. To say that such a service is inexpensive would mean misleading you. Ask the omniscient Google a question, and you will see that this is the cheapest possible way. Own social network website for the cost of dinner in a good restaurant? Yes, it's possible!

But is there free cheese outside the mousetrap? Unfortunately, the charm passes when you get acquainted with such offers. The first and most important question is who owns the social network created on the SaaS platform and its content? The answer is obvious, the platform owner provides it for use but not transfer it to the customer. Therefore, the operator can be considered the owner of all content on the platform. In this case, the social network creator is a manager who voluntarily collects information for the platform owner.

The more popular the social networks of customers are, the more data comes to the disposal of the platform operator. Interestingly, customer addiction to the SaaS platform is also growing, as it is impossible to move a launched project to a new platform without losing some loyal users. The SaaS platform itself can be considered a social network based on this state of affairs. And customer projects are user communities (at the same time, community organizers also pay for this opportunity!).

The second important issue is the technical limitations of such platforms. Virtualization technologies allow the effective distribution of the platform computing capabilities among all projects and isolate projects from each other. However, first of all, the operator must ensure the platform's stability, not the individual needs of each project. Therefore, implementing a unique design or custom functions is not available. The same can be said about the possibilities of scaling the project to serve a large audience. On the other hand, this long talk is unnecessary, as customers usually do not consider SaaS platforms to create competitive social media projects.

Now it's time to return to the question of large social networks' technologies. First, of course, any complex projects require non-standard approaches. Nevertheless, it is necessary to fulfill several basic requirements: project uniqueness, high load capacity, scalability, complete control over the content, software, and hardware.

If you look at the history of the emergence of all modern large social networks, they have always been founded by programmers with good entrepreneurial qualities. But this does not mean that you need to start learning programming languages and frameworks immediately. On the contrary, technology has become more accessible over the past decades, and independent development teams have done a lot of work to bring them closer to customers.

The right choice will save you from many mistakes and unnecessary costs when creating your social network. When you first meet with a developer, you should immediately determine which platform they use for design. If this is any ready-made well-known constructor or script proposed to be "a little" modified for your project, it is better to refuse such a service with no doubt. There is an extremely high probability of becoming an experimenter for your money. At the same time, the likelihood of getting a ready project of the expected quality is low.

Custom development of a social network project solves all these problems but requires time and money. Therefore, it can be the best but most risky option if you have them. The problem can arise when you don't expect to meet it, for example, the unexpected appearance of a competing social network. In addition, the social media market is very dynamic, and several years to create your social network platform from scratch can be an unacceptable luxury. In this case, you can lose all your investments.

The X Networks company offers the best option - to create a custom social network on a special QSNE (Qwerty Social Network Engine) platform. The QSNE platform is a set of software tools and an infrastructure for deploying complex projects like social networks, web portals, marketplaces. It results from the company's twenty-year experience creating high-load projects for business automation, advertising networks, and social networks.

The QSNE platform is not ready-made visualized cubes for building a project, as on SaaS platforms, but a technology stack that allows Qwerty Network engineers to create a social network of any orientation and functionality.

By the way, do you remember we talked about the danger of poor responsiveness of the social network interface? Yes, this was one of the main reasons for losing leadership of the once-famous MySpace. Fortunately, this is not possible for projects on the QSNE platform; according to the results of objective performance testing, the QSNE is among the one-thousandth percent of the fastest sites on the Internet.

Although the QSNE platform combines software and hardware components, it is possible to deploy the finished project in the customer's infrastructure. In any case, the ready social network is the object of its owner's right, so further use of the finished project is carried out entirely at his discretion.

Undoubtedly, the advantage is that the customer receives a ready project that can compete with any well-known social network while minimizing the risks associated with developing the platform from scratch.

Custom development of a social network is the most effective but not the cheapest way. The X Networks understands this and can support an exciting project. Co-financing is a great way to reduce risks and start partnerships with a strong team. Keep in your mind the social network launch is just the start of the hard way to its growth.