Launching a Social Network in 10 Minutes
Written by: Alex
Social networks dedicated to niche groups focused around a common industry, interest or cause have been spreading like wildfire. Creating your own social network is now extremely easy using freely available tools such as Ning.
1. Pick Your Purpose & Sign-up
Decide what your social network’s focus is going to be. Is this a community for your customers to interact with you and each other or possibly an industry related group to bring together new ideas.
Now it’s time to sign-up on the ning.com site. You’ll need your community name, tagline and description and you’re good to go.
2. Pick Your Style
Ning has a number of built in style choices that include background graphics (some definitely more MySpace crowd focused that others). You have full control over the colors for all text in the site which makes it very easy to get started. For the more adventurous you can do lots of raw html customization which probably isn’t needed in most cases.
3. Load Up the Features
Ning has most of the typical social network features such as friend lists, member management and blogs. It also includes media capabilities for music, video and pictures — allowing members to rate these items as well.
4. Pay for Upgrades?
Ning communities include advertising space (they need to make their money somehow) by default. You can pay a bit extra to kill the ads, use your own domain name (so instead of mynewgroup.ning.com you could set up mynewgroup.com) or even remove all references to Ning itself so your users don’t know that’s the platform you’re using.
5. Invite the Crew
Finally, you can either keep the community open to the public for member sign-ups or more likely if you’re creating something more targeted, send out the invitations to your email list. You can also send out an invite link by copying it and putting it elsewhere — such as sending it to your LinkedIn connections or through an existing email newsletter or targeted publication.
6. And You’re Live
While it may not have the complete customization capabilities of rolling your own using open source or off-the-shelf packages, using Ning also gets rid of 99% of the start-up headaches so you can get rolling in minutes. Now you can focus on interacting with that community instead of wrestling with tech issues.
Tags: Ning, social networks, web2.0
