Social networking is pretty trendy and it isn’t limited just to the big boys. Small, specialized social networks are very successful and communities are always blossoming out of thin air. But just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s easy. It takes a lot of work to build and maintain a social network. There’s actually a bit of science to it. Ubiquity Hosting hosts countless social networks and we’ve seen everything from tremendously successful juggernauts and the terrible ideas that flop within a month. Based on what we’ve seen, we’ve developed a list of tips for you. The list is intentionally vague because social networking is such a broad term. These tips are designed to help with a social networking site, a forum, or just any ol’ site where the focus is in encouraging your members gather and interact.
1) Have community organizers – Any seasoned veteran at running a social website can tell you that a good moderator team is the difference between life and death for any online social community. Social networks, forums, and even the big boys like Digg all have moderators, community liaisons, community guides, etc. It doesn’t matter what you call them, but trust me, you’ll be glad you solicited their help.
2) Listen to your users (kinda!) – Always be seeking feedback from your users. The site may be free, but they’re still customers and they may just even have some ideas that you haven’t thought of. That being said, you can’t please everyone. So take their complaints and suggestions with a grain of salt and make sure it fits in the big picture.
3) Know what you want – Having a clear vision of where you want your site to go is the first step in getting there. If you host a forum about fish and you’d like to eventually have the forum be about marine wildlife, ease the community in that direction or it might not get there on it’s own.
4) Keep the content fresh – A social network or forum are nothing without users that keep coming back and posting more user submitted content. A couple posts a day by a couple moderators may be all it takes to keep users coming back. People don’t like to sign up for sites that only have old content.
5) Don’t make it too complex – There should be a single, easy to understand, general concept to your site. Don’t divide the focus between user profiles and a forum. You have to decide if you want to be Facebook or Yahoo Answers, it’s significantly harder to try to do both.
We’ll continue this list next week with suggestions 6-10. Have some suggestions? Let us know by commenting on this post!