How to start a social media site in 4 steps

In recent years, the need to be a part of some sort of online community has increased. With more and more people spending so much time on social media, there are increasing worries about how sites like Facebook might be affecting our everydays life. Nowadays, normal life standards require having a social media profile, communicating and sharing your personal info on the web.

Social media sites just keeps growing and growing. Facebook has reached 2 billion monthly active users already and most of the new social media platforms are doing really good on the market.

So why not to create your own one! The market for this industry exists, and recent statistics shows that the demand for social communication is only increasing.

According to recent research by MarketingSherpa, 95 % of the online adults aged 18 – 34 most likely follow a brand via social networking. There are 2.56 billion global mobile social media users, or 34% penetration and 1 million new active mobile social users added every day according to We Are Social. This infographics about social media users’ growth confirm the potential on the market too.

There is a demand; all you need to do is to find the right tools and tips to make such platform.

Follow these 4 steps to start your own social media site.

1. Conduct a Quality Market Research

There are many available marketing research tactics, which you can use to shape your marketing persona. When conducting this study, you can get two types of data: primary and secondary.

- Primary data gathers information directly from the source or your customers. This method involves tactics like surveys, focus groups and interviews.

- Secondary data sources are related to statistics and infographics. This method includes reports, studies, and information from official authorities and associations.

The ultimate goal is to define how your social media site will affect them, what they really want as a service and what you can do to improve and offer a better solution.

2. Define Basic Social Media Features Plan

You need to prepare a complete social media features plan that will be based on your customer database. Use your market research findings to compose a plan that wraps up everything your users would desire in one place. Following their needs, the development process of the social media features plan is the most important step when creating a social media site.

You have to take into consideration everything: news feed, messaging, groups, profile looks, buttons, status updates, comment sections, privacy policy etc. The list is long, that is why you need to organize everything in a plan and have a clear overview of the defined things and cracks that need improvement.

Finally, you need to know what type of interface will trigger engaging reaction among the users. User centric interface means that you need to create an intuitive mapping between user’s intention and application’s function that enables a solution to a given task. The way people interact with your site and how they access its functions is greatly affected by the quality of the user interface.

There are typical UI features of social media and networking sites. You need to go through this process in order to create all of the things we mentioned above.

3. Pick Your Social Media Website Builder

Building a social media site from scratch isn’t an easy pie.

First, you need to register a domain, start a web hosting account and build your social media site from nothing. This requires hiring capable software developers that have the needed knowledge and expertise to help you develop the defined features.

Developing social media network from scratch is time-consuming and will cost you a lot of money. You can ease this task and use one of the available online builders to start a social media site in no time. You can expect quick results and you don’t need to have expert level knowledge about software development. The list of the available social media builders is long. For instance, Ning has a simple drag and drop builder and powerful design studio that makes the development process much easier. Here you can find in depth analysis about social media website builders, that is very helpful in decision making.

4. Run Demo Tests on Real People and Promote

After finishing with the defining processes and starting a social media site, you need to run a trial period. Testing the demo version on your customers will help you define the bottlenecks, issues, and errors. This stage will make you finalize your product and improve existing bottlenecks.

The last step is to promote your product. Digital marketing has multiple techniques that can help in getting your social media site out there. Email Campaigns are the efficient and inexpensive way to increase awareness on the market. Create a reliable database by using lead generation techniques, design newsletters and expect results.