One of the chief features of social media is the ability to participate in a larger community without needing to reinvent it. The idea with social media marketing is that your reach can be extended by publishing on existing social sites.
Post a question on your website, you get a few responses. Pose the same question to LinkedIn you get many, many more answers.
Which raises the question: Why do corporations and brand managers keep trying to make their own social networks? It really doesn’t make sense, but it sure gets the black turtlenecks excited, and in turn really blunts the effectiveness of your ad spend.
Here’s the deal: You get more power out of using third party networks than controlling your own.
Why?
More members. Bigger networks have bigger lists of members. Even Ning leverages this with search and profile management.
More viral. Viral messages need vectors to spread. Members=vectors. End of story.
More traffic. Oh, more members + more new members (viral) = more traffic.
Of course, if you don’t believe this, then enjoy taking on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Ning. Let me know how it works out for you.
should you “roll your own” social network? http://tinyurl.com/8vymg2
I tend to agree with you when it comes to getting momentum for your brand.
Funny you should mention lead generation, as I am currently building out a social network for a very specific industry vertical. My goal is to build pull around the niche vertical, and offer a free quotation system. The vendors in that vertical will pay a fee to access those leads. For regular businesses, it will be free.
I will likely create a Facebook presence for the site, and then embed part of our site into a Facebook page to harness that momentum.
Will let you know how it goes, and supply a link when I’m done.
I’m using PHPfox as my platform. See link above.
Cheers,
Michael
Michael –
You make a couple of really good points that were not top of mind when I posted this article. A custom, branded network is probably a good idea for:
Pay membership sites.
Fan Sites – like this one.
Where I disagree with you is that a self-hosted, custom branded social network is not always the best play for companies that are doing so as part of their branding or lead generation campaigns. Companies would be better off working inside an existing social network that has a ten thousand times the traffic and hundreds of thousands times the members and can really drive business and brand awareness. On most social networks interaction between members is what generates growth. Taking that interaction off Facebook or off of LinkedIn and moving it to a tiny walled garden reduces the speed at which the marketing program generates more friends and ultimately reduces effectiveness of the campaign. That said, if you’ve got enough members there are a lot of benefits to owning your own network.
I think there are serious benefits to ‘rolling-your-own’ for those companies that wish to charge a membership fee or ‘sell stuff’ within their social network (b2b or b2c). You simply can’t do this Ning, MySpace, or Facebook. GoSocial is the exception to the rule among these hosted solutions, and is coming around in this area with their ability for network creators to charge members a fee.
Still, a self-hosted custom branded social network allows for way more control and customization, period. That’s important to many businesses and brands.
I think the trick is to expand your brand by having a presence on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and Yahoo, etc. but then linking it back to your own solution.
For a one-time fee of $300, and $10 to $50/mnth in hosting fees this can be accomplished quite easily with something like PHPfox. They even support OpenSocial in their upcoming version due out next week.
You can learn more at http://www.brandedsocialnetworks.com