WeeKee Today

One of the tough decisions I face when deciding to create a community site is to decide whether to build it on top of existing social network platforms like Facebook and Friendster or create my own branded social network using platforms like Ning.

Each approach has it pro and cons and hopefully in this entry I can share with you some of my thoughts.

Building on existing social networks 

Using existing networks like Facebook, Friendster, etc has a few advantages. It is easy and fast to setup your own community site. It takes less than 10 minutes to create your own business page in Facebook. A big group of existing users also means that it is easier for people to join your community.

However customization options are usually limited, making it difficult to achieve the same look and feel that is consistent with your brand image. Available features is also limited to your chosen platform. In most cases, the data are also kept within the platform and it would not be an easy task trying to export information of community users out of the platform. 

Platforms like Ning, allows you to build your own social network and provides a high degree of customization. This provides a lot of flexibility when it comes to designing the look and feel that is consistent with the brand image. Other benefits includes customizing the features on the site, access control, etc. 

The most useful thing to me is the ability to customize the user profile questions to make it specific to your community. For example if you are creating a community for gadgets lovers, your profile questions might ask your members the type of gadgets that they own. This information can then be exported for use in creating a more targeted and relevant eDM campaign or used in further analysis to gain insights about your community members.

The key challenge to creating your own branded social network is that you will need more effort to get people to join your community. Why would anyone bother to take the time to create a new account just to be in your community and that is assuming that they even knew about it in the first place. Customizing the site to your desired look and feel could also take up substantial time and effort.   

I guess that covers most of my thoughts on the 2 different approaches from the technical perspective. I have started using the Ning platform a year back mainly due to certain features set that I need. Now it has become less relevant as existing social networks become more stable and mature. I am beginning to love the new Facebook pages. The question now is how should I go about doing it. Should I use it to direct traffic to my existing site on Ning or should I try to get the existing members to move to the Facebook page? 

Before deciding on that, the key question that I need to ask myself is "What do I plan to do with the community?".

Will share my learning on subsequent entries. At the meantime, do let me know what are your thoughts on this.