Niche Social Networks Layered On Top Of Facebook
Why compete with Facebook when you can join them.
A shift happened in social networking space about 4 years ago, when Facebook opened the doors to Facebook connect.
From that point on Facebook stopped being the biggest social network to being the "fabric" of the social internet.
Instead of building social networks that compete with Facebook at daolrevo we support something we call a layered social network, one that sits on top of a larger social network and filter the connections to just those defined by the niche.
It's one directional, you can make new connections in your own niche social network and those are yours.
Nothing in this post is new, infect the method for creating a layered social network is pretty simple. It's the perceptive difference in describing what is being built and the problem that it's solving. Opens up new doors when it comes to marketing.
Why not start from scratch?
A social network (any form of community site) has something called the network effect.
Another way to put is is the first person on Facebook was pretty bored for a while.
Sites with a network effect become more valuable the more people that are using it and are almost useless for the first 100. Getting to that tipping point is hard but once you get there the world is at your beck and call.
With a layered social network you can power through the early stages, reducing friction….
Not everyone has to be your friend*
One of the words I hate to drop in conversations with clients is the word "friend". It's a loaded word, a friend to us is something different to a Facebook friend. In technical terms a "Friend" is a bi-directional connection between two nodes.
A "follower" is a unidirectional connection between a two nodes.
So lets drop the terms "friend" and "follower" and just call then unidirectional and bi-directional relationships.
Now it's just two circles with a line and some arrows. You can call these connections anything you want. You could have a unidirectional relationship called "follower" or called "employee" - what that means is up to you. It could mean that an employee gets to see all the activity for a company.
In a layered social network you could be more specific about the type of connection, instead of just friend you could have:
"Colleague" "Employee" "Boss" "Wife" "XBOX"
The connections could have different methods associated with them, a boss gets to see everything whereas an employee doesn't.
(This translates into friend lists on Facebook).
Whats involved
Grab the friends list and make the same connections to the users on your site.
Need to filter and tag the connections that match your niche.
Endorse connections, are two connections just the same? Just because they are your friends doesn't mean the connection is just as strong.
What's the value
Facebook is huge, 1 billion people is on there.
Facebook is the big generic repository of your connections to everything, social, professional, to brands and celebrities and even to apps.
You may have people in your niche social network who you would not connect with on Facebook (however they are on Facebook themselves).
Instead of starting from scratch Facebook connect allowed us to build niche social network filters.
A niche IT social network can be just a filter upon your Facebook connections, take just the people who are connected to you professionally.