Back in the 00’s, social network or social networking platform were a widely more used term to describe these platforms and it seems to have fallen into disuse only to be replaced by “social media”.
But why did this happen? Did these platforms became way more less driven towards actual social networking and more directed towards social media and content in itself?
The appalling shift towards “social media”
Platforms in the late 00’s decade suddenly realize with algorithmic feeds they could significantly optimize time spent on them by indiscriminate passive content consumption as the most accessible and least resistance path towards increasing viewing times and overall use.
Transforming these platforms in majorly ad based revenue, digital media entertainment websites is a far easier development than creating service based features where people can discover each other and network with a far oriented purpose, not only is more straight forward to monetize these platforms via ad revenue, trying to monetize users with social networking features requires novel elaborate features for such entangled with user generated content itself, as well as the possibility to incorporate other services which go beyond just social media and networking in it’s more direct and basic form.
A robust and featureful social networking platform should include services and features such as:
- A great search system for people, content and people through the content
- A classified ad system for services, products and job listings with both WTB & WTS listings
- The ability to effectively network with people thought interests and common interests at will
- A well designed discussion groups / forum systems integrated within the overall platform
- An IM voice/text feature to communicate privately, either individually or in groups
I believe these are the most basic requirements for a social networking platform to be called a “social network” functionally speaking.
Of course we enter in the monetization dilema once again, because it’s way easier to monetize an endless stream of media content (social media), than it is to monetize such features that potentially lead users to redirect the attention towards outside the app or the platform itself and spending less time consuming all sorts of media content that has been strived to be optimally and individually selected to increase viewing times.
So what options do we have in this conundrum?
Ideally social networks could absorb or incorporate services like payment gateways and streaming content providers in order to diversify they income streams further away from ad revenue, but I don’t think such services which already exist elsewhere provide the best revenue potential, my opinion is that selling social features which allow users to increase their reach in social networking based features are the way to go, so let me explain.
Social networking as a freemium service
Social networking features as a service would allow to emphasis profiles and content on places such as the search, as well as allowing users to expand the capacity of these searching tools by paying a premium.
Not only that but it would allow people to feature their classified ads for their services and product listings.
In my opinion services and products classified ad websites are still lacking specially in a WTB / request format, and there’s a lot of possibility for improvement and expansion in this field, specially when integrating all other social based features of a real social networking platform.