Top 5 Reasons Not to Add Social Networking to Your Site:
San Diego, CA - December 14, 2007--A Social Networking Service (SNS) site, as defined by the Tech Encyclopedia is: "A Web site that provides a virtual community for people interested in a particular subject or just to 'hang out' together. Members communicate by voice, chat, instant message, videoconference and blogs, and the service typically provides a way for members to contact friends of other members."
Thanks to the Web 2.0 platform, SNS has become the new virtual "town hall" for people aggregating, communicating and sharing. Wikepedia states that there are currently 111 recognized SNS sites like MySpace, Orkut, Facebook, Hi5, and blogger, to name a few. Mashable.com acknowledges over 350 SNS sites. Many have been extremely successful in attracting membership, raising venture capital, and selling for millions to billions of dollars.
When I was asked to explain the "Five Reasons It's Not a Good Idea to Incorporate Social Networking Into Your Site," I knew it could come across as counterintuitive, since SNS is such a key ingredient to Web 2.0, Search Engine Optimization, and gaining and retaining Web site memberships. However, I will qualify my reasons here as I would if you and I were in an initial client meeting:
#1. Is SNS the core purpose of your site? Simply put, are you building a site solely for the purpose of enrolling members for a specific community interest? If not, be careful. There are over 350 sites competing with you for eyeballs. Thus, you need to be prepared for an uphill battle to grow your membership. Even Wal-Mart was unsuccessful in launching "the hub" last year in their attempt to be relevant in the SNS space. It was much derided and immediately closed down. If you are not fully committed to this route in both design and marketing, try to think of another way to differentiate your site from your competition.
#2. Do you have the time and ability to moderate? If you do, blog away! The more relevant content you have on your site with appropriate keywords, the better your overall search engine optimization (SEO). However, many of our clients want all the Web 2.0 bells and whistles, but don't want to spend the time ensuring the content in their site is relevant or appropriate. Once you've planted this digital garden, you have to feed it and weed it.
#3. Do you actually have enough members or content to make it worthwhile? I realize this is a "chicken/egg" type of statement, but the bottom line is, you won't gain membership if someone visits the site and finds that no one is in the chat room or your latest blog is from 6 months ago. Once you turn visitors off, they're gone for good.
#4. Ask yourself, "Why are people visiting my site?" Are they coming to get information about a specific topic? For example, one of my clients recently suggested that I design their site with many SNS capabilities. I suggested that they save their programming dollars until they had a proven concept and some traction. Since the site was specifically created to provide information to parents, we focused on adding as much informative content as possible. We also added interactive games to help parents and kids interact together with the site. This interactivity resulted in a "viral" marketing approach, as parents began forwarding the site to their friends and family. On average, visitors were remaining on the site for more than 7 minutes--a great statistic for a newly launched site. The interactive gaming functionality proved to be a better fit than creating profiles, chat rooms, or instant messaging, as most users were already members of other SNS sites.
#5. It's easier (and potentially more lucrative) to integrate. Let's say you're trying to get the attention of the 18 to 30-year-old market. Why not create clever original content that users will want to share with their friends on MySpace, YouTube, or Facebook? With combined memberships well into the hundreds of millions, that may be a better awareness generator than creating your own SNS from scratch. When you make it easy for users to add your content to their current SNS page of choice, they automatically share it with their friends.
The if-you-build-it-they-will-come approach no longer computes in today's SNS world. Users dedicating their compressed spare time on SNS's must be deriving value, either in the form of entertainment, education, an ego stroke or a money-making opportunity. SNS's are cycling much like the evolution of religion, which became so fragmented over the last century that people became bored by too many choices and gravitated toward the less niched, non-denominational mega churches. Eventually the many fringe SNS's will fall away as the real power brokers emerge. To summarize, you will be ahead of the curve with your next Web site if you understand this one simple truth: Every Web site built today need not aspire to become a community unto itself.
