The State-of-the-art Social Networks : Part 2

This post follows from my first one last week where I reviewed trends in social networking applications and platforms. This post continues with an analysis of emerging trends and provide pointers where entrepreneurs in India can make a difference. These opportunities also point towards strong business models that can leverage a social networks’ graph of relationships between its users.

Publisher platforms

Social networks are massive publishing platforms. The amount of time users spend logged inside their social network application is far more than time they spend searching or looking at content on a portal like Yahoo. This provides an opportunity to market products and services to a social network’s user base which is sometimes referred to as being part of the ‘social media marketing’ phenomenon. So far, social networks have carried contextually irrelevant advertisements (for example, see Google adsense inside Orkut) which can change now that all major social networks have opened up their systems and allow applications outside the social network to push messages and content inside them. You can see an application doing just that above which is using Facebook’s Connect interface to push messages into Facebook.

I presume social networks will eventually start charging applications a ‘publishing fee’ which points to a large opportunity social networks in India too can exploit. Messages sent to users in a social network by people they know from applications outside the social network will be much more relevant to the user compared to normal adverts and any promotion that is associated with such messaging and content push is likely to have a much higher click through rate and therefore revenues for social networks and applications that use them.

Social blogs

Blogs are a clear favourite among online mediums used very frequently. A report by McCann on Social media earlier this year pointed out that while 60% of users visit a social network site on an average in a month, 77% read a blog which comes second to only watching videos online which does marginally better at 82%. So far, blogs have been a medium of expression for individuals and organisations but little have they done to engage their readers’ into the blog’s social network which are people bound by common interests.

Recently, Blogger has released a new feature which allow a blog’s readers to follow the author which goes a step beyond MyBlogLog which identifies a blog’s readers and enables access to their profiles. You can see a test blog I have put up using Buddypress which is a social network plugin for WordPress. This again points to opportunities for product companies that can implement plugins for major blogging platforms and operate the resulting publishing network. These companies can potentially sell advertising and share revenues with blogs which makes it a very sticky and attractive business model for prospective blog network operators.