Build Your Own Facebook

by John Eberhard

Building your own social networking website with advanced functionality such as the ability to invite friends and have a friend network, having users each have a profile page and upload images and videos for others to see, may have been a pretty daunting idea in the past. Programming for building such a site would have run into the thousands or tens of thousands.

But there is an emerging trend of companies building complex sites and then offering them as off-the-shelf site templates that you can use. The functionality is built right into the site already. All you have to do is customize the site with your own name and graphics and look.

One such new solution being offered is phpFox, which offers a Facebook-like product that they sell for an inexpensive one-time fee. The software allows you to do the following with your site:

• People sign up and become members
• They have a profile page listing information about them
• They can invite others to become their friends
• An activity feed that shows the status updates of all your friends
• Creating custom user groups and charging fees for membership if you want
• Notices for events
• Instant messaging between members
• Posting images, videos or music
• A marketplace where users can list things for sale
• Create ad campaigns that target everyone or specific groups or demographics

In other words, you can set up a site that is essentially just like Facebook. So why would you want to do that? Well you’re not going to try to go head to head competing with Facebook (if you’re smart) because they are well established and are currently the top social media site in terms of traffic. That would be like trying to compete with Amazon or eBay. Not going to happen.

But what you could do with such a system is to set up a specialized site that is a social network for some specialized group or demographic, like computer consultants, or chiropractors, or dentists, or computer gamers, or classic car enthusiasts, or photographers, or sports fans, or people from a certain city.

You could monetize your site by having advertising (like Facebook does in the right hand column) or charging for memberships.

Of course you have to bear in mind that just putting up such a site would usually not result, just by itself, in millions of people coming to it. You’d still have to work out how to market the site and drive people to it.

But the point is that the availability of inexpensive software like this with all this advanced functionality, makes it possible for you to put up your own social networking site. And if you have a specific niche in mind, a certain group or demographic that all share a certain common interest, and there isn’t already a social networking site like this in that niche, it might be just the ticket.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous