The beginning of social networking

Key to entry into the industry lies in targeting the right group of people.

Many budding entrepreneurs often misconceive social networking to be an industry that has exhausted its potential. With Facebook’s recent announcement of over 500 million members, many are shying away because of the ostensible monopoly that the website seems to have created. However, a deeper examination of the pattern of successes and failures in the industry of social networking reveals that Facebook is only the beginning.

The historical development of industries has taken the shape of steady growth of firms eventually leading to industry-wide expansion. However, social networking seems to be a nonconformist to the conventional process of development.

Facebook Inc started out with a gigantic market share and exponential growth. There was no steady development or eventual industry-wide expansion – it was a quick jumpstart.

Since then, numerous competitors have attempted to find their niche, but most have failed. The reasons seem to be a matter of great debate among analysts of social networks but one does not have to look far to notice a striking pattern among these failures.

As a trendsetter, Facebook has set an example that social networking groups start out with a very specific group of people and then expand from there to become universal: it started out as a college social networking website at Harvard University.

Soon it expanded to include students of other universities, and eventually, these students graduated and the network was no more limited to students and colleges. It had successfully become universal.

However, as one of the pioneers of social networking, Facebook may have had delightful success by employing this strategy but that does not necessarily mean it is still the right strategy for new entrants.

It seems that numerous social networking sites have tried to do just that and have failed. For any potential entrants to this industry seeking success, the pattern of starting out with a specific group and trying to go universal after initial successes needs to stop.

The key to sustained and successful entry into the industry of social networking lies in targeting the right group of people, offering them the right features and limiting your portal to just that group instead of trying to make it go universally viral.

The group should not only be large enough to achieve the critical mass of success for your business but should also have a strong interest in exchanging information and socialising amongst themselves.

College students worldwide are an excellent group to target and the recently launched company CollegeOnly, backed by PayPal and Google’s co-founders, seems to be doing great at reviving college social networking.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 29^th, 2010.