Founder of Ning, a well-known social networking site: seven principles of social networking products

The founder of Ning, a well-known social networking website, said about seven important principles for designing a social networking product.

The following content is compiled:

1.Make your products more important in an oversupply world. Every day, people must deal with people, websites, requests, and relationships that are overwhelming. You like your social products, because the benefits it brings to you are obvious. However, if you and your team members cannot clearly tell users how to get emotional returns on your product within 15 minutes, and these returns are not available to users on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, so you still have a lot to do.

This is not about anything that is so boring. People don't care about your functions, game servers, or how nice your service is when you have millions of users. People have limited time. The new things you launch only take a few seconds to attract users. To this end, you need to integrate everything you can control seamlessly to create a unique brand for only one reason. Give product feelings. If your team cannot associate all decisions with the user's feelings when using your social networking product, the reason for this product is insufficient.

2.Only do one thing and do the best in the world. Lululemon focuses on black yoga pants, earning an annual income of $0.45 billion. Twitter focuses on messages with 140 characters. Facebook focuses on setting up online connections with people you already know. All of these companies have done their best. When you focus on what your social networking products are best at, all you need is to let go and do that thing, so don't think about anything else.

Ask yourself and all the team members every week which of you do the best in the world. It is best to define this, reach an agreement, print it out, vigorously promote it, and paste it on the wall. Everyone should think about it when making any decision.

3.Identify uniqueness. Nowadays, mobile platforms and services can satisfy people's sense of belonging. But what's equally important is what makes us feel different. People want scarce and unique things. This does not mean that your product is limited to a specific niche market. Frontierville is designed for the public, but its social experience is still unique through its neighbors, Community customization, and series of functions.

When talking about uniqueness and scarcity, people always mention the game theory first. However, if the game theory you use is the same as that of others, you may encounter problems. Or the oversupply problem mentioned above. All social products have points, medals, and upgrades. If you use this content without thinking about it, you will lose the opportunity to reflect scarcity and uniqueness. A better way is to find out what makes your products unique and you cannot find them on other social products. Then, we will give priority to those functions that can enhance user sentiment positioning. To achieve uniqueness, you must lead rather than follow.

4.Focus on the most important interactions. Once you have defined the key functions, you usually find the most important interaction. If such interactions are handled properly, people will return. If they are not handled properly, you will not be able to exert all potential. Find this interaction and pay full attention to it. This type of interaction is Twitter information stream, polyvore is a collection page, Facebook is a message feed, YouTube is a video page, and dailybooth is a live feed page. This kind of interaction is a miracle, so I pay more attention to it and make it a star.

5.Exercise caution in wording. When creating a social product, something can be copied by others, but something you need to be unique. Layout? Do your best, but pay attention to what has worked. Color? It's hard to reflect originality, but blue is a good choice. Term? Be sure to grasp it. Wording is the primary way for you to express your opinions. It not only reflects the emotional meaning of the brand, but also tells people what relationships they can get by using your social products.

6.Create a dance, not a museum. Excellent social networking products are clean, concise, and fast. Successful social products do not have many highlights in design, so that friends, photos, videos, text, and comments will appear in the center of the home page. The more colors, fonts, and images you add, the less your social networking product looks like a dance, the more it looks like a museum. Or a magazine. You want to build your social networking product into a cool dance, instead of placing expensive furniture around you. People don't even dare to sit around.

7.Development relationship, not function. At present, we have multiple and different relationships in the real and virtual worlds. If you want to design a new social networking product, it is not enough to have functions such as photos, videos, and activities, you need to check whether the relationship on your social networking products is different from that on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

For a new social product, you need to think about how your product expands, deepens, and changes the existing relationships between the real world and the virtual world. This is not easy. Quora is a good example. Quora initially originated from Facebook's social picture, but quickly stood out. The website's approach is to show you people you may be interested in, because their comments, experiences, and professional knowledge are closely related to topics that you think are important.

Gina bianchini is the founder of Ning, a leading social networking website. Organizers, activists, and leaders around the world can create their own social experiences. At present, the website has more than 80 million independent visitors each month.

This article is excerpted from:Http://www.techcrunchchina.com/7421