All about Social Networking Sites

8/9/2019 All about Social Networking Sites

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All about Social

Networking Sites(SNS)

Whitepaper by Koncept Konquerors

Divyan Kavdia (09BM8017)

Swati S. Arora (09BM8032)

Saurabh Mishra (09BM8045)Kumar Priyadarshi (09BM8069)



All About Social Networking Sites (SNS) Page 1

Contents

Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 2

History ................................................................................................................................. 2

Social Networking Models .................................................................................................. 3

Major Players ...................................................................................................................... 4

Social Implication of SNS ................................................................................................... 4

Revenue Models .................................................................................................................. 5

1) Advertising Model........................................................................................................... 5

2) Subscription Model ......................................................................................................... 5

3) Transaction Model ......................................................................................................... 6

References: .......................................................................................................................... 7




Social Networking: What is in it for you?

Introduction

Social Networking has been constantly evolving in many forms for nearly a decade, but the

tremendous ballyhoo in past few years has raised the involvement substantially.

The entire concept of SNS revolves around the very basic attribute of human nature to form

groups. People tend to form small or big groups in personal and professional life, this

construct act as the keystone of SNS. SNS have germinated from being „fun‟ activity for

school/college kids to being host for a varied scoped activities ranging from people finding,

advertising, transacting, knowledge sharing, recruiting and various other business

applications. To many a people SNS are like a „Third place‟ other than office and home

where they can perform a whole range of activities which they only dreamt of in the realworld.

SNS take many forms and there creation may be based out of different reasons like finding

friends to doing business, but in-spite of all these diversities there are a few attributes like

profile building, connecting and expressing emotions which remain common in all forms of

SN.

History

With the World Wide Web gaining public face in the 90‟s came into existence the concept of

online interactions. Bulletin Boards, Chat Rooms & Emails were the very first form of online

communities which people used to share personal information and knowledge. Along with

this came the technique of publishing the web page to make the internet users know about

you which heralded the blogs like WordPress, Blogger and many more. With Classmate.com

came the idea of virtual reunion. Then came SixDegrees.com which brought the concept of

profile building, inviting friends, organizing groups and surfing other people‟s profile.

AsianAvenues.com brought with it the concept of niche, demographic driven market. Within

few years of advent of 21st century came into existence the concept of „Circle of Friends‟ and

thus came into existence Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook , Orkut, Twitter etc.

Rising fame of SNS aroused the interest of Business community and thus started an era of

online advertising and various other business oriented features and sites came into existence.

Till now the basic attributes of SNS like profiles, identity building, community building,

network building, self publishing etc keep bringing lot of traffic to these sites and people are

enthralled by Web 2.0. Addition of Google Wave, Buzz etc proves the point that the field is

in growth phase and we can expect a lot of new features and concept related to Social

Networking like GoJiyo.com and many more coming to us in near future.




Figure 1: Evolution of Social Networking Sites

Social Networking Models

Right from profile building & inter-connecting to blogging, uploading pictures/videos and

tagging and commenting on them, micro blogging to tell your network of friends what you

are up to at the very current moment etc everything is so lively that one cannot separate

himself from the roots of SNS. From online dating to listening your favorite music on

demand, everything is so youthful, so refreshing that one cannot hold himself out of thisrapidly evolving „Third Place‟. The following Figure presents the breakup of what the SNS

users are doing the most on these sites

Figure 2: Percentage of Users using various features of SNS[1]

0.00%10.00%

20.00%30.00%40.00%50.00%60.00%70.00%80.00%

% of Users




Major Players

There is plethora of SNS available on the web. Some offer pretty generic platform and have

mass appeal, while some offer customized platform for a niche segment. Here we will talk

about all these in brief.

SNS

Target

Audience Type Prominent feature

Facebook All Generic Wall Post, Applications, EmbeddedVideos and Photos, Chat.

MySpace All Generic Updates, Applications, Embedded Videos

and Photos, Chat, Celebrity Updates.

Twitter All Generic Micro blogging, Status updates in 140 or

less characters.

Orkut All Generic Scrap, Applications, Videos and Photos.

LinkedIn Working

Professionals

Niche Recommendations, Refer employee.

Bebo All Generic Personalized Homepage, Built-in Skype,

Video Sharing

Ning All Generic Create your SNS

Smart.fm All Niche Japanese and English learning socialwebsite

Almost all of these SNS‟ are generic in nature. They provide personalized homepage, direct

ways to interact with friends (wall post, scrap), video sharing, photo sharing and various

applications. Personalized Homepages are the vivid example of Web 2.0. A user homepage is

determined by his/her friend‟s news feed, his interest and so it is dynamic in nature.

These are only the major players but there in only one ultimate player: You. Since you

created this (by using these SNS) and you play this (by providing content on regular basis),

no one can be the ultimate player except you.

Social Implication of SNS

Thomas L. Friedman has considered Netscape (/Web) a flattener in his famous book “The

world is Flat”. Basically, I believe SNS are the ones that really provide level playing field.Everyone, be it famous or notorious, rich or poor has a Social profile on any of the SNS.

They all feel need to be in touch of their peers, their fans. Famous celebrities tweet about how

they are stuck in Jam, they blog about their endeavors – they all want to be in direct contact

with their fan base. And what can be better medium than SNS which provide inexpensive,

effective, personalized and has mass reach.




These sites fulfill a very basic need of humans: the need to communicate, to talk and to

express their feelings. People living in corners are seen to be getting married, friends from

distant past are able to keep in touch with each other and lovers from North Pole and South

Pole feels their voices through these SNS‟s. These help us make new friends, stay in touch

with the old ones and let us know more about the persons we care: their likes, dislikes,

interests and emotions and their above all them as a person. Besides that, Youth is now more

and more connected to social issues, they voices their opinion through these sites. Althoughthere is element of addictiveness, these sites are becoming the way of living.

Revenue Models

The Revenue models for SNS can be categorized into three types:

(1) Advertising model

(2) Subscription model

(3) Transaction model

1) Advertising Model

This model makes money from the companies who wish to advertise their products or

services on the website. The sites may either put up banners of these companies or redirect

the traffic to a particular website in which case they receive a referral fee or a percentage of

resulting revenue.

The existing users generally do not mind advertisements to a certain extent. They consider it

as a price they have to pay to get access to all the free content. To be profitable, these

websites need to have a large number of user bases. For this, increasing awareness through

advertisements is important. Another very prominent way to increase the user base is throughrecommendations of the existing users.

Some numbers in Perspective:[2]

Social networking site (SNS) MySpace accounts today for about 80.8 percent of overall SNS

traffic. According to eMarketer, in terms of advertising revenue, on any given day this

accounts for approximately 57.9 percent of all SNS advertising revenues.

In the U.S. alone, overall advertising spending on social networks as a proportion of total

online ad spending is expected to increase from about 2.14 percent last year to 6.82 percent in

2011

2) Subscription Model

This Model generates revenue when users subscribe to a service or a product provided by the

site. In this model, user‟s willingness to pay is the most critical factor. This in turn depends

on the quality of the offering.






References:

[1] http://ccc.georgkolb.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/content-posted-on-social-

network.jpg

[2] www.signalversusnoise.com

[3] Albrecht Enders , Harald Hungenberg, Hans-Peter Denker, Sebastian Mauch.

The long tail of social networking. Revenue models of social networking sites. Strategic

Management, University of Nuremberg, Lange Gasse 20, 90403 Nuremberg, Germany

http://ccc.georgkolb.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/content-posted-on-social-network.jpg




http://www.signalversusnoise.com/






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All about Social Networking Sites