1. What is SNS?
SNS, social network. Full nameSocial Network Service
In 1967, Stanley Milgram (1933-1984), a psychology professor at Harvard University, created the six-degrees of separation theory, which simply said: “There will be no more than six people between you and any stranger. That is to say, You can get to know any stranger through up to six people.” According to the six degrees of separation theory, each individual’s social circle continues to expand and eventually becomes a large network, which is a social network (SNS).
Now we're going to use the internet to test this theory!
In the personal network, if you want to meet any stranger, you only need to go through up to six friends to achieve the goal. "In the context of Web 2.0, each user has his own blog, self-centered small circle, personalized tags or IM, email, etc. connected together." According to the six degrees of separation theory, each individual's social The circle continues to expand, and finally becomes a large network, which is a social network (SNS). "
What will SNS bring to us?
Social relationships are the indispensable foundation for people to carry out any activities today. They are not only very important for business people, but also for college students. As the saying goes, a good man has three gangs. He relies on his parents at home and friends when he goes out. If he has more friends, The road is easy to walk and so on. These vividly illustrate the importance of connections to personal development.
2. Domestic SNS analysis
Xiaonei network
Before opening the API on campus, I made two mistakes: one was that I underestimated the enthusiasm of small domestic web2.0 websites to develop apps; the other was that I overestimated the business vision of domestic SNS websites.
I think opportunity is the main reason for the success of the school network in China: when Wang Xing was building the school network, the State Education Commission began to control BBSs in major universities. School students had nowhere to go, and the school network just made up for it, and those Students leaving school are faced with two extremely bad classmates, ChinaRen and 5460, and they can only choose the school network. Therefore, the success of Xiaonei.com is not so much the success of the real-person network and targeting the college student market, but rather the State Education Commission and Tsinghua senior Zhang Chaoyang gave Wang Xing this opportunity. The fact that Wang Xing left the school to start a domestic business has not made any progress, which also illustrates this problem. The success of the school is not the success of copying the website model, but the success of opportunities.
BTW: I personally think that the opportunities in Internet entrepreneurship are very important. The fact that Wang Zhidong has not turned over since he left Sina speaks volumes. I still have two examples of successful Internet entrepreneurs who left their original companies and failed to start their own businesses, but I can’t name them because I know them. In short, successful people should not think that they are great. Most of your success is due to bad luck.
The nature of the campus network is not a Facebook model, but a community website. Although it has also made necessary isolation, overall, UGC still accounts for a very important part of the campus, especially the campus and mop are closely integrated. I saw an interview with Wang Xing when he founded Hainei: A reporter asked him why he founded Hainei. He said that although Xiaonei.com copied Facebook, it was essentially a copy of MySpace, and he was more optimistic about Facebook, so he founded Hainei and truly copied Facebook. I didn't understand this at the time, but later I understood it. If you study the school network carefully, it is indeed a MySpace website disguised as Facebook, and its community nature is obvious.
The nature of the community on campus determines that he will never adopt Facebook's business model. Why? If you work hard like me to create a community website and accumulate so many members, then you will definitely not have the determination to open the website and open users. Because such a community can already allow you to make a lot of real money. If you completely transform into an application platform now, you will give up the benefits that are now within your reach and make a greater bet. Or to use an allusion from martial arts novels to describe it, if you want to practice the peerless magical skill of absorbing stars, you must first destroy the internal strength that you have worked hard for twenty years. Unless you are forced to a corner, who would be willing to take this risk?
This is the dilemma in the school, but for Chen Yizhou, he is not embarrassed at all, because he is a person who refuses to give up even immediate interests. So the bullying clause in the school is not surprising at all. What is strange is that treating others as fools is a problem of one's own IQ or that of others?
But frankly speaking, the school's current conditions are very good. It has accumulated enough users and raised US$450 million in funds. It is fully qualified to build a platform without having to worry about any risks, not to mention the unprecedented surge in domestic web 2.0 small websites. The enthusiasm for app development and Taobao’s experience also prove that Facebook’s business strategy is completely possible in China. But based on Chen Yizhou's character and the current practices of Xiaonei.com, I can conclude that Xiaonei will personally enter several vertical fields, such as e-commerce, tourism, online recruitment, and web online games. While making such a small amount of money, it has given up on becoming a real Chinese Facebook. possibility. I think if Chen Yizhou is replaced by Jack Ma, Jack Ma will definitely choose to take the platform path, so character determines destiny.
Kaixin.com
Kaixin.com is a website that is truly a Facebook clone in terms of temperament. In fact, the only secret to Kaixin.com’s success is that it copied Facebook in the most humble and sincere way, and it was copied to the right level. Kaixin.com’s two most popular apps for buying and selling friends and competing for parking spaces are copied from Facebook’s “Friends for sale” and “Parking War.” Kaixin.com claims to be thoughtful and prompts you with an email login link after registration, but they are actually copied from Facebook. Facebook. However, Kaixin.com has become an astonishing success just by faithfully plagiarizing Facebook. This shows that cheaters on the domestic Internet, please show some professionalism. You have to be more similar when you copy.
The only problem with Kaixin.com is its business model. CPC advertising is even more unworkable in China. If Facebook can still earn 145 million with CPC, then Kaixin will not need to count on advertising fees at all. If we follow Facebook's platform strategy and build a huge application platform and charge fees through app merchants, the road will be too long and the investment required will be too great. After all, Ma Yun’s success is also due to the cumulative investment of more than one billion US dollars by Masayoshi Son and Yahoo. Sun Zhengyi has already spent 450 million on Chen Yizhou, and it is impossible to give it to Kaixin.com again.
So I guess Kaixin.com's business model will take the third path, which is to make its own web games, and eventually transform into an SNS-type casual web online game website. But this road will be very tiring: First, the competition in the web online game market is no less intense than that of SNS websites; second, the development cost of purely small games is very high.
At present, Kaixin.com's mini-games are all developed by itself, but this kind of mini-games has a freshness period. Users are very active at the beginning, but after the freshness period, they gradually find it uninteresting. After a period of time, users During the active period of time, it will gradually decline. Kaixin.com has now begun to have this problem. Therefore, the life cycle of traditional online games is only 3-5 years even if they are constantly updated. The life cycle of such small web games is even shorter, only 1-3 months. If you want to keep website users active, you must continue to develop it, so the development cost will become higher and higher.
The smartest thing about Facebook is that it does not develop apps itself, but only encourages app developers to develop them, so Facebook does not have the huge burden of development costs. If Kaixin.com wants to get out of this predicament, it must still adopt the Facebook platform strategy. It can be said that if Kaixin does not adopt the platform strategy, it will have no great future. But if Kaixin adopts the platform strategy, the goal will be too big and difficult to achieve. So Facebook’s model is not easy to copy. If you really want to make Facebook, you won’t be able to play it if you don’t open the platform. But if you open the platform, you won’t have enough funds to support it, and you won’t be able to play it either.
Overseas network
Wang Xing's current situation is very embarrassing. When Wang Xing founded Hainei.com, he already realized that it wanted to avoid becoming a community website. However, because he did not start with apps at the beginning, Hainei became an IT fan community in a way he did not expect. But he was very unwilling to accept this and tried his best to get rid of it. However, he does not do IT fan communities, some people do it, so 5GSNS came out, and a large number of domestic IT giants ran away. I don’t know whether Wang Xing is more happy or disappointed now.
Compared with all the SNS clone websites mentioned below, Hainei.com has one essential difference: Hainei.com does not provide the broadcast of public information on the website, and you cannot see information other than your friends. It still uses the Facebook model to guide you. Socialize with people you know. But unfortunately, domestic users are the generation who grew up in Chinese BBSs. You don’t need apps to seduce them. They only want to post undercover posts and engage in UGC in China, rather than attracting their friends to socialize in a false way. Failure, this is really a failure.
3. Traditional BBS
For traditional BBS to be profitable, there are two proven avenues:
1. BBS transformed into online media. There are countless successful cases of using BBS as the basis to become online media:
The predecessor of Sina.com was a Sitonglifang Sports Club BBS;
The predecessor of NetEase was also a big BBS. I even registered an account for trolling in 1998;
Among IT media websites, which one of the recently acquired IT168 and PCPOP did not start off as a BBS? Pacific Computer Network also started as a BBS;
CSDN also started as a BBS. It was initially a technical support forum for programmers’ base camps;
ITPUB, which was bought by IT168, and ChinaUnix are also BBS;
JavaEye also started as a BBS;
2. BBS transforms into e-commerce
The Alibaba website was a BBS from the beginning, and Jack Ma personally decided to become a BBS;
Needless to say, FenceNet is also a BBS;
Soufun also started as a BBS
There are too many Internet websites that started as BBSs. This is a bright road. Why are these Internet veterans so intimidated?
1. The operation difficulty and cost of BBS are relatively high
To run a BBS well, the webmaster needs a very superb balancing ability and a capable operation team. It is extremely difficult to run a BBS well. The threshold is very high. Too many people want to avoid this difficulty and take shortcuts. , fraud, watering, and noise, the traffic has increased, and the commercial value of the community has disappeared. Moreover, BBS requires continuous investment. Once operational investment is insufficient, the popularity of BBS will be difficult to sustain.
2. The more experienced Internet users are, the more they hope to use the unique functions of the website to win and win without a fight, and the more they want to avoid close combat and down-to-earth operations in business.
People who are particularly interested in the Internet often hope to use their own strengths as core competitiveness, hope to use excellent website functions and experiences to attract users and defeat opponents, and disdain daily operations without technical content and marketing similar to traditional sales. Way. I feel that I have this problem, and I also feel this from the comments of many people above. After all, a website is a company, and it must abide by business rules. It is more important to operate and make money in a down-to-earth manner than to think about using killer website features to defeat your opponents all day long.
Websites that take shortcuts to succeed often have difficult business models. The business models of websites that are built up bit by bit are logical. Of the many websites mentioned above that started out as BBS, which one did not become successful after five or six years of steady operation? However, the blog sites that were so popular in 2005 are now closed down one after another. The difficulty of operating blog sites cannot be compared with BBS, so it is also more difficult to generate business models.
4. Facebook Skin
In a word, the founders of these websites have one obsession: "BBS is shameful, BBS has no commercial value, and BBS has no class. As a classy Internet veteran, I have to create A quality Internet lifestyle”
Classmate Xiao Dai is discuz! I wrote a long post on the forum about why he wanted to develop UCHome. The central idea is that BBS is outdated and BBS has too many shortcomings. I found that Facebook is better at building communities than BBS, so I developed UCHome now.
Why use Facebook skin to build a community?
1. BBS does have big flaws
Anyone who has run a BBS knows the problem of "bad money drives out good money" in BBS. The abundance of bad players will lead to the departure of experts and the decline of the community. Using Facebook's skin can isolate users to a large extent and solve the biggest chronic problem of BBS.
2. It can improve many functions that BBS has not done well.
For example, centralized information update notification functions, personalized recommendations, better community friend interaction functions, etc.
These benefits are all visible, coupled with the strong rejection of BBS by many people, they are more inclined to use Facebook skin as a community website. I have to admit that although the UCHome clone completely misunderstands the original intention of Facebook, UCHome is also a good improved version of community software.
But I have to say that as a non-profit community, using UCHome may be better than BBS, but for a website with commercial expectations, using UCHome as a community is undoubtedly suicide. Why?
Because the Facebook skin itself is used to achieve social interaction between acquaintances, it is a closed tool and is very unfavorable for the spread of information!
For a community website operated under the skin of Facebook, the dissemination of content created by its users is blocked, so it cannot successfully transform into an online media. This is the first business model of BBS. As an e-commerce website, its user dissemination is blocked. The channel is limited to friends, and the scope of communication is too small to form effective marketing. This second business model of BBS is also blocked.
The future of Facebook is bright, but whether China can have a Facebook now seems not so optimistic.
Most community websites disguised as Facebook are just for fun. If you are doing a Facebook-style community website as a hobby, that’s fine. But if you want to build a community website with commercial prospects, I would like to advise you to do it. Don't use UCHome, it's a dead end.
There is also an interesting trend: some community websites that started as BBS have also begun to become SNS and introduced the Facebook model:
One has a BBS and uses UCHome to set up a community. I think this is very funny. He obviously has his own BBS, but he also uses UCHome to steal its own users, just to let users play webgames on UCHome?
The other one is a little more clever and uses the Facebook skin for personal space and personal blog. In fact, this layer of skin is not important. What is important is how you provide community users with good personalized recommendations, good personal information aggregation, and good friends communication tools. I have not seen these in my personal space.
I predict that more than half of those community websites that have the skin of Facebook will die within two years, and the other half will be converted back to BBS.
It’s better to take your time when building SNS for community websites. Think clearly before doing it. If you want to do it, do it a little innovatively. Don’t be reckless and just steal other people’s buttons and CSS.
In 2009, web games promoted the development of SNS and third-party Apps to a certain extent. Most SNS achieved huge growth in the number of users, the number of third-party Apps, and advertising revenue through web games, which laid the foundation for the growth of China's SNS. This important foundation also lays hidden dangers for China’s SNS.
Starting from the second half of 2008, slave buying and selling, vegetable growing, parking space grabbing, and various test voting... Various online games and dating communities represented by Kaixin.com have sprung up and become popular in offices. In particular, circle-style interactive online communities where you can call friends can quickly involve many employees in the office. These two "work efficiency reducers" have caused headaches for many corporate executives and bosses, and have been boycotted by a large number of companies.
Seeing that their competitors are doing well, everyone refuses to lag behind.
Overnight, it seems that the spring of SNS has arrived, but this spring seems to belong only to web games. But are SNS really just games?
To put it bluntly, SNS is just a tool that was created to solve problems more efficiently. If a tool hinders our normal work and life, it is putting the cart before the horse. What goes up must come down. When will China's SNS, which has changed its flavor, return to normal?
5. How to use SNS now?
As a website, why do users come to your website?
Because your website is famous? Or is it because your website has high-quality articles and discussions? Or is it because your website provides many opportunities and resources to attract him?
If users come to your website for this reason, then you have failed by copying Facebook. Because the core competitiveness of your website still lies in "content", you still have to rely on UGC. Then it would be too difficult for a closed community, a community where users are decentralized and isolated, to create high-quality UGC.
Facebook relies on your friends being active on it and you being able to participate in their activities, that's the whole reason. It doesn’t matter what activities you engage in, or whether you write words or not. The only important thing is that you need a tool like Facebook to maintain relationships with your friends.
Although Facebook is not limited to friends you know, its main purpose is to provide communication with friends you know well. Therefore, Facebook itself does not provide any site-wide public information broadcast, nor does it provide anonymous access. You and the friends you know Communication between them is inherently private, and this information is inherently protected.
And a particularly important point is that Facebook does not encourage UGC (user-generated content), which is the essential difference from other web2.0 websites. What Facebook really encourages is the "interactive behavior" between you and your friends on Facebook, not the "interactive content created."
If you use this standard to measure it, you will find that Kaixin.com is the only website that looks like Facebook. Other websites, especially the poor imitators of Facebook, have completely failed to understand the essence of Facebook and have completely used their own ideas of making community software. The UCHome created by Facebook is basically a community website. Let’s take a look at 5GSNS:
1. Why do you go to 5GSNS? Because you want to read articles written by keso or other experts.
2. Why do you go to 5GSNS? Because you know what keso or other big names are doing now.
3. Why did you go to 5GSNS? Because there are recruitment information in the Internet industry.
To put it bluntly, it means: high-quality content and resources are attracting you, so to maintain high-quality content and resources, you must rely on high-quality members for continuous UGC. So let me ask you, is there any essential difference between this and a BBS? ? Or let me ask you this, keso does not use UCHome, but discuz! , will it prevent you from accessing 5GSNS? Will it prevent you from hanging out on this site and posting?
Vertical SNS profits from consumer experience
Users' different needs for relationships have brought opportunities for the rise of vertical or idiosyncratic SNS websites. SNS based on different classes, different groups, different hobbies, etc. have their own value. Comprehensive SNS is also It is impossible to monopolize the entire market. With such a large number of Internet users in China and so many needs, there are definitely still many opportunities for SNS with different characteristics and directions. Therefore, if there are good resources in certain aspects, there is a chance to build an SNS website that meets the needs of a certain group of people. Just as the sudden rise of Kaixin.com has surprised many people, although there may not be such good market gaps and opportunities, there are still opportunities in SNS.
If users enjoy playing it, they will consider purchasing the product. This concept is the profit idea of Douban.com. With a large number of quasi-professional book reviews, film reviews, and music reviews, Douban has helped Dangdang and Joyo sell a lot of products. In this, there will naturally be a spoonful of Douban.
In other words, the ideal SNS community should provide personalized food, accommodation, travel, shopping and entertainment services as its main service. The difference is that these services are entirely "individual" focused. The sns community knows your food tastes and recommends corresponding nearby restaurants to you; the sns community knows your cultural tastes and can recommend to you the latest movies that are about to be released or are currently being released, and this movie is exactly what you want to watch; During working hours, it can help you find the reference materials you need for your work; then, it can help you formulate a suitable travel plan before the holiday comes...
In fact, in addition to book reviews, movie reviews, and music reviews, there are many products that can be used for consumer experience. Kitchen supplies, travel products, catering and entertainment, educational products, digital products, cosmetics, daily necessities, cars and even real estate, job applications, all allow users to experience first and then consume.
The website itself becomes a shopping guide. Closely integrated with Taobao customers, this kind of advertising is very enjoyable for the website and members!
Taobao: http://taoke.alimama.com/
It won’t be too long before everyone enjoys entertainment. After all, leisure is not a basic human need and cannot occupy most of everyone’s time. SNS community operators need to leave their desks, go to the market to find solid services and provide them to users. This kind of resource integration work is also an app, and it also needs to provide an effective docking channel for collaborators, but what it needs is not Technology is a more open attitude - from online openness to offline openness, testing the operator's ability to control and guide traditional resources.
Providing all traditional resources to all users will be a huge task, so you may try to start with localization; or change the angle and start with a single category of services; or provide a single professional service for a single user group (Douban has already done this)...The final Internet application must be fully integrated with reality, and the SNS community should be the best person to take on this task.
A good 2.0 website must go through this process to accumulate and retain users from scratch.
The first step is to choose a vertical field, such as kitchen supplies, travel products, catering and entertainment, etc.
The second step is to have corresponding functions.
The third step is to let users go from using one function to using all functions of the entire site. This is a problem of website content stickiness. From the moment a user lands on the website and views the first page, you must find a way to attract his interest and retain him. Suitable example: "User similarity preference algorithm" such as "Douban guessing"
In the fourth step, I think the key thing to do after letting the user use many functions is not to get him to register, but how to get him to visit this website every day. And I think the best and most effective way is to let this user have his own circle of friends on this website. In this way, it is impossible for him not to come and take a look every day. This is just like the IM software. Whether I like QQ or not, I have to use it because many of my interpersonal relationships are on it, so it is impossible for me not to log in for a long time.
To sum up, it is to use good functions to attract users, use good adhesive website content and functions to make users like and understand the website, and at the same time provide users with endless recommendations. Finally, let users build their own social networks on the website, and finally Completely stick to the user so that he must log in frequently. I think this should be a better way to develop SNS.
Take Douban as an example
In the vertical field, Douban.com (douban.com) is popular for its positioning of sharing and communication of books, music, and movies, as well as its simplicity and ease of use. Although there is still debate on whether Douban.com is an SNS website, in any case, Douban.com has the first characteristic of a vertical SNS: the groups gathered are based on common interests and hobbies, and they have a common cultural atmosphere and circle. .
Douban’s SNS composition
Basic, friendly neighbor function.
Share, recommend + broadcast
discussion, group
Offline, same-city activities
These things added together constitute Douban’s SNS, which is very complete!
When asking why DOUBAN is successful in the short term, we are not asking what is good about Douban, but how Yang Bo built Douban and what work he did in terms of strategy, business and details, so that Douban can connect with the industrial chain, build systems and Attract users?
Strategically:
1. Intellectuals, the heavy group of people who choose "keyboard users" (this definition is not old-fashioned. It is a general definition, refers to the group of people with leading indicators in terms of educational literacy and desire to express; compared to the main group of Chinese Internet users - teenagers Intellectuals are a niche, so DOUBAN's market is a segmented market, and the scale of user development is slower than that of the general market).
Second, for the target group, a WEB2.0 community platform with comments and sharing as its core was selected. Whether it is a group, TAG, or SNS, they all serve the target group and are consistent with their behavioral habits. In other words, if the target group is not intellectuals, the WEB2.0 form is not necessarily chosen.
Third, the content traffic derivation model was selected. I think people largely misunderstand the meaning of interaction, thinking that there is only one type of interaction - the chat mode. The chatting type is represented by famous communities such as Tianya, Maopu, and Xilu. The performance is that there is no specific theme, or the theme has no specific direction. This type of crowd gathering is based on celebrities and requires a long time to cultivate. The other type of interaction is what I call the content traffic derived model. Represented by Sina, Baidu, Tudou, etc. In this type, people's comments and expressions have specific and immediate content as topics, and these contents are readily available on the website and can be seen everywhere; people express their feelings and are emotionally moved by the scene. DOUBAN chose books, audio and video, built a content resource in front of the community, and then closely integrated the content traffic with the derivative community. I think it is very wise.
Fourth, after accumulating users, you can quickly find your position in the industry chain. By grasping the power of the terminal consumer group, we obtained the qualifications and conditions for negotiation with the upstream of the industry chain, and successfully confirmed the specific cooperation method (only profit sharing, no advertising, no selling of goods)
DOUBAN's strategic clarity and accuracy are indeed extraordinary among many WEB2.0 websites.
In detail:
1. UI Douban’s UI is very popular with target groups, but not necessarily with non-target groups (for example, teenagers prefer gorgeous pages, and people who want to obtain information prefer long pages with rich content).
2. Improve a website that often corrects details. It is easy for people to like it. Because users will think the changes were made because of them.
3. Several elements mentioned in the promotion and detonation of popularity: opinion leaders, messengers, etc. have all done a good job, and I will not name them specifically. The so-called reputation is actually not mysterious at all.
4. Posture If Douban had the same posture as Taobao and Maopu, it might not be so popular. In terms of temperament, both it and its founder deliberately packaged it into a low-key, gentle, and professional image. This is a wonderful stroke.
5. Data mining is the real core technology of Douban and will be seen in the future.
The wealth of Douban belongs to cultural groups with high quality, high income and strong desire to express themselves. No matter what channels or topics Douban develops in the future, be it books, magazines, music, movies, blogs or travel, they will all be opened for these target groups. What Douban needs to do is to find service providers that are truly related to these topics and be able to gain profits from cooperation.
6. Vertical SNS website building program
With vertical fields as the core, it recommends interesting content to users, shares and discovers like-minded people, has a complete group discussion mechanism, offline activity modules, integrates Taobao customers, and achieves the purpose of making money using SNS as a platform.
The SNS website building program is currently under development. If you are interested, you can apply for a beta account now. How to apply: send an email to liamliu (at) vip.qq.com
Email format:
Title: Apply for an internal beta account of SNS website building program
Describe the field in which you need to build a website: such as kitchen supplies, travel products, catering and entertainment, educational products, digital products, cosmetics, daily necessities, automobiles, real estate, job applications, etc.