5 Tips for Entrepreneurs Looking to Start aSocial Media Platform
Social media platforms are dominating forces in our hyper-networked postmodern society. They are the conduits through which a wholly new form of communication is routed and amplified. Some entrepreneurs have made their fortunes by investing in and launching innovative new platforms. Here are five tips for the would-be Zuckerberg looking to make their mark in the world of social media.
Know Your Niche
Knowing your place in the market is essential in any business venture – but it is particularly pertinent in social media. The giants of social media have filled pretty much every role to some degree. What they do not offer is specialization. This is why entrepreneurs can still flourish by launching specialist social media platforms. Platforms like the now-defunct Last FM and Soundcloud, for instance, filled the need for social media platforms that incorporated musical creativity. Bandlab fills this role in an even more specialized way – providing a social media platform with a built-in musical composition element.
Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience and defining what they might need from a new social media platform allows you to continuously tailor your service to the people that might share and use it. Before you start any design and strategy planning, you need to build profiles of your key user types. These profiles can be generated using traditional market research strategies or through modern big data analysis. A combination of both methods is typically considered to be the most sound.
Accept Risk
Not every new social media venture will immediately see success. In such a crowded marketplace, some hiccups are inevitable. You need to shrewdly calculate and accept a degree of financial risk. Luckily, it is possible to insure against unforeseen interruptions in business, property damage, and lawsuits with companies like KBD small business insurance Montreal. Insurance won’t cover losses you make through poor business planning, but it will keep you on track if you have any unexpected problems that you need to work through. Plenty of social media companies have to drastically rethink their design and marketing after the beta phase is complete.
Embrace Big Data
As a social media entrepreneur, big data is your friend. Big data can roughly be described as any dataset that is large and varied enough to only be workable or understandable using software. The use of these huge datasets, when conducted properly, can help you understand the complexities of social media user requirements. It can also help you and your team forecast accurately in order to build robust and innovative strategies for future development.
Be Willing to Change
A social media platform that stays the same as the environment changes around it is doomed to fail. On the other hand, social media platforms that are insensitively or poorly redesigned can turn existing users away. The key is, as usual, pertinent research. Maintain an understanding of the ever-changing requirements of your userbase in order to understand what needs to change and when.
