A new community, even if there is Facebook

Why are you going to create a new community if there’s Facebook?
This is a kind of question you could often and bitterly be surprised to be asked in case you are about to create a new community.

While reflecting about the possibility of succeeding in new social media projects, good reasons for saying that it is not gonna work can also arise very easily.

In fact, many people say that social media are another web fluff maybe just because many communities or groups have been abandoned or left spoiled or just because they don’t understand this new industry.

Actually two are the most relevant business approaches in social media:

-         social media marketing: marketing campaign of  brands, products or people done on social media;

-         to mix a community to a business: for example to use a community to advertise brands, products or people or to offer paying memberships with special privileges.

As for the Social Media Marketing, there are some figures, which demonstrate that it is mainly played on few social networks:

- 96% of marketers with years of social media experience are using Twitter, while 91% used Facebook and 89% LinkedIn.

- marketers with some social media experience are also big on Twitter (92%), followed by Facebook (88%) and LinkedIn (76%) (source www.emarketer.com).

- following: blogs (70%); Youtube or other video sites (46%); Social bookmarking sites (i.e. Delicious);  Forums (26%); Digg, Reddit, Mixx, StumbleUpon or similar sites (22%); Ning Sites (17%); My Space(11%).

The main motivation for that is partially linked to the fact that social networks are very rich or the richest in terms of members. Other important reasons are some social media tools that allow marketers to run the campaigns and to publish commercial information.

So until the community you are creating becomes a Big and you are able to offer social media tools matching the marketers’needs, you won’t see so many social media marketers running campaigns on your website.

As for how to transform a community into a business, this is only a short list with three basic recommendations:

- don’t forget to put in your business plan the costs derived from this reality: contributors are in average 2% of the entire community members, so you need a team of publishers, community managers and social media specialists (I dare you to find them) to run your business;

- preferably and accurately choose and study your market and focus on it, generalist social networks are harder to soar.

- a community is a round-the-clock job such as a whatever other business.

At this point, if you are again asked the question: “Why are you starting another community if we have Facebook?”, you may just answer:“Many people don’t buy furniture at Ikea”.

Set up what you have the full rights to call business and good luck!

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