Online Social Media Networks

Online Social Media Benefits

A typical OSN platform architecture.  It is desirable to customize an OSN to sustain competition in this field.  The social network provider should choose a brand name with its own API interfaces and profile variables.  The chosen forum categories must be relevant to the sufficiently large user community. 
The OSN platform must include specific functionalities that make it easy for users to join and enjoy the services.  Furthermore, the provider must prove the online marketing concept to attract members to join and leave freely.  Highly sophisticated software, virtualized data centers, or processing and storage cloud platforms are needed.

Large Social Network

As an on-demand service provider, the OSN platform should be appealing to al Web 2.0 Communities.  The social network community must operate reliably with high availability and performance.  Logically, the OSN provides a P2P platform.  However, modern popular social networking services are all built with the client / server architecture for easy management and maintenance.  This Means that all blog entries, photos, videos and social network relationships are stored and managed by private clouds owned by the service providers.  A large social network site must maintain huge data centers.  To serve clients better, many of the data centers are virtualized to provide cloud services.

Social Network Benefits

Editorial web sites often include a forum already immersed in Web 2.0 services.  Forums are valuable but lack the attraction to deliver the same level of value as social network communities.  A full-blown social network community can be built around a forum to result in the following four operational benefits :

• High Return Visit Rate

Users return to the social network community frequently.  This opens up the opportunity for great page impressions and a huge advertising inventory.

• User Loyalty

Users connect to their friends and will not abandon them easily.   They do not move over to a competing social network.  Instead, they show high customer loyalty. 

• Virtual Growth

Members invite their friends to the social network community.  This is effective marketing at a low cost, and the OSN grows by itself. 

• Business Model

With a social network community you can even revenues through subscriptions to premium content in addition to advertising revenues.

Facebook and Twitter

Twitter does not completely copy all the offline relationships onto the web sites.  Hence, the attraction to use Twitter is far less than Facebook at present (2010).  On the other hand, Facebook is not as open as Twitter.  These features make people trust Facebook more than Twitter.  Last but not least.  Facebook is more complex in functionality then Twitter.  Although Twitter has plenty of third party application. 
Twitter is still not convenient for beginning users.  Facebook has embedded many common features.  If someone does not like to explore third-party applications for some common functions, she would go to
Facebook instead of Twitter, based on the current trend.