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How To Pick Out The Best Social Networking Software For Your Site - Identifying The Community Needs

Looking back at earlier articles, I noticed I frequently write about the worth of really writing down your site’s needs prior to buying a social network script.

A lot of the bad reviews a number of of these social network scripts are getting are due to clients not really comprehending what they considered necessary in the first place.

What they buy can then never live up to their expectations, as they are not really certain of what is they wanted initially!

To assist you in picking the best social network cript, I’ve put together the below to help you comprehend what you really require for ypur site. It could appear obvious at first, but for someone with no IT or software design experience, it can really be quite challenging.

I will take as a case study the identification of requirements to set up a specialized community network website for backoffice banking employees (the site will be reffered to as BBE in the below).

Simply use the logic for whatever social network site project you are working on.

Setting the goal:

The goal of BBE is to build a site where backoffice banking employees (bbe’s) can group together, connect and share information.

Segmenting the visitor community:

The visitors are either bbe’s or persons working in financial recruitment agencies. The visitors speak English and come from banks from lots of different countries.

Visitor community requirements:

The bbe’s have the following requirements:

-    Associating with others in the same business
-    receiving career offers from recruitment agencies
-    easy access to common backoffice banking documentation which apply to all financial institutions

The recruitment agencies have the following requirements:

-    easy access to profiles from banking employees-    way of contacting the banking employees

BBE website requirements:

So, in order for BBE to be any good for the community, the following is needed:

-  distinct types of profiles for bbe’s and recruitment companies
-  opportunity to invite and propose contacts
-  opportunity to send mails and instant messages
-  message job board with opportunity to apply
-  A wiki for conventional banking documentation
-  video and audio upload capacities to complement the wiki
-  Membership management: Membership for bbe’s is free of charge, recruiters are  required  to put down a monthly    membershipfee
-  advertising components for books and industry seminars
-  RSS to add to the wiki
-  Et cetera

You understand the point. What I’m doing here is determining the needs for my site based on the requirements of the visitors. What you shouldn’t do, is purchase a social network software package and then see how you can force its functionality down onto your visitors. It sounds really obvious, but you’ll be surprised how many people make this error.

As a webmaster, you could find it really cool that your site enables visitors to “hug” one another, but my backoffice banking employees will not be so impressed by this “cool” feature that can’t be removed fro the script.

The visitors set the community needs. Once you have your overview of needed functionality, you can begin comparing it to the features each of the software packages has to offer and get the best social networking software for your site!

For a good site with list of features of many different social network script solutions with users reviews, check out www.TopCommunitySoftware.com

About the Author

Joe has over 5 years of experience in finances and software development, and is currently starting up as an independent marketing consultant specialized in social networking.