Why New Social Networks Will Have a Hard Go
There’s two clear trends we’re seeing with regard to Social Networks (i.e. Facebook, Bebo, Ning etc.) in our research;
1) Specialization: There’s a growing number of specialized Social Networks for people’s hobbies, cultures or activities. Such as sailing, Indians, African Americans and more, we call these SSN’s (Specialized Social Networks). Then there’s services like Ning that enable social groups to connect and organize.
2) Consolidation: People are getting over the mad rush and excitement of new stuff and staying put, including consolidating where they are and what services they are using. If they’re on Facebook, they’re staying.
In terms of global Social Networking services, Facebook has won, as LinkedIn won for business networking. MySpace, Bebo, NetLog and others can try all they want, but pulling in people from existing services is going to be a tough job. Why?
It’s Not Contacts It’s Relationships & History
Sure, Buzz already enabled your Gmail contacts to easily migrate into Buzz (a problem with privacy in and of itself) and Facebook and the others offer the same service. But it’s not about your contacts. It’s about your content history (the photo’s and videos you’ve shared, commented on, laughed and cried over, the notes you’ve made and shared and more.) This is the real value inherent in a Social Networking service.
While it may be easy to import contacts, it’s much harder to convince all your friends and connections to move to a new service. Because they too have a history on that service. And they don’t just connect with you. They too have their own family and friends they’ve established relationships with.
For new services that want to compete directly with Facebook, this is their biggest challenge. And relationships and that history are not transferable. It’s just not technically possible.
Specialized Networks Have Opportunity
This doesn’t mean there isn’t still opportunity. We see a trend toward specialized Social Networking services, such as AllSailors or ConnectedSailors or singles dating for sailors like LoveSail in the UK. Then there’s Ning where you can set up your own Social Network for whatever hobby, sports group, community group you want. Easily and quickly. These specialized Social Network services are growing and what we’re seeing is that people are keeping their Facebook, NetLog etc., services and then engaging with specialty Social Network related to their hobby. We have seen as well, that people who are passionate about a particular topic, cease engagement with general services like Facebook; this will represent a monetization challenge to these services.
Age Related Context
Tied into this is that the under 20 demographic is most active in broad social networks, it’s the 20+ crowd who are establishing hobbies and extra interests that are migrating more to Specialized Social Networks (SSN’s), especially the 35+ demographic, men and women alike.
(Author: G. Crouch)