COMMUNITIES AND SOCIAL NETWORKING: lessons from the front line

Aim of the report

This report examines a selection of social networking and community sites in order to identify best practice in this sector across different marketplaces.

Interviews were conducted with six service providers:

• AccountingWEB (Sift Media)

• Complinet

• LAMS

• LinkedIn

• Magicalia

• ThomasNet

These interviews were then used as the basis of the case studies, which make up the body of the report.

Overview of findings

Community and social networking features were generally offered in order to provide a valuable additional service to offer to an audience that was already being served in other ways, with the hope of building further business around this engaged audience.

Community hosts identified a range of benefits arising from running services of this type, including creation of an archive of user-generated content that can be marketed to the community, higher renewal rates and lower user churn, and revenue generation (either direct or indirect).

Challenges faced when launching a community or social networking service included ensuring that the offering sufficiently populated with content, dealing with spam, and managing the community effectively.

Providers of these services judged their success in a number of ways, with measures including amount of time spent using the service, renewal rates, user churn, and the number of pages viewed per visit.

While none of these services was exclusively available to those paying a fee, a range of revenue generation techniques were evident, such as advertising and up-selling additional services. A range of indirect revenue benefits was also identified.