5 Social Networking Features That Will Boost Your Traffic

Is your social networking site lacking in features and floundering with average growth? Are you having trouble figuring out how to keep users engaged in your social application? These are tough questions, and almost every entrepreneur I talk to has these concerns. The thing is, through hundreds of conversations and our 24 hour coverage of the space, we've developed some pretty good answers about what features make a positive difference on your social site. Here are five techniques that will help make your social site surge in popularity, so read up and start adding them! Games Lobby Imagine that there was a games page where you could chat with other social networkers who were waiting to play games. Maybe you could pair off or recommend games to each other. I'm talking about a real 'arcade' feeling, but for casual and social games. This is currently a big hole at Facebook, and a big opportunity for other players. We just chatted with hi5's CEO Alex St. John about just that at Casual Connect and you can see that the competitors are ramping up to do such a thing. We'll see how they do, but in the meantime, building a kickass games arcade and lobby is one sure fire way to get people excited. Virtual Currency, Virtual Goods and Achievements There's just no doubt that virtual currencies, virtual goods and achievements are the bread and butter of today's social games, and their success is starting to spread their influence into more traditional sites. I took a look at why you shouldn't just add badges to any old website earlier this year, but if you're creating a social network, a well implemented virtual currency system can help your users feel a reward for being social. Maybe users earn a bit of currency for every friend they engage with per day, and there are small decorations you can buy to spice up your profile. If you're a prolific friend, maybe you get to share a special badge with the friend who you so often communicate with. These ideas are exciting and engaging, and will ensure your site stays on people's radars. Photo Search One of the weakest parts of Facebook is currently the search. After you perform a search, you're usually looking at a few pages and applications related to your search term, even though a user's 'search' within Facebook likely has many different goals. People could be looking for photos tagged with a certain person, or personal information that includes a specific search term. To be fair, Facebook does have the "posts by friends" and "posts by everyone" feature on the left hand navigation of the search results, and those provide you with results that include status updates for your search term. But it's not enough for me. A new social network could really benefit from a searchable photo index. You search the term you'd like to see in photos, and then all your friends' photos with that term in the description or title are shown. This would be a great way to browse photos. Furthermore, if your new social network supports things like 'tagging', then people could tag their photos with terms like "Seattle", so other people could check out your Seattle photos with ease. Better Closed Networks and Group Walls I have a group of friends that I want to engage with in an exclusive way. On Facebook, I can add them to a 'close friends' list, but that still isn't very exclusive. Messaging them requires me to make a group for my friends or message them in the messaging section, but that makes it harder to include things like links, photos and videos like I can when I post on someone's wall. I imagine a new social network could have something like a Group Wall, that allows me to invite people to it, and we can use it as our scratchpad to stay in touch with each other. In the early days of Facebook, this is how I used the tool itself. I didn't feel like 300 people were looking at our walls, and for a few months it was a fun place to easily share funny content and see what my close friends were doing. It would be great to have that ability to easily share and chat with my friends in a closed network, and I think a group wall could do it. Integrated Location Features Location is fun. I love the idea of having a posted photo automatically tagged with it's location, so that people can tell where I am (when I choose to reveal that, of course) and give the photo a bit more context than just the date. A new social network that emphasized location would be a lot of fun to users, and of course this is similar to what foursquare is doing, but within the context of a fully featured social network that emphasizes photo sharing, it could be a different type of experience.

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5 Social Networking Features That Will Boost Your Traffic

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Neil Vidyarthi

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