A lot of talk is going around about social media marketing and social search and generally about how you should be utilizing the utilities in order to help give your business an edge. However while that’s all very good and well, it’s also not terribly ambitious and you could very much look at that as thinking small.

What would happen if rather than using Facebook and Google+, you wanted to become the next Facebook or Google+? Is it even possible? How would you go about doing it?

A Look at the State of Social Media

If we were to look at the state of the social media platforms available currently, then there are certainly some weaknesses there for you to exploit. On the one hand, Goolge+ really hasn’t taken off in quite the way Google had hoped. That may well change as webmasters and SEO gurus recognize how integral to their search algorithms Google+ is likely to become, but for now there are some lessons to be learned.

The problem with Google+ was essentially that it attempted to directly take on Facebook and this meant that people had a choice: stay with Facebook which has all of their photos and all of their friends on it, and which they invested a huge amount of time and energy into, or focus on setting up a new profile on a new social network that has no pictures and probably about two of their friends on it.

And what about Facebook? What’s its Achilles’ heel? Well while Facebook is still no doubt the top dog when it comes to social media, it can still be criticized of one thing – a lack of imagination. While Google went from just search and expanded into social media, maps, phone software and even dabbled in hardware, the most exciting thing that Facebook has done is to introduce the timeline and generally keep messing with the profiles. There’s a small chance that these tweaks and iterations could eventually start to drive away a few users, but at the same tie it means that Facebook members need to look elsewhere for their other services.

A Viable Business Plan

The reason for Facebook’s initial success was that it started off by focussing on a very small market – the students at Harvard (you’ve all seen the film by now). This allowed Facebook to easily target a selection of people, to make Facebook seem elitist and desirable (people wanted to be on it before they even could) and to ensure that there were a huge number of people on it before it went ‘global’. Google+ started this well by letting a select few use the Beta, and then by restricting registration to invite only, but it gave up on this tact too soon and opened wide before it had built up enough momentum.

If you wanted to tackle Facebook then you’d want to play it at its own game – come up with a niche for your social media, or a particular function that it can provide, and only once you have become successful in this area start to open up and include more people.

Some areas for your consideration are file sharing (something which Zuckerberg has toyed with in the past himself), augmented reality (this really hasn’t been used to its full potential yet) and mobile (a fully mobile social network could work better than a mobile ‘version’ of an existing network).

Jeet is aspiring technical writer and Cloud Server Administrator at directoryroll.com. Apart from professional life he loves to shares various opitizing techniques for cloud servers which he uses in day to day life in work profile.