SUCCESS CONSULTING

Besides finding the best social networking software for your needs, you need to be creative about what kind of social network you want to cater to. You really need to think outside the box in order to be successful in the social networking game today. If you attempt to build a generic Facebook type of site your chances of success are slim to none. Why would anyone want to join a site that does exactly what Facebook is already doing so successfully?

You need to focus on your specific idea and create a niche site that has a specific target audience. For example if your favorite hobby is fishing, you could build a social networking site around that topic. As you are most likely knowledgeable in that area it wouldn’t be hard to run a fishing social network successfully. Being able to advertise and create some income from a fishing site would be simple as well with pay per click programs such as Google AdSense or selling fishing equipment or magazines through advertisements on your site! Using the right social networking software easily allows for advertisements to be added to key areas of your website!

SocialEngine is one of the most popular brands when it comes to social networking software.  SocialEngine was initially released in 2007 and has over 10,000 active customers utilizing the SocialEngine platform.  Currently their are two flavors of the platform, SocialEngine PHP and SocialEngine Cloud.  The latest version of SocialEngine PHP is 4.3 with enhancements being worked on constantly by the SocialEngine developers. Get more information about SocialEngine and learn why it is a great platform to easily create a highly customizable social network.   I. Installation of SocialEngine Depending on the SocialEngine platform you go with, either SocialEngine PHP or SocialEngine Cloud the installation is either going to be manual or completely automated.  SocialEngine Cloud is fully hosted and installed by SocialEngine staff.  Once you decide to go with SocialEngine Cloud, the SocialEngine team spin up your community on their servers, configure a base SocialEngine script and optimize the web server for you.  The data of the community lives on their server and you lease the script and web server for a fixed monthly price. Alternatively, if you decide to go with SocialEngine PHP, you need to manually install the social networking software.  SocialEngine has done a wonderful job building an installation script that will walk you through the installation process.  Take a look at the video below to see how simple it is to install SocialEngine PHP on your own web server. If manually installing the script is a scary thought, SocialEngine also offers an installation service in which SocialEngine staff will work with you to install the social networking script on your own server.   

  BoonEx just put out an awesome blog post regarding their achievements in 2013, as well as their future plans for 2014.  To celebrate their success and to welcome the new year, BoonEx is offering a huge 30% off all orders between now and January 16, 2014.   With this discount you could save $240.00 when purchasing a Prime license for Dolphin.

In early 2013, BoonEx released Dolphin 7.1 witch touted a great new design and improvement in quality. Through 2013, Dolphin had a few minor revisions which finished with version 7.1.4 which also incloded impovements to mobile apps.  The blog post then goes on to state that many companies and people into social networking noticed that 2013 was a bit of  a slow year for social networking software companies in general.  This could be attributed to Facebook fatigue, a form of less attractiveness in starting your own social network due to the massiveness of Facebook and how groups and pages can be created for niches now.  The cloud based services could also have attributed to the decline of publicly hosted social networking scripts.  Sites such as Ning allow people to spin up a social network in the cloud.  While sites like Ning are convenient, they are not highly customizable and can only take you so far.

Regardless of the decline of social networking in 2013, BoonEx has their own take and vision on what needs to be done moving forward.  Before we get to their vision for the future, lets take a look at the success BoonEx achieved in 2013.  BoonEx updated their market to allow users to validate that third party plugins would be compatible with their specific version of the Dolphin script.  The list of trusted vendors was also updated.  Trusted vendors must also include mandatory fields on theur profile such as skills, working hours, location, spoken languages, and availability.   The changes to the BoonEx market have been extremely helpful to both customers and vendors.

When looking at 2014, BoonEx understands where things are going in their industry.  Different types of users utilize different types of social networking sites, from Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, and LinkedIn.  The great news is that a Facebook only social network is never going to happen due to the various other platforms users gravitate to on a daily basis.  This means that niche specific sites are still going to be successful going forward.  BoonEx plans to release Dolphin 7.1.5 soon in 2014.  This new version of BoonEx Dolphin’s social networking software will have even more advancement in mobile and touch devices.  As more and more people utilize their smart phones and tables to access the Internet it is extremely important to cater to this growing change in society in order to stay relevant and successful.