Social Network Software

Social Network Software Buying Guide

Social networking software allow creating an interactive and visually appealing social site. They can be acquired online or can be downloadable for hosting on your server with little effort as well as time. However, before you do so, it is essential to ensure that the social networking software has all that you need.

Purpose of Social Network Website

When you select a right software, you should check a purpose why you want to create a social network. Networks like Facebook, Linkedin or Google Plus already have tons of features to offer and are used by millions of users. They have very sophisticated infrastructure to offer best possible user experience to their users.

When you select a social network software, most probably you want to create it as a private community with as much control as you can have. This could be a private network in your company, school or any other organization with all privacy controls in your hand.

There is no point in having a software that offers too many or less features than what you need, because that means you will end up investing in a wrong software or product that either has least useful stuff for which you paid extra or lacks some essential features that cannot fulfill all your needs.

Because there are several social network software available in the market, it is essential to choose the most useful one as per your business or personal needs. For that, you will have to map the features to your needs or requirements. Therefore, here are some most useful features to look for!

Cloud versus Self-hosted

Most modern software are available in these two versions. If you already a Web server hosting your site, you can choose a self-hosted version. Otherwise, the cloud version can be a good-to-go-with version, provided security is ensured.

Open Source Code

Each too has its own coding framework, which is usually HTML or PHP in most cases. If you are a developer, having a software with an open source code framework is essential. Access to such code can enable you to make the desired changes to the code for including more functionality or features in your community site.

In case you have no programming skills, it can be even feasible to allow someone else to do the changes on your behalf. Making changes to code might appear a bit daunting, but it is really easy after some practice and useful for customizing the look and feel of the new site. A few software providers have a dedicated team to do these changes for you, which is surely not expensive. They are usually more than happy to guide and help you.

Friendly Designing Experience

If you are a beginner or naive with no programming skills, the best software for you is the one with drag-n-drop interface. Obviously, you would like to have all the desired features and functionality without the need to access or change the code. Most of these social network software don't come with too many templates. So you may have to rely on default template. If you can edit it or enhance look and feel, you can distinguish it from other sites using same code.

Facebook has more than half of its users accessing its platform through mobile and mobile apps. Apparently, Facebook is a big network but your ideal social network website must have responsive design atleast where your users can access their account without any issue.

Interactive Features

Making a new community site without including videos, comments, photos, discussions, polls, and blogs is just unimaginable. Therefore, choose a software that comes with all these utilities as modules or features. If you wish to give Facebook-like look, you can choose a software that allows including Facebook features such as likes, Notification Center, and posts.

Marketing Features

Several modern social media script builders come with unique features dedicated to marketing. Most social network software come with a unique module called Marketplace that allows selling products and keeping contact directly with the sellers. This means you can earn money from your new community site.

Feature Extensions

Products like SocialEngine, PHPFox and Boonex have their own app markets. Other users of their product develop various addons (extensions) and submit them to these marketplaces for free or as paid extension. These kinds of extensions can really help to increase feature strength and sometime enhance features of the network. It is always good idea to buy software having such an active and own marketplace.

Custom Branding

Do you wish to hide from your users the networking software that you have used to create the social site? If yes, then look for a a product that comes with 'no branding' feature. This feature will not have any “powered by” tags in the footer.

Monetization

What is the purpose of your social network? If you’re willing to build a close community without any profit plan then you may not need these else you should look for software that support monetization.  Built-in monetization support can help you to avoid messing with code especially if you’re not tech savvy.

Some of the social network software mention on our reviews also support advertising. Meaning if someone want to advertise their product to your community users, they can do so. That's also yet another great option to monetize social network without help of any external tools.