The big social networks like Facebook struggle to monetize their membership base. Their biggest problems their size and maintenance cost as opposed to advertising revenue.
An active community of interested people is a huge marketing resource. The big networks are general as far as interest but they have smaller interest groups, however those groups aren’t being sold to. The classic monetization such as banner ads is entirely ineffective. In order to sell to the interested groups, there have to be businesses in respective niches. Unfortunately that business isn’t the one that runs the network – running it is a whole another business in itself.
To make matters worse, social networking sites stand guard against any attempts to monetize their networks by Internet marketers. Their motivation is natural, that kind of monetization would benefit only the marketers and would not covert the costs of maintaining the network.
Having a huge community looks promising but it brings other big issues on the table. Meanwhile a smaller community is much easier to maintain and to sell to it. More often than not, a small community has a much bigger commercial intent and once the technical problems are solved, monetization is easy.
How much would Facebook make if it was a paid subscription. Mind you, nobody will ever pay to use such a general network, but what if it was a smaller and very targeted community. It’s not a secret that little closed communities are like mastermind meetings where big ideas are born, anyone in that business would pay to have access to the community of that kind. Not to mention paid classifieds and ability to post to paid directories – all those services are top quality in a private environment. And of course let’s not forget the good old affiliate offers and your own products.
The essential factor in social marketing is finding a niche where there’s no community but the crowd is hungry for it. The Internet is a big place and there are hundreds of thousands such niches, targeting them can be very profitable from square one, unlike targeting general audience with no goal whatsoever. Remember the old adage – try to please everyone and you will not please anyone.
