Facebook started small, only being offered to college students when it was first launched. At the time of its creation, Friendster and MySpace were the social networking giants. Fast forward only a few years and Facebook is now estimated to be worth over 15 billion dollars. It's an impressive story and very common to see small new sites take down the previous sites that dominated an industry.

Take Google for instance. When Google was first launched, there were tons of other popular search engines. Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, were some of the search engine leaders. How did Google take the majority of the search engine market share? The founders thought outside the box and instead of building an entire web portal, they focused on just web indexing and acting as a search engine. The simplicity of the site design won people over and eventually Google overtook all of the other search engines in the market. Google has now evolved into many facets, but it all started with just a simple basic search engine.

It's very possible to rise from a small social networking property to a huge site like MySpace or Facebook. All it takes is a great idea and the right members and social media to help get the name out.

Bigger is not always better in the world of social networking and social media. Twitter is another huge success story. People flock to Twitter just to see short messages that were once sent via devices like pages or cell phones to friends. Twitter took texting/paging to a whole new level by allowing mass broadcasts of your status to whoever decided to follow, or view your profile. SIMPLE CONCEPTS CAN BE REVOLUTIONARY! Twitter's estimated value is over 8.7 billion dollars!


So you may be thinking...I have a great idea! Where do I start?


 I am so glad you asked! 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 tyoe 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!

Promoting a social network can be difficult at times; however, if you select a specific niche things get a lot easier! Face it, you could have the greatest social network on the Internet but if nobody knows about it what is the point? Back to our fishing example, word of mouth advertising is extremely powerful! It would be simple to promote your fishing site at bait and tackle shops, or just mentioning it to other fishing enthusiasts while out fishing. If you've got more of a budget you could advertise in fishing magazines or sponsor fishing events. With the right social networking software, you can find plugins that really assist in the word of mouth advertising. When a user signs up you can ask your members to email their contacts from their email address to let them know about your new and awesome site! Let me break down the power of word of mouth advertising. Imagine you had a new site with 1000 members. If each of those members got two of their friends to join, and then those new members got 3 friends to join your site would have exploded to 6000 members at a rapid rate! The more traffic to your site means more clicks on ads which means more income from your site!

It is important to find only the best social networking software to build your social network with. You want software that is full of features out of the box so you don't need to learn how to code things you might want or pay someone else to do it for you. Above are a breakdown of the best social networking software I have had the pleasure of working with. Click on any of the links to view the details of each script or to visit the author's website for more information.