Making Money Online With Social Media Applications

Series Article 17

If you like Twitter, Skype, FaceBook or many of the other social media sites out there, you can make money creating social media applications widgets and plugins. These applications perform some sort of function such as having fun or promoting a cause or even PC-like software functions. Money is made through advertising served when the application is used or with membership fees and/or purchase fees. Social media sites are some of the most highly trafficked sites on the internet so tapping into a large audience there is not only possible but potentially quite profitable. Just think of something neat and hire it out at odesk. Then promote it and make money.

One great way to build social media applications is Kickapps.com, from their site;

Two Sides of KickApps

There are two sides to the KickApps platform: the community-facing features are the things like media sharing and profiles that you use to enhance your site’s user experience; and management features–the tools that make it simple for you to configure, customize, and run your community on a daily basis.

Community-Facing Features

• My Home
  The My Home page is the starting point for every member of your community.The individualized My Home features real-time RSS feeds about the community’s and their friends’ activity. These features are designed to keep your members engaged and your community lively and active.
• Media Sharing and Mobile Uploading
  Members of your community can upload, share and rate your site’s media (UGC and editorial), including videos, photos, and audio files. KickApps also supports mobile uploads for videos and photos to allow your members to generate content on-the-go.
• Profile Pages
  Each member can create a personalized profile page with a unique URL. Their unique home on your site, your members can see all their uploaded media and blogs in one place, and their friends can leave them messages and comments.
• Viral Widgets
  Members can syndicate their favorite content from your community to some of the Web’s most trafficked sites, including MySpace, iGoogle, WordPress and Blogger, with a simple mouse click. Or, they can easily copy/paste the embed code.
• Messaging
  Members get individual inboxes where they can receive video and audio-enabled messages from you or their peers.
• Friending and Groups
  Powering the connectivity of your site, members can easily ‘friend’ others as well as create groups within your community that receives real-time feeds of group activities, including media uploads, comments and new members.
• Blogs and Podcasts
  Any member can post his or her own blog or podcast into the community.
• Message Boards
  The Ajax interface makes it easy for members to participate in discussions, thus encouraging activity and engagement. Additionally, thread-based, webcam-enabled discussion boards are easy to organize and moderate.

Management Features

• The KickApps Affiliate Center
  Create, deploy and manage your entire community from the KickApps Affiliate Center. This powerful tool enables publishers and developers to control every aspect of the community (members and media) from one place.
• Industry’s First Self-Service Widget Builder
  Create custom, branded Widgets that allows your members to syndicate your community’s content across the web. The KickApps Widget Builder is the industry’s first self-service tool that enables every publisher and developer to easily create their own viral Widgets that can be embedded on any website including the world’s largest social network, MySpace.
• Media Management
  Knowing and controlling all media is a crucial requirement for managing your KickApps community. Using the KickApps Affiliate Center you can easily monitor and set rules for reviewing each piece of media uploaded into your community, instantaneously rejecting obscene or copyrighted content.
• Member Management
  The ability to control the membership of your community is as important as managing your site’s media. KickApps provides you with a detailed view of all your community members and enables you to foster relationships with them through direct messaging as well as assigning different levels of permissions. Additionally, you can review and edit any profile and disable or ban troublemakers.
• Advertising Inventory Control
  An active community with engaged members will create incremental advertising inventory for your site. KickApps enables full control of the available advertising slots on your KickApps-powered pages. See pricing page for details.
• Detailed Reporting
  Generate high-level or detailed historical reports on site traffic, media uploads, members and more. All exportable to variety of formats for data mining.
• Content Management System (CMS) Compatible
  KickApps is compatible with all major CMS systems, including Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. You can use our Single-Sign On (SSO) APIs to add social features to your CMS-powered site quickly and easily.

4 points to keep in mind would be;

1. It should have the function of an aggregator. Blogs have RSS feeds. You can grab these feeds and have them displayed in an easy to use home page tool like Pageflakes. With the rise of social media, your blog’s home page no longer is the main landing page. With the advent of FriendFeed, Twitter hashtags and yes even something as simple as cross posting your latest post to other blogs and social networks you own, your content becomes ubiquitous over the Internet given the fact that each of your social platforms may cater to a different target market. Developers should be able to see the value in making their users content as ubiquitous as possible.

2. “Social” should be beyond adding friends, generated because of true interest in a particular community. In the old days of MySpace and Friendster, the benefits of adding friends were really limited to being able to see each others profile. Today, the concept of building a community goes beyond having a friends list. If you do a Google search for “Friendster,” your top results include free custom themes made by community members. In the realm of mobile tech, you have Apple, Android and Nokia building a platform allowing a community of developers to converge by providing SDK’s for their operating platforms. In Twitter, a community is built upon hash tags to promote specific topics and advocacy.

3. Content can be imported and exported easily. Apart from Blogspot and Wordpress, one of the better blogging tools out there is SquareSpace, a service that allows for easy dynamic formatting. But one of the features I like about SquareSpace is that despite being a paid service, they have the confidence to allow the import and export of your blog’s content. This is a similar deal to the ease of getting a credit card offer and at the same time making it easy to cut it off. I don’t know about you, but bloggers can be fickle

4. There are value added benefits to linking. Look, we’re not talking of link advertising. We’re talking about simple conveniences that can be appreciated by anybody. if you post a YouTube URL or image file on Plurk, instead of a link, you’ll see the embedded video or photo. The same goes for FaceBook. I guess the frame of mind in building social apps is that the platform itself is social (i.e. Ping.fm). These small things are actually a big deal as it makes it more convenient for people to access your medium in a space where it is easy to get distracted with other things to do in front of the computer.

Whats most imporrtant to understand is that there’s a certain mindset you have to align yourself with before you engage a community that is not only easily distracted but are easily frustrated by services that do not work the way users think they should.

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