
// Development
How Much Does it Cost to Build a Social Network Website or App Like Linkedin
// Development
Social networks are not always a means to communicate with friends and share photos. Many companies use these platforms to popularize their brand, find business partners, and build business connections. When Reid Hoffman noticed this 17 years ago, he had a brilliant idea: “What if you create a social network for business?”
Thus, the idea of the social network LinkedIn was born, which for 16 years has grown to 600 million registered users (250 million active), more than 1.5 million groups, 13,000 employees and 2 billion dollars in revenue per year. From our guide, you will learn how the brainchild of Reed Hoffman became so popular and how to create a site similar to LinkedIn yourself.
Magnet. Encouraging users to actively and regularly interact depends on the needs of the participants and the professionalism of the developers. So, on LinkedIn, everyone can meet their needs:
Bridges (toolbar). To simplify the interaction between employers and applicants, the platform should provide a set of tools and rules for building bridges between them. LinkedIn builds such bridges with the following tools:
In the case of social networks, such a value is a repeated interaction of the participants. For example, in the case of the Kickstarter site, this is financing various projects. Musicians, producers, moviemakers, bloggers or potato salad lovers can use this platform to search for money to realize their ideas.
As you can see, each of the sites reviewed is focused on a specific target audience, which is more segmented than the LinkedIn audience. Kickstarter is focused on contacts between investors and investment projects (sometimes quite strange), Xing - on citizens of one country, AngelList - startups and their investors, Dribbble - designers.
Before creating a site like LinkedIn, consider what target audience you can rely on and what value your site can provide to these users.
After you decide on the target audience and the main value of the site, focus on the functions and capabilities that ideally meet the needs of users. To do this, you need to highlight the problems of the target audience that your site has to solve, and also determine which functions and tools can do this.
Such functions can be divided into basic and specific. Basic should be present on all professional social networks and we will consider them on the example of the Afrine-oriented platform focused on Africa. This is not the best and not the worst platform, but simply an example, chosen at random.
User profiles in professional networks, such as LinkedIn, are crucial to help build and maintain relationships between members who share similar goals.
Profile must include:
In Afrinection and LinkedIn, user profiles also contain biographical information and information about people’s education and experience, which helps employers to select the best candidate.
The platform for building business relationships should offer an advanced search, through which users can find the right person by entering a name, specialization, position or keyword. You can also specify the location and industry in the search engine.