2009

One of the great things about having a social network on Ning is that it’s fully self-contained. You can host discussions or share videos and photos, all in one place. That said, many people have other websites and set up a social network as a way for members to get to know each other and join the conversation.

If you have another website or blog, you can create a seamless experience for members and visitors clicking between your social network and your other site. There are a number of built-in tools on Ning that give you the power to do this. Let’s start create a website on the Ning.

One of the great things about your social network on Ning is that you can easily make it the hub of your online presence. You can even set up your social network so it appears under your own domain name. Using your own domain name brands your social network and makes it a place people will seek out when they want to learn more about your brand.

Good Charlotte has taken advantage of this feature to make their social network the top place to get to know their fans and communicate band news. They’ve mapped their social network to their domain GoodCharlotte.com.

Coming up with a great set of keywords lies at the heart of making your social network discoverable. If your keywords are specific and uniquely related to your social network, it’ll be easier for people to find your social network via search engines and even via searching on Ning.com.

I’m thrilled to announce that Ning for Dummies is now available on Amazon and will be at your local bookstore soon. The book was written by Network Creator Manny Hernandez, who created his social networks, Tu Diabetes and Es Tu Diabetes, a few days after we first introduced Your Own Social Network in February 2007. To date, more than 10,000 people have joined Manny’s social networks.

Every social network on Ning comes with an iPhone interface, which is great when you want to keep up with your social network when not at your computer. Using this interface, members with iPhones can access a simplified version of your social network that looks great, matches your social network’s colors and loads quickly, even on a 2G iPhone.

To access the iPhone interface, you simply need to add /m to the URL of your social network. For example, to access Brooklyn Art Project on an iPhone, you would head to #m

As we covered in The Perfect Social Network, your Latest Activity feature shows all the activity happening across your social networks as soon as it happens.

It is the single most important feature you can add for driving recurring usage by your members on your social network, especially as you get bigger. And by bigger, we actually mean everyone should use this feature. It’s how people quickly find the best, brightest and most recent stuff on your social network.