Ning’s Tips and Tricks

Some Network Creators want to share their social experience with the world, while others create Ning Networks just for close friends and family. To embrace these different preferences, flexible privacy settings are built in to every Ning Network.

As a Network Creator, you have many different options when it comes to the privacy of your Ning Network. To adjust the privacy settings, go to the Manage page and then click “Network Privacy”:

From this page, you can choose the ideal privacy settings:

As we wrote earlier this week, choosing and promoting the right Network Administrators can help you manage your social network’s members and content. Administrators have access to the Manage page, just like Network Creators, though they don’t have access to the Premium Services, Network Information or Analytics sections.

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.