When a client comes to the Custom Web Apps to implement a social media marketing program, one of the major concerns of the client is the social network design. There are three primary design options a client has: a standard social network software package, a custom software solution or a mashup. The right option for the customer depends to a large degree on customer requirements and constraints. These include time to market, the client's short term and long term budget, the membership targets of the social network, and the functionality and features that the customer wants.
Social network functionality and features that customers often need to consider are many. These include the collaboration power of the network, relevancy technology, search engine technology, widget integration, content management system metrics, push technology, data source integration, the online advertising systems, the e-commerce system and last but not least, the scalability of the design.
Scalability of the social network design is actually one of the most important considerations of a design. A scalable design will allow a social network to expand with social membership growth without requiring an excessive initial investment. As the membership increases, the client can scale the design with incremental budget outlays that are supported with increased revenue from the growth of the network.
The social network vision of most clients is a social network that will grow quickly to millions of users. The temptation is often to create an initial design that will support millions of users. However, network designs that can support a million plus concurrent users are expensive to implement. This because high traffic social networks require highly optimized software and highly optimized server network configurations. The client can go through the time and expense of developing such a network, but only to find out that the social network growth is much slower than anticipated. The more prudent client starts with a social network foundation that can be scaled so that investment risk is minimized.
Often the best solution to a scaled social media application is to make use of a social network design platform. Social network design platforms, such as Custom Web Apps' Rapid Application Deployment (RAD) platform permit the development of a social network quickly and without a high initial capital outlays. Most importantly the RAD platform permits the design to be scaled as the social network grows.
The RAD platform is a family of pre-built software modules tied together within a standardized framework. The platform can be used to add software plug-ins, , replace software modules with newer fuller featured modules and to add custom features and functionality quickly and reliably. The RAD platform is also able to be customized such that it can meets the needs of a wide range of social network applications, whether they are consumer specific, profession specific, corporate specific or organization specific. Additionally, the RAD platform, because it allows the integration of open source software, keeps software development time to a minimum; allowing Custom Web Apps' customers to meet time-to-launch targets.