Dannie Jackson

  I think I will spend some time in this group. And I want to say my first experience with UNA was with UNA 12. And I have come to be able to redesign the network feeds to re-envision UNA for a network that provides a Business network inside of UNA for use by small business, and a magazine section in the site for viewing the Post. And I created another section I call Networks to help people to find their local and regional communities. I believe a better way to market a social media site is to market it locally first, using the community team spirit of the region around you to get people to join, and then they spread the word by word of mouth to get family and friends to join. Of course, you would do regional advertising of your site via local and regional small town and city newspapers.

  Local and regional newspaper advertising is the cheapest means of advertising, and you can advertise off and on over time, to keep your sites brand and logo in mind.

  For Kentucky the team spirit is Go Big Blue UK. You promote your site by promoting and standing for what your region stands for and promoting their school teams and the regional institutions they relate to and hence promote their interest.

  Now in time as people spread the word to family and friends in the nearby states, they join and so do advertisers and even advertising agencies. And so, you install inside of your base home directory a folder that contains a WordPress Ad Server that people can join and upload their ads onto the network.

  Now China and India have the largest population of social media users, while the USA has the largest response to online ecommerce advertising. While China, India, Germany and Brazil rank in the top with the USA. Hence, for us here in the USA we want to look at our market, which is as I said the market with the largest response to ecommerce advertising. Note however some of that ecommerce is going to China who have companies that advertise in the states and have warehouses here. 

  Hence, you would not want to think of growing into a global social media site like Facebook with all of those 30,000 or more servers they have. And who do you think mostly pays for their servers to serve the globe? It is the online advertisers who pay high prices to advertise on Facebook, and these are USA advertisers. If they only had social media sites that only serviced the USA with fewer servers, then those sites could provide advertising at a lower cost, and the advertisers would migrate there.

  If you understand this, at some point Facebook will reach critical mass in terms of cost to run and maintain servers for the globe versus income. Since those other nations out there, are not providing the income from response to advertising that the USA provides. Do the math. Your vision then would be to only be of service to the USA and thus not grow to have a massive number of servers one day. You would hence block some global IP addresses to limit membership to the states and its territories, to conserve server space. Well, this is the USA group, so I am saying it.

  To sell and promote your social media site to get people to join, you should rather think of your region of the world, and hence you corner of your state, and market it there, to the regional base. In your county and the surrounding counties to start. And then, in time it should grow out from there.  Make you site something relative to your region and obtain their interest, as you promote theirs. It is a two-way street, and furthermore, UNA's marketing to people to obtain and use UNA is also a two-way street since UNA needs things the owner of the site can use to market it to everyone. More about the meaning of this later herein.

Focus on the harvest.

  You should think more about your corner of the world and providing advertising services to regional businesses to advertise on your site as the site grows with regional users, and then one day spreads into the nearby states. I would suggest this vision instead of being a niche special interest social media site. To obtain members for a site that focuses on a niche in the market, requires expensive nationwide advertising and promotion, to find all of those people of that niche special interest, which in reality is a small number out of the masses of people nationwide. You should rather want to be of interest and service to all in the free market economy of the United States. And so, begin by promoting your regional interest. A state-wide site would be attractive to advertisers.

  Furthermore, in order to be of service to all, UNA would have to consider that UNA should provide some modules for online influencers use. For streaming broadcast where the stream is automatically saved, since the USA market includes streaming broadcasters. And a module for placing video ads on the videos saved on the platform. It might also consider a full-fledged Ad Server for UNA, where the UNA site owner can place ad zones wherever they want. And the ad server should also, be able to provide ads on other websites and platforms, so that the UNA site owner can provide a service not just on their site but other sites, and I mean on other UNA sites, as an advertising network to help other UNA sites to cover their hosting cost. And I have a vision for that; I already wrote that down in another group.

  I envision one UNA site that has grown and become successful, who provides ad iframe scripts for other UNA sites to use (in "raw blocks"), and charts their ad impressions and clicks on the other UNA sites via cookies, and shares income with those sites for their service in a UNA network. Well WordPress can do this presently.  

  Now one more item here, you have heard of a marketing funnel where people advertising a site, to drive traffic to it, to funnel them down to reviewing and buying a product. Well, this works if you can afford the initial advertising. The largest funnel of them all is a social media network whose product is the ads on the network. This in reality is your product. Where you do not have a product for sale just links to services and products. And you need to know how to add more ads to your network without creating user ad fatigue. And you need to have features in social media that everyone wants, like features that are desired by online influencers and advertisers. Including features for business use. My UNA demo site has a Business Network designed into it, so I know this is possible to do. Creating things like an internal business network with an office desk and a similar desk for online influencers and journalist to edit their post, and both with their own calendars. Remember that online influencers are driving the trends in social media, and advertisers are looking at them and selecting them to carry ads for them. However, you can place ads on their videos and monetize them and share the profits with the influencer, if you have a module for that.

Envision ways and means to help UNA site owners to be able to derive more income to support their sites and to make a profit. And who knows, maybe sell more UNA services in the process, but help the site owner.