Five Fundamentals for Success for New Social Media Platforms

“An image of a new social media network growing up,” by DALL-E

I created a 5-point framework for new social media platforms/companies to determine how they can survive and be successful (beyond simply making a good product).

(I plan on revisiting this framework in the future to add plans and check in on how platforms fare against the theory. But, I wanted to get my thoughts down quickly.)

1. A very clear answer for, “who or what is this for?”: Very soon (if not already), it will become quite hard for a new social network to survive if their target audience is “everyone”. Too many large, entrenched players adequately serve the needs of “general purpose social media”.  

The best new networks will have a clear idea of a target audience whose needs are not currently being met – and why – and will design a solution that meets them, and their needs, in ways that other networks do not.

(Two exceptions can help new social networks fudge this answer a little bit: an entirely novel use case and an entirely novel technology. A blend of these two exceptions helped TikTok emerge as, in my opinion, the final general-use social network: a novel use case built (initially) on stitching music, and a novel algorithm (paired with massive video inventory). But you could see how those, together, very clearly filled an unmet need: short-form video entertainment scrolling, not unlike channel flipping in the TV era – a capability that hadn’t been unearthed in the social era.)

2. Opportunities for that unserved community to engage and deepen relationships: If you’ve identified a community with unmet needs, whose needs you can meet, provide that community with a place to convene and relate to each other.

Becoming the “network of choice” of communities with unmet needs serves many, many benefits, beyond earning their powerful word-of-mouth marketing.

When you provide underserved communities with a safe, durable and trustworthy place to convene, they create culture - language, symbols, imagery – unique to, or starting from, your service. Some of this culture could even rise to the level of a meme, a valuable culture generator even if today’s memes last days or shorter.

In my opinion, the very best social networks start here – by winning, deeply, with specific communities, around whom they build (and scale from). This is why new networks like Threads, Bluesky, and whatever we’re calling Mastodon have managed to be somewhat of product successes but have thus far failed to catch on culturally: they started top-down, as “networks for everyone,” hoping that some community would collect en masse on their service enough to generate cultural gravity that draws in others. While I’m certain each service has pockets of examples their users would reference to explain their cultural power, I haven’t witnessed any that are either unique to their service or are so powerful that they puncture culture. All these services have the same pitch and are fighting for the same users, which is why no one is sure where to spend their time.

Doing this well requires making purposeful product choices. How will you allow your niche community to convene? How will you listen to their needs, and adapt your product roadmap to better meet their needs? How will your core functionality evolve as you scale?

3. A plan to build deep trust within those communities: where everything begins and ends. You must build and retain trust with your core communities at all costs.

Trust transcends product. Through constant, consistent and personalized communication, demonstrate your ability to listen to your users – most importantly, those building-block niche communities – and act upon their needs. Meet up in person to deepen relationships. Show that you understand them, and the intersections of their culture. As you scale, show that you continue to focus on their needs and interest.

You may make mistakes and lose trust, but how you communicate, and rebound from, those mistakes could deepen the impact, for worse or for eventual better.

4. A way to attract, incentivize, and retain the creators who enrich conversation for those communities: Many smart writers, including Taylor Lorenz and others, have written about the deep relationship between the most popular social networks and their creators. I’m using “creators” broadly here to mean social media users who produce attention-grabbing content that people want to see.

While Taylor Lorenz covered the rise of the creator economy in her book, Extremely Online, today’s creators have many options on where they can “hang a shingle”. New apps and services constantly pitch to creators about spending their time elsewhere, with the promise of big payouts and legions of users.

To rise above such noise, the best social networks need a clear pitch to creators about why they should create there, how they’ll be incentivized for their time, and why they should stay.

Your pitch to creators does not need to be wholly different from other networks, unless you’re asking creators for exclusivity (which, in the early days of your new social media platform, seems like a costly move). Many creators can create content for multiple platforms. But be purposeful in the creator targets you invite; how do they appeal to / relate to the kinds of audiences you want to attract? 

Without a stable, growing, and consistent cadre of creators that fill your service with must-see content, you risk filling your service with lurkers, occasional dabblers, and people who simply copy-paste their content from elsewhere just to have a full-looking feed.

5. A clear business model that you explain up front: After a generation of social media, I believe many (though not all) users understand how this (waves hands around) all works. A technology product cannot be free forever; for the platform to continue providing service to its users, it must make at least enough money to cover its costs, and ideally, more than that, so it can improve (among other reasons). 

Many users (again, not all) understand the tradeoffs that come with many of the pathways to making money.

Will you take capital from investors? Then, in exchange for a rapidly improving product that’s (likely) inexpensive and low on ads (at least at the outset), the service will be expected to grow quickly, likely meaning it won’t be a niche, ad-light service forever.

Will you monetize through ads? That’s perfectly acceptable, but how will you monetize in the early days of the service, when you don’t have a big enough audience to command lots of ad revenue? Also, to revisit the topic of trust, are you being upfront with your users about the data you’re collecting, and how they’re being targeted in ads?

Will you ask users to subscribe? That’s fine, but can you clearly explain the value they’ll receive in exchange for their subscription – right now, not just in the future?

I believe the best new social media networks treat their users like adults, explaining upfront how they intend to make money/survive, and why they’ve chosen that strategy. Nobody wants to sink their time into a service that they don’t trust will survive very long; in my opinion, clearly explaining how you will survive builds early trust.