How to Build a Professional Social Network

Social media isn’t simply a means of staying connected with family and friends. Many businesses also benefit from professional social networks, using them for brand recognition, recruitment, sharing ideas with like-minded individuals, and attracting and retaining customers.

Reid Hoffman and his team realized the business benefits of social networks 15 years ago and decided to build a network for making meaningful business connections. Guess what? Today, this platform, which we know as LinkedIn, is the biggest professional network and operates in over 200 countries and territories.

Wondering how to build a website like LinkedIn? In this guide, we examine how to create a professional social network in detail.

According to Sangeet Paul Choudary, there are three major functions that every successful platform should perform: pull, facilitate, and match.

• The platform should pull participants to interact. It should encourage users to actively and regularly participate on the platform.
• The platform should facilitate the exchange of value and create an ecosystem where users can collaborate with each other.
• The platform should match producers and consumers with each other in a relevant way. To do this, the platform should provide filters.

To offer this functionality, a platform should be comprised of the following building blocks. What’s important is that none of these building blocks should be omitted. If you fail to implement one or more of these three blocks, you jeopardize your chance of success.

Pulling producers and customers on a regular basis depends greatly on social gravity and reciprocal needs. To attract a great number of users, a platform must be beneficial for all. On LinkedIn, everyone can meet their needs: companies can promote themselves, build professional relationships, and find top talent; job seekers can hunt for and find good jobs; and employees can promote themselves as professionals, establish business connections, and stay informed about what’s happening in their industries.

To facilitate interactions between producers and consumers, a platform should provide certain tools and rules to encourage users to behave a certain way. LinkedIn, for example, provides a large number of handy tools for all parties to foster interactions. Recruiters can use advanced search filters, save search results, contact anyone via InMail, monitor updates of top candidates, and do much more. Job seekers can search jobs based on location, job title, industry, date posted, company, and other filters to narrow down results. Apart from tools integrated in the website, there are some LinkedIn extensions to help users interact, such as Discoverly, Linked Helper, Open Network, Dux-Soup, and dozens more. Additionally, plenty of platforms offer subtle cues, such as notifications and feedback, to motivate users to take desired actions. LinkedIn sends notifications about new messages, invites, updates in a user’s network, posts and shares, and news and articles, encouraging users to go back to the platform.

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