Running a social media site

[Timo]

Just wondering if anyone here has experiences of running your own social media site related to your own niche (something like Digg but in much more narrow scope)? How much there is work involved when starting out and also, how much time does it take to maintain? One would assume that since the content is mostly submitted by users, administrative tasks wouldn't take that much time, but maybe that is not the case. I would like to hear your experiences.

[Timo]

Actually the reason I'm asking this is because if you would have a successful social media site and a blog related to same niche, can the social media site bring you more traffic to your blog?

[Blaine Moore]

I haven't run my own site, but I've had a few friends that started them up, and they certainly helped bring their presence. It can be a lot of work reaching that critical mass of users that keep the system running, though.

[mintblogger]

The are two aspects related to this question. One is to create a social media site and second to bring traffic to it.

You can use Elgg CMS for creating a social media site. For second you have to do the same efforts as you do for your blog

Just creating a social media site doesn't mean that tons of traffic will come to it that you can divert to your blog. Just like a fresh blog or web site, you have to put same amount of efforts to market and publicize it.

[Timo]

Originally Posted by mintblogger

The are two aspects related to this question. One is to create a social media site and second to bring traffic to it.

You can use Elgg CMS for creating a social media site. For second you have to do the same efforts as you do for your blog

Just creating a social media site doesn't mean that tons of traffic will come to it that you can divert to your blog. Just like a fresh blog or web site, you have to put same amount of efforts to market and publicize it.

Thanks for the platform tip I was looking for a software which could provide the platform for me.

But to the actual question ... Yes, I agree. After building a social media site you naturally need to work hard in order to make it succeed. But eventually if your site is doing well, does this have a side effect of bringing traffic to your blog ?

I don't have any experience of running a social media site, so I would imagine that it requires lot's of (daily) work, at least in the beginning (?)