SN Guide Competition Analysis

Keeping an eye on the rest of them

SN Guide is in the business of social networking analysis, but it is certainly not alone. There are many websites out there which offer similar services to those of SN Guide.

SN Guide faces competition in both fields of its operation, Social Networking News and Opinions, and as a Social Networking Site Directory.  However, SN Guide holds the advantage of combining both of these fields into one website.  This combination will make SN Guide a one-stop-shop for all things social networking.  As well, SN Guide offers an alternative method for the generation of content: allowing users themselves to help aggregate and contribute to SN Guide as a resource.

• Social Networking News
• Social Networking Site Directory
• Website Analysis Engines
• What else is involved in social networking analysis?

The sites that offer social networking commentary similar to that offered by SN Guide are, for the most part, weblogs that are updated multiple times daily with new articles or opinion pieces on social networking. For example, Mashable offers a very frequently updated site, which is populated with many interesting articles of the sort that SN Guide looks to present. Mashable clearly has a very strong base of contributors who seem to likely be writing these articles for a living.

User collaboration and an open invitation for contribution are what distinguish SN Guide from other social networking weblogs.

The Social Networking Weblog is another site that is driven by a team of prolific bloggers who post on a variety of social networking topics.

Similar trends continue with many sites offering social networking article feeds. Other major potential competitors for SN Guide include Social Networking Watch and The Social Software Weblog.

SN Guide does not yet have the resources to keep up with these blogs in terms of output. While it could certainly grow to the point that it could employ and pay regular contributors to supply content, at this early stage of development, SN Guide must find its niche not in quantity of content, but in the interactive and collaborative process by which content is aggregated. User interactivity, it appears, will need to be a large part of SN Guide in order to make it a success. Rather than leaving the analysis to the professionals, SN Guide is taking the analysis to the streets; SN Guide delivers content that is generated by actual site users, ideally a high number of them. Many of the competitor sites implement similar strategies to those that SN Guide will use, for instance categorized sorting of articles for easy lookup and a user comment system for articles. It remains to be seen whether SN Guide will improve upon these methods, but it will be at least on par with them once it gets rolling.

SN Guide also features its Site Directory, a side of the site which faces its own challenges in distinguishing itself from other site comparison engines like it.

Many weblog sites feature large, overarching "comparison" articles from time to time. These articles act as a survey of social networking sites, just as SN Guide's directory does. Search Engine Journal's Social Networking Site Comparison, PC Magazine, and Read/Write Web's Social Networking Faceoff all represent this brand of article. The former even displays a chart similar to SN Guide's directory format. One notable difference between these site analyses are their ages. As solitary articles, these analyses become out-of-date relatively quickly. SN Guide will hold the advantage of frequently-updated and user-driven site analyses. Site clients will be constantly improving the SN Guide Directory with comments, suggestions, and insight that will ensure the data's continued relevance over the course of time.

It has also been speculated that SN Guide will be competing to some degree with web information site Alexa. Alexa does show clients how popular a site is through quantitative research, but SN Guide offers qualitative analysis as well. People using SN Guide will not likely be using it strictly for finding quantitative web traffic data. In fact, SN Guide will offer no such service.

Many social networking analysis and discussion sites include information pertaining to topics not covered by SN Guide. In particular, concerns about social network safety for children (and security in general) is not a focus of SN Guide, although submitted articles could certainly make SN Guide an informative resource on this topic as well. Sites that feature social networking safety include On Guard Online and Social Network Advisor.