Here are a handful of social networks that are engaging their communities with unique, interactive groups.

www.yourgroups.com

YourGroups is an original social network allowing members to create one or more private groups. The site structure and group privacy ensures that your group experience will give you the privacy that Facebook lacks. Whether its your closest friends, family, work group, sports team or school connections, yourgroups provides a private place to support those day to day communications. Here are some of the features it offers:

• Immediately contacting all or a part of your group via push messaging
• Sending a location and time for the group to meetup via push messaging
• Setting up future events for the group to attend
• Check-in to events once you arrive and see who has checked-in
• Posting a message for your group to see
• Sharing pictures relevant just to the members of the group
• Using your phones GPS to set destinations to meet

All of your communications are private to just the group. There are no public profiles or sharing of data among groups. yourgroups puts your social circles privacy as our #1 priority.

www.golfswingfreak.com

Golfswingfreak.com is the first website of it’s kind, focusing specifically on the viewing and rating of one’s golf swing by web and mobile video. Members simply upload their swing, join and submit to online tournaments, and rate other user swings to see how they can be the best ranked site-wide, within their personal network, or by their specific golf swing groups. The purpose of GolfSwingFreak.com is to use video and the connectivity of a social network to improve your swing and your game, have fun, and pursue your quest to win with your swing.

GolfSwingFreak.com is for anyone that is passionate about the game of golf or cares about someone else that is a Freak about Golf. As a member you can capture your swing on video, connect with other golfers, and compete in Tournaments by receiving votes for your swing. Tournaments include Opens, Invitationals, and Fight Club (Head-to-Head). You can also purchase freakish deals on GolfSwingFreak.com.

www.returninghomeproject.org

Returning Home is an online interactive resource that creates a welcoming space to share stories of our men and women in uniform—from those who served in the first World War to those returning from the current conflicts.

The resources provided on the Returning Home site will allow family and friends of our uniformed men and women, as well as those supporting our troops during the war effort, to have a place of their own—to be honored and remembered.  One key resource on the site are the Community pages, which are essentially online groups that celebrate, commemorate and support specific groups within the military community. Members can join, follow and contribute to these pages for an experience tailored to their areas of interest.

Returning Home is a politics-free site designed to help troops and communities open the lines of communication and begin to heal and support each other. Medical professionals, historians, and schools will be utilizing this site as a resource to help others heal as well as teach others about the duties and sacrifices of those in uniform.

www.wiseoldmen.com

Wise Old Men was created specifically for the 60+ community to find each other in the ever-widening social space. Groups are central to the site’s purpose, allowing users to search and join specific interest groups and related sub-groups. Users can also suggest additional groups to be added by the website’s administrator. Once within the group, users can receive updates new group wall posts, submit discussion topics and comments. Users can also submit links to related external websites as well as post events associated with groups.

While the site is equipped with many other core social network functions, most of the user’s experience surrounds the community’s interest groups and facilitating the relationships within those

First of all, if anyone could decide be just like Facebook, I’m sure MySpace would be paying to be first in line. Second, thinking that you will blow Facebook out of the water with a site that looks and acts just like Facebook just isn’t too innovative. It would take a really outside-the-box concept to do that. Third, Facebook will sue you if you’re just like Facebook.

This is actually why we build niche communities, because they serve a demographic in a way that Facebook currently does not, whether that is by a specific interest, by function or by location. Sometimes Facebook is just too big and too general to meet every need, and that is the gap that we fill and that we encourage our clients to take advantage of. We build networks with the hope that one of our communities could warrant it’s own social bookmarking icon someday, but we’re also interested in building a site that actually has a chance of gaining traction by serving a need that hasn’t been met to an audience that will take advantage of it.

Once you’ve got your concept down, if you are gearing up for major Facebook-level visibility, there are a few things you should keep in mind.

A Website is a Business.
You need a name, an official formation of the business under that name, ideally a business plan, a marketing plan and possibly even some investors to help fund your concept sufficiently. You’ll probably also need an intellectual property lawyer, bullet-proof terms & conditions and a privacy policy. You can get by with a well-versed business lawyer who isn’t afraid to dabble in some IP topics, but if you get sued (which, if you’re doing as well as Facebook this is probably inevitable) you will likely need an IP lawyer.

Hosting.
Prospects often ask us if our software can support 50,000 users, a million users, ten millions users. The answer is yes, but the real question is whether your host can support those kinds of numbers. The traffic that your network receives requires a certain amount of ram, bandwidth and storage.  The Facebook rule of thumb is one server for every 10,000 active users which is usually what we recommend as well. Because most of our clients want 50,000 users but may not have them lined up yet, we typically recommend an appropriate server to start with using Media Temple, which you can then scale up as the network grows.

Marketing.
So if you want a million users, you need a solid plan on how you intend to attract them. “Build it and they will come” isn’t a hope to stake the family farm on. Everyone wants their site to go “viral,” but getting it to the launch point of getting picked up virally takes some level of initial marketing. If you don’t have marketing already in place, it’s critical that at some point prior to launch that you allot the necessary funds to getting your brand and your site visible. Using existing social networks as platforms is usually a good idea, but certainly it takes time, investment and good planning to position yourself for Facebook-like success.

A Team.
So you’ve got your business, your social network and your marketing. For the most part your network should run itself, but like a car and like a house, your network will require some level of maintenance respective to your traffic and what kind of exchanges and transactions you are enabling on your site. While you may not need it right off the bat, plan to need a community manager, possibly even a full-time developer and someone devoted to marketing and business development. All three will ensure that your network is in good working condition and that as a business, that you are continuing to grow and meet the ongoing demands of your community, keeping you current and profitable.

Trust me, I’d love to be the next Mark Zuckerberg too! But the reason why Facebook is Facebook is because it was innovative at the time. It did things that Friendster and MySpace wasn’t doing. It’s hard to imagine anything being bigger or better than Facebook, but a lot of people felt that way about MySpace a few years ago, so certainly anything is possible with a great, unique idea and a good plan behind it!

Fill an Untapped Niche in the Social Networking World. If you’re anything like me, you have periodic revelations about something that you’re certain hasn’t been done yet. And if you are me, you immediately think about how you can fill the void through a social network of some sort. Like Twitter but only for sports fans! A community for Twilight-obsessed moms! A network to connect tattoo enthusiasts with tattoo artists! While social networks have really become commonplace in our lives the past few years, there is still plenty of opportunity to fill a void. I will say that the chances are low that any run-of-the-mill idea can compete with social networks giants like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. These networks target a very general and broad audience. Websites that target specific niche communities, serving the needs of that particular group, I feel have a fighting chance of gaining momentum. If successful, they could have a chance of achieving more broad appeal. Facebook, for example, was originally built for college and university students. MySpace was primarily for musicians. Both evolved from serving a specific niche community to serving literally millions of users from all over the globe, including numerous corporate giants who now use these networks as must-have microsites for their brands.

My advice? Take your idea, identify potential target audiences as specifically as you can, research competing sites and find out how you can best serve that group with the most useful tools. What if there are other tattoo networks, for example? Don’t be discouraged. If there are others competing in this market, it’s typically a good sign. It means that there actually is a market. You just need to find out how to make your concept better: more unique, more useful, more visually-appealing and valuable enough to attract the lion’s share of the market.

Hobby & Theme Sites. The vast world of fandom and all its marketing potential dawned on me when I fell deeply in love with the Twilight series, joining myself with millions of other seriously obsessed Twi-hards. I needed a place to talk about all these new feelings and ideas and sometimes just gush about Team Edward nothingness to others who would truly understand! I discovered other websites with valuable Twilight information, I read blogs that posted up-to-date Twilight news, and I followed all of the cast members on Twitter. I soon learned that there were others like me… many others. My hairdresser, my sisters-in-law, my coworkers, random people on the street whose conversations I overheard. There was clearly a need for a community, so we set to work creating TwilightDisorder (because let’s face it, this kind of obsession just isn’t normal), and in the process realized that a huge demographic of this fan base identified themselves as Twi-moms. Hot-blooded women with children and draining careers and humdrum relationships for whom the romance of the story really resonated. This was our niche market, and it would be one of the things that set our site apart from others like it.

The Twilight fan community is of course only one of many. Film, music, sports and recreation regularly take us out of our daily lives, into an entertaining world outside of our own. Everyone is fan of something. The only question being, has that community been thoroughly and effectively tapped yet?

Investment Opportunities. Nevermind personal interest and the conceptual intrigue, it’s hard to argue against the benefits of investing in social media. According to The Neilson Company, global consumers increased the amount of time they spent on social networking sites by 82% in December 2009 compared to December 2008. Think about how many people you know who have surrendered themselves to Facebook and Twitter accounts this year. Social networks are fast evolving from the “trend” to the “norm.” Before long, it will simply be the way people interact online, and businesses and their websites will be expected to have some social element to their Web presence.

In fact, despite tight budgets in this economic crunch, there are still venture capitalists and firms looking for new opportunities and are investing heavily in high-tech start-ups. Granted, most will be looking for multiple criteria to take such a risk, such as an established team and board of directors, a prototype or semi-functional demo if not a fully underway site, and the usual business plans, business models, etc. It’s even feasible to get investors on board with the idea alone. It’s a harder sell, but if the idea is revolutionary enough and the team behind it strong enough, I know first hand that it can be done!

Can you successfully pitch your idea to an investor, and do you have the ability to follow through with the network as a business?

Building a Community for your Existing Business. Ever think that you or your business could be the impetus for creating a community? Even if you build a community that isn’t necessarily centered around you specifically, you could easily position yourself as an expert in the field by creating a community for your industry and providing legitimate tools that, based on your specific experience, you know will be useful to others like you. What better way to network, learn and grow than by providing a digital meeting place for others in your industry?

Alternatively, a social network that allows you to connect with the outside world of unknown connections-to-be could just as easily serve as an intranet of sorts, connecting you with a community that already exists in real life. A medium to large sized business, an artist with a growing fan base, or an educational institution would all be candidates for establishing a network for their specific “real world” communities to connect online for the purposes of disseminating information or communicating more effectively. Share group-specific news, events, or bridge the gap between members in remote locations.

Simply ask yourself who you would ideally like to connect with in an ideal community, and what keeps you from being able to do that on the communities that you participate in now?

Building a social network of course is so much more than the idea generation that marks its birth, but that seedling of a concept is what will set you down the path of success or failure. Believe in your idea, find the facts to back up why others should too and let the journey begin!