Design of a New Social Media Platform on Content Community

Tao Yao
Social Media: Theories, Ethics, and Analytics
4 min readDec 8, 2020

Introduction

It is a community based on a particular group and a specific type of like-minded users based on making friends, sharing, and interests.
Some people say that the content community is a feed stream with a stronger sense of participation. With the stranger society’s arrival, the content community will become the main occasion for the fermentation of weak relationships. It is also said that the essence of interest communities is to help users improve the quality and efficiency of social interaction.

User Interface Design

In this article, I will design a new Social Media Platform based on the content community. It combines Instagram, Facebook, and Amazon to deliver a social media platform for product buying and sharing experience between strangers.

What it will provide from a user’s perspective:

More personalized functions for the user to choose from. It means under a machine learning and deep learning algorithm, different users eventually got their customized user interface.

a. Function selection(Sport, Shoes, Makeup, Film, and so on)

The main page shows different interests depends on your selection for the first-time user. Using the association rule from the data mining process, we will know it has a likelihood of chance the user might like other interests or post.

b. After a personalized user interface, user can share their moment or their product review by using short video/ photo/ VR photo /VR video with others.

c. The sharing content by the user will be detected and contains a link to a certain product buying page. Other users who see this post could buy this same product directly from the link.

d. User can interact with the post by thumb up(like) and repost. (This function is like Twitter, the platform can use those data to show ‘heats’ and recommended to the related user who might interest in this post)

In this sketch user interface, I draw below, I will briefly describe how this Social Media Platform will work.

Simple sketch drawing of the user interface 1

The Left is the content-choosing page, you can choose based on your own interest, like Sport, Shoes, Makeup, Film, and so on.

The middle one is the homepage after you choose your interests. You will see related content other users post and share(pictures or short videos). You can like this post and when you click, you directed to the right.

The right one is the detail of the picture or short videos you click. It contains high-resolution pictures with internal links(show as hashtags). When you click this hashtag/link, it will direct you to a buying page. Also, on this page, you can follow, like, or comment and send a private message to this original uploader. There is also a button to forward to Facebook, Twitter.

Simple sketch drawing of the user interface 2

The upper interface is the product buying page. Users can choose the size and bookmark this product. Also, there is a button to buy now.

The other is MY homepage to show my personal social media details. It contains how many fans, how many likes, My bookmarks, My order history, also the chat history button and wallets here.

Stakeholders and Interaction

This social media platform contains stakeholders of the following:

a.Platform Developer and manager team: In charge of developing and operating this platform to provide quality service and content.

b.Users: Users could share pictures and upload a short video(15 seconds) like Tiktok with an internal link (hashtag) of the product they share in the image or video.

When the user uploads a picture or video, the machine learning algorithm will detect the suggested products, like Red Air Jordan 1 shoes or Nike Hoody. There will be an input inbox for the user to input to search the product, too. If there is none product existing, the user could manually add on. Those suggested, input, or added will be displayed as a tag, like on Instagram. The system administrator will receive a notification from the database team to perfect this link and product.

Other users could like or comment on those posts. Meanwhile, they can click to follow the original user who posts it. Also, there will be a chatting function for users to communicate with each other.

c.Product Supplier: This stakeholder will be responsible for the product supply to this platform for product supply, including

d. Logistic: Social media platform needs to cooperate with FedEx, UPS, and USPS to do the shipping after the user bought certain products.

Platform Responsibilities

Since this will be a content community sharing social media platform it is more interesting with the young people group, who are more active and more likely to share their opinions and suggestions online. The statistic shows the share of adults in the United States using social networks as of February 2019, sorted by age group. During that period of time, 90 percent of adults between 18 and 29 used social networks.1

In this case, it may create loneliness or need Anti-addiction in some scenarios. For content controlling, this social media platform is aimed to be a combination of posting/sharing and product buying. It will not allow people to upload inappropriate content detected by the algorithm based on the community rule.

The product suggestion and similar content suggestion function, using data mining association rules and machine learning, deep learning algorithm, it will best give what the user wants as long as we had lots of other user’s recommendation information or user’s buying history.

References

Percentage of adults in the United States who use social networks as of February 2019, by age group https://www.statista.com/statistics/471370/us-adults-who-use-social-networks-age/

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