Is Rig Lynx any different from other social networks?

During this era of expansive technology and explosive growth in everything from your network connected toasters to reordering all of your household supplies through Amazon we find ourselves slipping further and further away from mainstream social media and into places where we are more comfortable with others. Much like real life, we are finding friends and joining forces in numbers on other social media channels.

The value of a niche social media network comes in the interaction with the community and the equal open communication channel that it creates. Instead of receiving a like or a comment, people actually divulge in using their network for a purpose. This is not without saying that people are not currently doing this with major platforms but if you look closely at each of these platforms they are starting to turn into something that closely represents your local television station or broadcasting channel. Seemingly all of them are passing the same hurdles as they look for investments to enhance services and provide additional user experiences, these come at a price and the price is calculated in square inches of space on your screen or news feed.

As the mass begins to grow with any platform it begins to be easily manipulated with super major accounts with thousands or even millions of followers taking up the valuable impression counts that the unknowing user believes are unlimited, this is not the case, there is a maximum amount of impressions that a platform can withstand.

What is an impression?

[1]Impressions are the number of times your content is displayed, no matter if it was clicked or not.

Anyone calculating up the maximum amount of impressions that any platform can produce would be a guess at best, but they are limited and this amount of exclusivity creates changes in CPM rate for which the small businesses or brands will have to compete with to gain valuable “eye space”. Arguably this is this largest hurdle for smaller businesses and can be extremely frustrating as well as expensive building a brand over any length of time.

That is the largest factor with business and brand recognition but breaking it down to value for the thousands of others that are just looking to engage, be inspired or share meaningful information with others that is a different story and that’s what we mainly want to focus the rest of this on.

Open Networking

This is considered to be a bit taboo even still to this day, you can compare it to the uncomfortable silence in a room full of people you don’t know and trying to engage in conversation. As an open networker you will find vast black space across multiple platforms that detour you from connecting or engaging with people you do not know, mainly for safety reasons. Remember when you were a child and your parents told you not to talk to strangers, yeah that sticks with you and stays in your subconscious and only comes out when you get a random friend request from a person you do not know. You will think to yourself who this person may be and even now the majority of people not knowing how social platforms work will leave this request sitting in their inbox and never hit the ignore button.

What is an Open Networker?

[2]In simplest terms, when it comes to social media, open networking (done by open networkers) is a philosophy whereby people open up and expand their online networks to include pretty much anyone, without setting rules or barriers for who they choose to include in their networks.

There is power in open networking, you are now using the network as a tool instead of acting as if this person is coming for dinner later that day. Your connections are to be thought of as exactly that, a connection. Personal connections you have on all social networks are still just that, personal connections but harnessing the power of open networking will lend itself organically to job opportunities, business leads, free information exchange and overall powers the platform with content that is user generated versus competition for “eye space”.

Rig Lynx has created a patent pending open networking algorithm that allows others to engage with open networkers without having to beat your subconscious into accepting or denying a connection request that magically pops into your inbox as well as keeping security and blocking features fully enable to protect you from unwanted solicitations and spamming of your inbox.

User Experience 

By design, every social networking platform wants to generate more use of it in the daily lives of its users, this is the only sustainable design if the network is in business to make money. This money is again mainly generated from advertising and creating the “need to not miss anything” and constant increase of dopamine when someone likes something you have posted. There are effects that happen to the brain as well…

[3]Just like a gambling or substance addiction, social media addiction involves broken reward pathways in our brains. Social media provides immediate rewards — in the form of attention from your network — for minimal effort through a quick thumb tap. Therefore, the brain rewires itself, making you desire likes, retweets, emoji applause and so on. According to TED, five to 10 percent of internet users are psychologically addicted and can’t control how much time they spend online. Brain scans of social media addicts are similar to those of drug-dependent brains: There is a clear change in the regions of the brain that control emotions, attention and decision making.

This is the dark side of every social media network once it becomes an everyday part of your consciousness versus being used as a tool to facilitate higher learning or creating lasting connections that facility healthy career growth or enhancement of your personal life.

Rig Lynx UX design has no psychological programming built into it, this is one reason why our niche network is not growing at a scale that can ever be competitive with major networks, we understand the effects of social media on the brain and your everyday life. We truly appreciate real time spent with people face to face and not across a screen. It is built as a tool, to connect you with others that can be of equal benefit and not a one way street which only creates benefit for the network owners and the super major accounts that pass across the news feed each second.

User ROI

You need to know the actual value of your network and what it is doing for you. Although major social media networks do not directly charge you for a membership, your “eye space” is being auctioned off and leveraged on every post you see, we have briefly touched on this. Optionality (not a real word, sounds good though) on some of these networks comes at a cost but upgrading to services that enhance or open up the platform as a tool is as well part of that ROI but it is also the smallest part of the revenue stream for these networks.

It’s an easy one for us, that 30 mins you spend on any network at any time of the day, break it down to a return of investment. If you calculated up your time spent a year making a middle class income, for example [4]$60k, take that same $60k and break it down to a value of time. That is $164 a day (without holidays, vacations etc..) just raw time. That same $164 breaks down to $6.83 an hour, of course less than middle wage now but remember your holidays and hours you are not working are not taken into account here and some additional factors but we are using this as an example only. Take that 30 mins a day you are flicking through the news feed and calculate that back into a year spent looking through the news feed.

That roughly comes out to $1,760 a year of your time…

How many times have you personally purchased something from seeing an advertisement across your news feed? Yes, we all have, the value of that purchase is amount taken away from your ROI if you find the product of no value. Say you never purchased anything from an advertisement then your time is still sold to the highest bidder.

[5]Facebook profits off of its 1.4 billion daily users in a big way: According to its most recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the average revenue per user in 2017 was $20.21 ($6.18 in the fourth quarter alone). Users in the U.S. and Canada were worth even more because of how big the markets are.

Average revenue per user for that example, did you pay a subscription to Facebook? No, that’s the power of advertising, it can give you many free abilities but Facebook also knows that the average person will purchase and buy across the network with other businesses and services. If you want to start calculating it up how much Facebook should actually be charging you to facilitate the network to you, a normal person could not afford it based on the subscription target it would need to be.

Calculating ROI for a user should be based just on the value of your time and nothing else, does that network lend value to your day, if so great, if you find yourself scrolling and scrolling through the news feed endlessly then you are taking away from the investment each second it is not being used for a purpose.

Rig Lynx is currently free, the network is self-sufficient and does not have platform based advertisements to entice users to purchase goods or services from algorithms that target groups of people. This will not be of use to some businesses and services because they are looking for market leverage but a niche social network is just that, leverage.

What is a Niche Social Network?

[6]A niche is a specialized subset of a larger set, so a niche social network is one that targets a select segment of the general population. Sites like Facebook have grown so large that some users feel a bit lost in the shuffle. These networks allow users to connect with fewer people who have the same interests, hobbies or professional associations. 

It takes all the white noise away and gives you the raw crowd of people that are interested in generating content that is useful to people, they are not coming to a niche network to go on a shopping spree. There are many other networks for this but again, the power is in the exclusivity, blinders off, people connecting to people, no ads. Although the platform is free to the user, there is still cost to facilitate the material, services and technical abilities in the background that keep the network up and running. In the future the platform will change to a subscription based platform but it will be based off the ROI for the user and this will be at a value that you can easily compare to the example that we showed you above, think about your time as value to you, don’t waste it.

Rig Lynx is a niche social network that is currently available for the oil and gas industry but in the future will be expanding to other subset energy groups that closely mirror our own. It is privately funded by the founders, both with long careers in the energy industry. We have the largest engaged oil and gas community currently available on a downloadable application through Apples iTunes and Google Play stores.

Who is in Charge of the network?

Network quantities are vast today, you can find everything from a basic group on Facebook devoted to photos of sunsets to an entire network devoted to people that find babies of the renaissance period amusing. It’s more about the home for which these networks live, the platform which enable the user interaction and engagement. Up time, security features, algorithms, placement of paid advertising, streaming content, thumbnail placement, UX design, update frequency and unsolicited changes to the functionality, it’s how all of this is managed, the team behind the curtains. One of the main things that absolutely drives us insane are pushing new features out that come in the on position and do not give you the choice to enable it after doing some research. Do I want to have something I do blast something across my network that I mistakenly set or did not set? [7]Horror stories of Snapchat when it first arrived on the scene in 2011 and how users were sending messages to people “they thought” but actually enabling their entire network to see what was being sent. Misunderstanding of the functionality of some of the application’s abilities is something we have all sit with the phone in our hand and thought should I or shouldn’t I. A simple google search these days and you can get almost any network adjusted correctly, but occasionally it still happens.

Have you ever posted something onto your news feed or sent a message and wish you hadn’t, we all have. In cases like this, who do you send a message to and try to get it removed? Networks have added the delete feature but if the network has a malfunction while you are in crisis mode, who do you reach out to?

The level of customer service and technical support has gotten better over the years but there is still no way to send a direct message to a person that has enough influence to change something immediately. Take for example another major B2B network that has millions of users, people can randomly add themselves to a company without any approvals by company owners. Then once the owner sees that someone has added themselves to the company they reach out to technical support. They then have to fill out a questionnaire and technical support tells you that the investigation will take 7-14 days. They are telling this to the owner of company page? As the owner of the page, you should have exclusive rights to have any person removed that is not affiliated with your brand or company. This is just one example but there are plenty others, the main point is the ability to get quick reaction from decision makers, they don’t give you the access to people like this.

Rig Lynx gives you multiple places to reach out directly to the founders of the application, we have a function just for question and answer sessions. Plus you can reach out and connect with them directly across the network and if you are in crisis mode they will action your request as soon as possible. The main thing is that you will get a real person that is devoted to making sure that you are a happy user. You can always come connect with us and have a friendly conversation, get a bit of advice or just to say hi!

Networks with Job Solicitations and Openings

There are networks that harness the power of technology to bring you job offerings based on a data set that you fill out when you register as a member. As a rule, these networks do not charge the person looking for the job but do charge the person or company that is placing the job posting. This works when there is equal interest between both parties, but when the network is managing these connections they typically do not keep their algorithms updated which you will find out if you stay a member of a network for a long time and become a dormant or inactive user. You will get random job offers based on data sets that are old or a profile that is inactive. We all get spam into accounts that we have had for many years, but just imagine for a moment a niche network, devoted to the oil and gas industry, or any industry for that matter, that has hundreds of thousands of daily users that does not adjust its algorithm and continues to send out job postings to you that are old or do not match your profile anymore. The first thing they tell you to do is to go in and update your profile, you do this and think this will work and are expecting some better job offerings to come your way, wrong.

Their algorithm targets keywords in your resume or CV, these keywords can be a number of things but they target words so you still get job offers that do not match your profile even after updating it with your current information. As a company that is paying for a very expensive service and access to thousands of resumes or CV’s you should expect that the system work correctly shouldn’t you? As well as the old job postings that stay on the news feed forever and has a million comments on it, you can imagine this position has been filled 100 times over, very impersonal. [8]Others use web crawlers that search for your interests and serve you up links to company’s job postings. They also allow for job sponsoring which create a revenue stream for the network. Think for a moment for a low cost for the person posting the job and the person seeking the job, wouldn’t this facilitate a better connection and user experience. Is a small subscription amount not worth finding a great career? Yeah, we know, how do I pay for a subscription without a job? Let’s be real for a moment, the mobile device that you are currently using will cost more than any subscription to a social network that you may possibly use, ever.

Rig Lynx does things very different, we facilitate the search engine, the profile identifiers and allow either the job seeker or the person posting the job to use either channel they decide. You can either search for a candidate or look for your own new adventure. We do not allow companies access to this functionality, it remains at a personal level because what we found as we were designing this was the amount of disconnection there actually was between the person looking and the person posting. The gap was phenomenal, people that are looking for jobs need action, and they need to know that their resume or CV will be seen and acted on.

We have developed a process that will enable full visibility, this means from the time you are shortlisted until the time you are hired you will receive device notifications, open CV views, populated inbox messages for information and a barrage of techniques to keep the person looking for the job 100% up to date, all the time. For the person posting the job you are given an active dashboard that will show you all of your tools, keep things in order for you and enable you to move quickly through candidates, no more files to keep up with or large subscription fees to pay for access to thousands of CV’s, now you get it all for a low subscription cost, the same cost as the person looking for the job, cool isn’t it? Remember we talked about ROI, run that thought process on your current subscription fees to these job networks and feel free to send us a message to any of our inboxes, let us know what you find, it will be staggering and eye opening, we assure you. We would love to know!

Doing Things as a Team

As you grow with the network, you understand it, use it more efficiently, this enables you to become a person that can teach others how to use the network. Take a popular question and answer social network that lets people reply to questions that are directly related to their interests, how many times have you seen or read an answer that was either way over your head or one that had very limited information? You are given an upvote option… the upvote raises this answer to the top of the list and is the first one that is displayed then when someone else searches for the same question they can immediately be served with the upvoted answer at the top of their list. This is great for some users but think for a moment, an algorithm is taking away the ability for you to choose what you want to see, now you are being served the one that has the most engagement, this works the same on all the networks, more engagement a comment or answer gets, it moves to the top. This model as we said before is amazing for people that just want quick information, but it also hides some of the additional engagement that other comments or answers are getting which shouldn’t be the case.

The team working functionality is basically being removed and it turns into a person to person conversation (inbox message) with other users commenting around them instead of it facilitating a teamwork environment. Why not just point the person that wants to answer the question to a place that will enable the answer to go straight to their inbox? Because it would not promote the features of the network and those features are visibility and engagement and that would be considered lost assets for the design of the network. It is to be used as a tool, remember, all of them are.

Rig Lynx has a new feature that will be rolled out very soon that will enable you to add people that you have had meaningful engagement with, either it be personal or professional. Much like asking for a reference for a new job, we have created a place to list the real person that can facilitate that live reference for you. It enables people that are reviewing your profile, resume or CV the ability to see who you are actively connected to within your specified team. This shows experience, teamwork and to even some shows how enriching your teams are. It may also lend to additional team members that you worked with in the past to have access to potential job offerings and you could rejoin a previous team on a new assignment.

In closing your social networking day to day should be of value to you, if they are not of value to you then move your interest to a niche network and if you happen to be in the industry that Rig Lynx serves, check it out, we would love the feedback.

Thanks for reading my first article of the year and for following me here on LinkedIn!

Happy Scrolling!

Greg Williams is the founder of Rig Lynx, an oil and gas social network where he works with bridging communication gaps and connecting people of the same craft every day.

You can contact Greg for other information about this article or just to have a chat by downloading Rig Lynx on your iOS or Android device and connecting with him today!

[1] https://sproutsocial.com/insights/reach-vs-impressions/

[2] https://workcoachcafe.com/career-dictionary-definitions/what-is-open-networking-or-an-open-networker/

[3] https://now.northropgrumman.com/this-is-your-brain-on-instagram-effects-of-social-media-on-the-brain

[4] https://www.businessinsider.com/middle-class-income-us-city-san-francisco-2018-2?r=US&IR=T

[5] https://money.com/money/5207924/how-much-facebook-makes-off-you/

[6] https://computer.howstuffworks.com/internet/social-networking/information/5-niche-social-networks.htm

[7] https://www.thethings.com/15-snapchat-mishaps/

[8] https://www.indeed.com/hire/how-indeed-works