Are Invite Only Communities the Future of Social Networks?

• Did you ever wonder how Startups like Initiative Q, Clubhouse or some other social networks get so much attraction with invite-only Registrations?
• Did you ever ask yourself how your site could benefit from restricting the registration to invite-only?
• Did you ever think about why others decide on an invitation-only based registration system?

In this article, we’ll try to answer this question and, in the end, we’ll leave some links to show you how to create your own invitation-only-based community with our plugin All In One Invite Codes.

After the pandemic of Fake News and the Coronavirus, many people have made drastic decisions about their digital lives. They decided to abandon the mainstream social networks such as Facebook and Instagram and try their luck in platforms like Telegram, Signal, and the recently famous ClubHouse.

Club House is a new social network based on invite-only access, and it’s having an incredible boom, positioning the app at the height of Instagram when it comes to net value, 1 billion dollars.

Why would invite-only make sense?

But why is ClubHouse making such a fuss, you would wonder. Why should I wait in line to get into something that I don’t know how it works, and have a lot of substitute products?

Beyond the particularities of the ClubHouse interface and inner workings, we, the Themekraft Team, would like to focus on the restrictiveness side of the application. The invite-only subject gives a feeling of exclusivity and the fact that it’s solely for IOS only adds more fuel to that fire. Plus, if you get in, you have two invites to use yourself. That’s a very powerful feeling because if the exclusiveness is the new sexy, to have a saying over who is or is not exclusive enough to be somewhere, is the new power of sexy.

This has several advantages:

1. You can create a community using the snowball effect that the first couple of invites generates. This is huge for marketing purposes; you don’t navigate the web(advertise) looking for people to join your community, it’s the user who does the leg work for you. If you have the power of sexy in your hand, you’ll want to use it, for sure. (And for sure, they’ll want to have it).
2. Another advantage of these exclusive social networks is their fundamental homogeneity considering people invite people they know and, therefore, share certain characteristics with them, certain baseline values. With this, you can create school communities, expert groups, or any other like-minded societies. So you can build spaces you are positive the users will want to be with each other, talk to each other, share with each other. What you get with this are vibrant communities, users eager to cooperate in the network process, and to be a node of information. People won’t crash with others on the opposite side of the spectrum, and that almost guarantees a pacific and secured communication and development of activities. And if it happens, then you have the next advantage point.
3. Absolute transparency in the user’s registration flow and full management capacities. With an invite-only registration system, you have something called the user’s tree which is a graphic way to display who invited whom. This enables you to have complete control over the community’s users and allows you to keep it somehow clean of nonaccepted behavior or activities such as racism, sexism, discrimination, hate speech, bigotry, and anything you don’t allow in the boundaries of your community. You can know exactly who invited who through the Users Tree, and, if some branches of that tree are causing problems, you can either punish, ban, or remove entire trees or branches out with just a click. Of course, you never have to forget to have clear community standards for your users to follow and to always be fair and transparent about them.
4. To add another seasoning to the mix, you can always take advantage of the classic psychologic tricks to help you grow the community, like:
   1. Gamification: Set a reward scheme to motivate the invitations, creating a ranking with the best ones; the best trees and branches, the best adapted to the community norms, the most active, those who have invited the most, etc. All that through badges, levels, or privileges system, as many other apps do.
   2. Belonging: you can display the user’s trees in their profiles so everyone can know where they are coming from, just like a family tree. You can make it so that the one who invites takes responsibility for their invitation. If someone infringes the community norms the wrong behavior falls back to the one who invited that person, and so the responsibility itself for that act. That way the members will be conscious of the people they invite to the community, and they’ll aspire to invite the most suitable ones only. This is just another way to keep your niche network safe from infiltration, hate speech, fake news, or any kind of undesired factors.

Can I do it for my existing Site with open registration?

Now, you would be wondering, how can I take advantage of such a powerful tool?

If you have an area for your users to talk about your product or service. If you communicate in a niche social network to share knowledge or write guest posts or create any kind of content, yes you could.

You could create an application form for your existing site with BuddyForms for the invitation.

Is it possible for WordPress?

Yes, it is. In this blog post, we’ll show you all you need to know to achieve that by using our free plugin All In One Invite Codes. Download for free here.

Use Invite Codes in the regular WordPress Registration, all about it here: Use All In One Invite Codes as User

Use Invites in social network plugins like BuddyPress (Send Codes as Admin With BP), BuddyBoss(BuddyBoss Documentation), or Ultimate Member(Ultimate Member Documentation)

All In One Invite Codes BuddyBoss Integration Youtube tutorial.

BuddyForms Registration Forms (BuddyForms Documentation)

What should we do next? All In One Invite Codes Plugin Survey.

Looking for more information?
All In One Invite Codes Landing page
All In One Invite Codes Documentation

Sven Lehnert