A social platform exhibits a social media network's technological and user-specific characteristics. Technologically, a social platform provides markup language for creating native applications, an application programming interface (API) for third party application integrationb and a backend admin console for managing the entire user base and preferences, etc. From a user's perspectives, a social platform enables communities, sharing of content, adding friends, setting privacy controls and other native social media network features.
Ning is a popular social platform that provides a Software as a Service (SaaS) based platform for the creation of social media websites and networks.