Designing Growth Model of Niche Social Networks in Iran

With the development of the Internet, the use of social networks also increased rapidly and various content-based social platforms were widely used in Iran.Public international messengers and social networks inside Iran have remained unrivaled, and almost developed platforms have not been able to compete with foreign examples. However, the growth and success of specialized social networks (niches) that have been able to gain the trust of a section of the Iranian audience in the ecosystem of platforms developed inside Iran is significant.The main purpose of this study is to provide a model to describe the "growth of niche social networks in Iran." Since there is no model for the growth of social networks in general and niche networks in particular, the “Grounded Theory” has been used to design the model.Interviews were conducted with 18 social network activist including decision makers in this field, managers of media and social networks; social media index audience, university professors in the field of media and communications and the founders of specialized social platforms. The final model was extracted after open coding, axial coding and finally selective coding.The success of niche social networks in Iran was extracted as a central category and the causal, contextual, intervening, strategies and consequences of implementing strategies were expressed.