As the big dogs (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Google+) cement their control over the main social markets, most of the interesting work done in the creation of new social networks takes place in niche markets — Blip for original web series, Flixster for movie fans, Busuu for the ‘language learning’ community, and so on. But the niche market for alumni social networks has seen little growth. Customized alumni social networks often have terrible engagement, and that is a problem Graduway.com intends to fix.

Though Graduway is still very new, it already shows several advantages that could make it popular.

1. Universality– Graduway is already at 40 schools in 14 different countries worldwide. The system therefore has international recognition and, more importantly, international experience.

2. Mentoring– Graduway helps recent alumni reach out to older alumni to gain skills and form mentoring partnerships. It’s a valuable service that many networks cannot and will not do. It also boosts engagement.

Will Graduway make money? Though we sincerely hope that they will, they have a significant obstacle- their cost. Graduway is a ‘freemium’ service, meaning that they do offer a substantial amount of services for free, but if a school actually wants a fully customized social network, Graduway charges $4,000 per year. And that’s a base price.  Worse, Graduway is appealing to a class of administrator that has traditionally been slow to adapt to the free social media platforms.

Still, as long as there are colleges and universities, there will be the need to appeal to alumni for donations. Graduway has found a way to do that. Do you think their methods of engagement are valuable enough to justify the price?