Lady Gaga is no stranger to social media and increasing the visibility of her brand through her unorthodox online presence. But now she is taking digital media one step further with the closed beta launch of her new social network.

LittleMonsters.com — the first product created by startup Backplane — gives Gaga’s fans an outlet to create or share Gaga-related content, interact with fellow “Little Monsters” and publicly show whether they like what other users post. You can request an invite to join the network Now!

The social network, which has been around in beta for four weeks now, has doled out roughly 10,000 codes, including one to Mashable. Check out our test-run in the gallery above for specifics.

“Backplane is about bringing together communities and Gaga’s community just so happens to be the community we’re using to learn about proper functionality,” Michelsen says. “We think we can really change the world.”

Gaga’s strong social media presence should work into Backplane’s advantage and help build a large user base — let alone attention to the startup — for Little Monsters. Gaga joined Google+ in January and has already accumulated more than 330,000 followers. That’s in addition to her almost 19 million Twitter followers, which is the most for any user on the microblogging service, and 47 million Facebook fans.

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