Social media is incessant and infinite in its strength and éclat, making for massively promising domain not just for users but also for elite business entities. With social media platforms dominating the world of marketing and advertising, business wanting to capture ample audience can see it as a lucrative opportunity.
Of course, the competition in this market is simmering with a few jubilant players. But as technology evolves, the new creative social app development ideas are getting big attention.
Before embarking on the social media app development project, expertise in mobile device is must. If you are planning to break into the social market through a dedicated mobile app, you must realize that the major cost falls on the shoulder of backend developers, and that challenges for making it from scratch are high. Therefore, you require great deal of resources and talent to make it work.
Here is how you can give it a jump start:
Main ingredients of social media app
1. Integration with existing social media
The power of true user experience often stems from enabling users to explore the full-fledged interaction. Since they already are a member of a few other famous social platforms, they expect your app to provide them with a button to stay connected with those profiles. Your app can allow them to login to the app using existing social accounts.
2. Sharing expressions
Users want to set a stage of expression on your social app to flaunt their unique creative ability. Your social media app must contain features that empowers users to share their life stories and experiences along through personalized profiles, videos, backgrounds and customized pictures. Take examples of YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, Vimeo, Snapchat, etc.
3. Creating a network
Being able to connect with distant friends and increasing the number of followers make the platform more desirable for users. Like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, social app developers must create a system that lets members to invite new friends.
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Smart networking system can help build communication between people. LinkedIn provides professional networking opportunity whereas Tinder, Badoo and Grindr enables personal and dating services
4. Reviews
Social media app doesn’t necessarily need to be confined to mean just social. Since users leave great loads of data, users can take advantage of this information to make purchasing decisions just like Yelp.
The app can know users’ geolocation and let them leave comment and suggestions about interesting brands or local businesses.
5. Newsfeed
Content is what attracts people to decide and subscribe to services. Social network apps run on influential content.
Through expressions, status, video, photos and audio sharing, users generate colossal amount of content in order to display their opinions and be heard.
Therefore, iOS and Android app should contain news feed very typical of quintessential social apps.
6. Community forums
Community forums and discussions like Quora, Disqus and Reddit are fundamental to social apps. Such knowledge sharing can form the basic mechanism of powerful social interactions within the app.
7. Publishing platforms
Blogging and microblogging platforms make for social media services users capitalize to publish creative text and media content. Examples of such apps are Medium, Your Story and Tumblr.
8. Interest-focused networks
Interest-based media creates a powerful community of like-minded people who share similar interests. A media app this genre creates tremendous appeal by bringing together individuals of common tastes. Goodreads is for literature lovers, for example, and Last.fm and Spotify are for music fanatics.
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9. Private Chat conversations
Having a built-in service of private communication increase ROI for social networking app as it inspire users to resort to your app more often to connect with their friends and followers.
This means users will spend more time in your app.
Creating a Social Media App
To build such an ambitious social networking app, you should ask developers to first create an MVP for the app. MVP contains core features and functionality that let you test its performance while saving on investment and time.
After acquiring good buzz, you can scale it up to add more features andUI/UX elements. To keep the app’s performance up and healthy, you need powerful architecture built of:
1. Backend
This is a backbone of your mobile app that handles intense rush of http requests as a result of numerous user actions happening within your app.
Node.js, .NET, Xamarin are a few great options to pick for building a mighty, high-performance and scalable networking app backend.
2. Database
MySQL databases along with SQLite or NoSQL are amongst the most preferable database tech for social networking apps as it swimmingly takes over dynamic contents.
3. Hosting
To handle constantly fluctuating traffic to your app and on-demand uploads along with likes and shares and other stress, you need a reliable hosting service plan. AWS is a competitive and widely used option with superior adaptive capability and scalability.
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4. 3rd Party APIs
Integration of3rd party APIs is the convenient option for mobile app developers as it reduces the efforts needed to build every single part of your social app and enables certain readymade solutions.
APIs can be integrated for solutions like payments, push notification, geolocation and other sensor-based indicators.
Basic steps of developing social media app
You should follow these critical steps for a creating successful social media app:
1) Target audience
In this phase, the idea is analyzed and studied to understand the requirements and map out the target audience. The first step to creating a successful social app is to identify the user needs and challenges they face.
In the end, project analysts can derive KPIs to be achieved in a social media niche. Developers now have a substantial choice of using a ready framework designed to create custom social apps with excellent user experience.
2) Calculating realistic estimates
Once determining the target audience, it is time to build a strategy and calculate realistic budget estimates. If your wish is to create highly engaging and technically immaculate social networking app, as an entrepreneur you should consider investing wisely. Too limited budget can’t produce the app you desire.
The cost estimate depends on the platform you choose, and iOS could be a great option to first develop an app. Then you can opt for Android platform later. Though it is hard to estimate traffic volume, it is essential to prepare database for end users.
3) Design considerations
The social networking design strategy starts with a basic outline and a rough sketch that includes expansive logic, screens to target and layout.
Then comes preparing a good wire frame which is important to development team as they begin to conceive a skeleton and structural view of the app.
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The next step is to create a prototype that represents a working model of the app and gives detailed understanding of what it is going to be. You can make changes to prototype idea before developers start writing the app.
This is followed by the design of app skin where app wire frame is used to create a solid design.
4) Development & QA testing
Due to rising development process technologies such as DevOps, design, development and QA testing phases are often synchronized and combined to run in perfect symphony.
After prototyping step, developers consider all technical requirements to start sculpting its backend architecture and implement servers, database, APIs and more.
Engineers focus on all the latest guidelines and platform terms for native iOS and Android app development to deliver brilliant performance.
During and post development, testers leverage manual and automated testing and cover extensive use cases to ensure the app is bug-free and well-programmed and has its expected UX standard.
5) Publish, Market and Promote
After everything is checked and tested, the app is deployed. Your app development partner will help you publish the app on popular online stores and create a comprehensive marketing strategy to evangelize the app.
The marketing team will optimize the app marketing with description content and video guides so that businesses can save time on making the app stand out at Google Play or the Apple Store market as well as on popular social media platforms.
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Make sure you communicate your concerns about what all are included in your project contract. Some companies separate the cost of development from the fees reserved for marketing and promotion activities.
Also, to achieve better audience, it is advisable to start marketing the app 3-4 months before the app is ready to publish.
Conclusion
Social media app development is not as straight as it seems. The process is rife with many challenges and brainstorming.
Only a veteran mobile app development company with extensive experience, rugged resources and competitive talents can help you build a successful social networking app and fulfill your business goals. They know what technologies best align with your business objective and help create fascinating features.
