How To Develop A Social Media Application? – Make an App

Do you know, in the   GA, people spent almost 230 billion minutes on the Facebook app in a year? We think this figure is good enough to imagine the popularity of social media apps.

Nowadays everyone is looking to develop a social media app due to its increased popularity. From small grocer to gigantic businessmen, everyone wants a social media app along with their existing business.

Are you also planning to develop a social media application and want to earn money from it? For this, you should possess a clear idea about the whole social media app development process. We will tell you all the development related things in this blog post. But before going ahead, first understand, what is a social media app then we will tell you how to develop this.

The Social Media App

A social media apps allows people, companies, and organizations to create, exchange and share information over a network. People can exchange pictures, videos through these type of mobile apps. These apps are the virtual communities where people can create accounts and log in. These accounts are managed by the social media organizations like Facebook, Twitter etc. The organizations connect user profiles with other groups and communities and thus, make a social media network.

Facebook app, Instagram app, and Twitter app are the best examples of these type of apps. You will be surprised after knowing the fact that the photo sharing app Instagram has over 400 million monthly active users in the world and number of Facebook users have crossed 1 billion registered accounts.

Thus, we could say, if you have planned for a social media app, you have made a good decision as you could make a huge amount of money from these type of apps but for this, you have to know the whole development process in a precise manner. You can do this easily by following these three steps:

The Social media apps follow the three-tier architecture which includes mobile client, database, and a backend but in this blog, our main focus is on the mobile client. We will explain database and backend in the next section of this blog.

Mobile Client

The mobile client of social media apps can be described by understanding the 3 fundamental features profiles, feeds, and connections.

Profiles

A profile is basically the personal details of a particular user and the database of this personal details is the key asset of social media app. The best possible way to create a user profile is to connect the app to an already existing social media account. The data can be easily retrieved from these social media accounts by applying REST API calls. Another approach is the signup process in which user will enter email id and password. But this process required more work.

Content Feeds

Content that shows up in the feed is basically shared by the user in the form of uploaded video, audio, photo, presentations and so on. These are the user generated contents and sharing of these contents motivate people to use social media apps. This user generated content can be further divided into following categories:

Location-based content

The most common form of letting others know that what they are doing, is the location-based content. This is done by tagging a particular location to the post. You can find others location by this way.

For this, a location-based API is implemented along with social media account which retrieves a particular location from a mobile network provider.

Status Updates, Photos and Videos

Status updates, photos, and videos come into these type of content feeds. Your social media app should be capable enough to share status updates, photos, and videos. You have to simplify the process of sharing these type of content into your app. Also, you should specify your target audience.

Levels, Special statues, badges, and tangible rewards from the content

These type of content feeds allows a user to get some implicit and explicit rewards. Levels, Special statues, badges, and tangible rewards are the forms of these type of rewards.

Connections

A Connection can be in the form of content-based connection, groups, events, social networks, address book, SMS, search, and recommendations. Let’s understand, what are these.

Content-based connections

Content-based connections depend on the user, A user can be in the form of explorer, talker, admirer or searcher.

Groups

Groups are the public communities that connect people and thus make a chain. These groups are created as an additional feature in a social media app.

Sending event invitations

Sending event invitations and event tickets are the good sources of income in a social media app. It helps for new connections into your social media.

By connecting Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin

By connecting your app with the popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Google+, you could increase your connections. These sites allow developers to retrieve their friend lists.

Invitation from your Address book

Users can send the invitation to their friends from their address book through an email client. This will help your app user in generating new connections.

‘Downloading the app’ Message

A message which contains the information regarding ‘downloading the app’ from one user to another, is also a powerful method to increase connections.

Search by Username and Full Name

In this feature, the user can search any user by their name. Social media apps allow users to search the accounts by usernames or full names, or email ID.

Suggestion for a new connection

Your app suggests your users for new connections and this is called recommendations. The App allows its users to swipe right to like and left to pass. Thus, a user can increase their connections.

In this article, we have briefly described what is the mobile client and how it works but for a better understanding of social media app development, you have to know database and backend as well. We will cover these in the next article.

Hemendra Singh

My name is Hemendra Singh. I am Managing Director and co-founder of PuzzleInnovationz, a Mobile App Development Company. I am having a keen interest in the latest trends and technologies that are emerging in different domains. Being an entrepreneur in the field of IT sector, it becomes my responsibility to aid my audience with the knowledge of latest trends in the market.