How To Make A Social Media App? (The Complete Guide With Examples)

• On this page:
• The Business Perspective Of Building An App
• For Beginners, What Is Social Media?
• Different Types Of Social Media Apps
• Features That Your Social Media App Should Have
• The Pre-launch Market Research Of Your Social Media App (step by step)
• Best Practices To Design The Perfect Social Media App
• How To Maintain Your Social Media App?
• How Much Does It Cost To Build A Social Media App?

In 2021, over 4.26 billion users were active on social media worldwide, which is expected to scale to 6 billion by 2027.

Here is a great social media usage infographic by Hootsuite so that you can know how prevalent social media usage has become.

With increased smartphone usage each year, the number of social media users continues to grow. And this incredible growth is giving rise to several opportunities entrepreneurs can’t miss. Each app created today is designed to make our life easier, and if it succeeds in its goal, it becomes prosperous in the market. Billions of users download them, and the audience starts acting like brand ambassadors, which makes such apps immensely popular.

So, suppose you are one of the entrepreneurs looking to capitalize on the ever-growing social media market by launching an app. In that case, this blog is for you.

The Business Perspective Of Building An App

Social media is one of the most productive markets if you are willing to invest in it. Mobile apps are becoming immensely popular today. Just pick your mobile and see the apps on the app store or play store. You’ll find numerous apps that are earning millions of dollars daily.

With a ground-breaking app, you can do this too. There is just one little problem. Some extremely dominant players have taken over the social media segment. However, the rapidly evolving infrastructure is opening new gateways and opportunities for you.

New ideas are fostering, and there is still room for more apps to make a difference. See how the apps in the image below made inception with a unique and innovative idea.

 

Image Source: streambankmedia

When building a social media app, it is essential to be clear of the app’s vision and value. With over 8.93 million apps in the market, your app needs to stand out to outshine its competitors in the same niche. And if it does, there is no telling how much your social media app could accomplish. So, if you have an idea, have studied it thoroughly, and know it will work, then why wait?

If you have an app idea that can be the next big thing in social media, but you don’t have enough capital to invest in it, you can read our guide on crowdfunding app development to learn how to raise investments for your app.

For Beginners, What Is Social Media?

Several people don’t know the literal meaning of social media. When people hear the term social media, they think of Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, but the truth is that there is much more to it. Social media is a social network. It is a platform that was designed and aimed to connect people globally.

People with the same interests, hobbies, and backgrounds got a chance to make real-life connections with each other. While social media’s central concept was to bring people worldwide together, it evolved and became a powerful modern marketing tool. Users could share what they’ve been doing in photos, videos, posts, or statuses. Later, with the inception of smartphones came the era of mobile apps.

And the same social media channels that once were just limited to having a website turned into mobile applications that we love today.

Some essential features of social media include the following:

• Activity feed on which the latest posts, viral videos, and updates from friends or groups are received.
• A profile where users can input his/her information such as name, age, profession, skills, interests, or hobbies. They can also share videos and photos from here.
• An easy-to-use interface that people from every walk of life can easily use.

These features are also integrated into a social media app to make the desktop and mobile experience similar. However, over the years, this experience has improved drastically. The latest social media app, e.g., Facebook or Twitter, offers a way more immersive and satisfying user experience.

Different Types Of Social Media Apps

Now that you know the actual meaning and purpose of social media, let’s discuss the different types of social media apps and their categories.

1.  Content Organizing Apps

These apps are used to discover, share, and save the content that the audience likes. A perfect example of such apps is Pinterest and Facebook.

2.  Customer Review Apps

As the name says, these apps are best for finding the perfect service or product by reading reviews and suggestions from old customers. An example of customer review apps can be Trustpilot or, indeed.

1.  Discussion Forum Apps

The place where the audience asks questions. From selecting the best hair oil to finding the perfect off-road vehicle – you’ll find all the insights, tips, and answers here. Some great examples of such apps are Reddit and Quora.

2.  Connecting/Interacting Apps

You may already be familiar with these kinds of apps. They are used for connecting with friends or family. You can share information, photos, video, and much more. Facebook and LinkedIn are some great examples.

3.  Media Sharing Apps

These apps allow users to create and publish their content. They can also get an audience in the form of subscribers or followers.

YouTube and Vimeo provide this facility to their users.

4.  Blogging & Publishing Platforms

Users can create and upload blogs leveraging these platforms. Tumblr and Medium are some examples of such platforms. With these out of the way, now your mind should be clear about which type of social media app you want to build. Moreover, some standard features must be included in your app, regardless of which type of app you are willing to build.

Most Popular Social Media Apps in 2022

Here’s the list of 10 most popular social media apps in 2022 based on active monthly users:

• Facebook (2.93b users)
• WhatsApp (2.35b users)
• Instagram (2b users)
• YouTube (2b users)
• Reddit (1.5b users)
• TikTok (1b users)
• Twitter (1b users)
• Snapchat (600m users)
• Pinterest (450m users)
• LinkedIn (70m users)

Features That Your Social Media App Should Have

Image Source: MsPowerUser

1.  User Profile

Having a user profile on your social media app is extremely essential because it displays the user’s information in detail. User profiles also help people make more precise connecting decisions.

2.  Customization

Your social media app should have photo editing, collage creating, tagging, linking, bio’s editing, and sharing options.

3.  News Feed

There should be a general news feed where all the shared posts, viral videos, stories, or photos are shown to the audience.

4.  Location

What if a user is spending his vacation on a beach with his family?  You need to give him GPS so that he can share his location with his friends. To do this, you need to integrate a location API that retrieves your device’s location through GPS. This would also come in handy when businesses would opt for monetization.

5.  Text Editing Functionality

Give your users the option of customizing their text to make it more beautiful and engaging.

6.  Simple But Engaging Interface

The interface should not be complicated. It should be easy to navigate and user-friendly.

7.  Audience Insight/Targeting

Give your users the power to use analytics to reach their audience as SoundCloud does. In SoundCloud, you can reach your potential audience and showcase your music out there.

8.  Managing Personal Value

Integrate the functionality of liking, sharing, or commenting so that your audience can send or receive rewards and maintain a sound image.

9.  The Interlinking Option

Usually, apps are interlinked with each other, e.g., you can share your WhatsApp stories on Facebook.

Include this feature in your app, and try to make your app interlinked with another app.

This approach will attract the active audience on a different social media app to come and try your app, which will increase downloads and usage.

10.  Push notifications

This will benefit you more than it will benefit your audience. Through push notifications, you can get your audience to use your social media app more.

The functionalities mentioned above are some of the most basic features that your social media app should have.

So now, you know a lot about social media apps, their types, and their must-have features. You are all set to start building a ground-breaking app.

But before starting the work on your app, we want you to go through one more phase: the Market Research Phase.

Conducting comprehensive market research will enable you to strategically place your app to boost downloads, rankings, reviews, and customer experience.

Detailed marketing research will reveal several valuable insights that’ll help you make more informed decisions while building your social media app.

Let us tell you how to do market research for your social media app.

The Pre-launch Market Research Of Your Social Media App (step by step)

·  Researching Your Targeted Audience

You need to understand your targeted audience and what they want or what’s missing.

Understanding your audience will enable you to integrate the functionalities they want, create a more user-defined experience, and clarify the revenue model.

·  Competitor Analysis

Another crucial aspect of building a social media app is the competitor analysis phase.

You need to analyze your competitors and create and implement a comprehensive strategy to surpass them. We already told you about the fierce competition that your app would face in the digital realm.

Analyzing your competitors’ core weaknesses and strengths will enable you to capitalize on the gaps and start yielding results from your marketing efforts.

·  Creating Powerful And Meaningful Messages

Communication is the key to any business so, make sure your messages are power-packed.

By understanding your audience, and knowing your core values and beliefs, you can create a powerful and effective message.

Because marketing is more about building relations, your message should be aimed toward the innovation and feasibility that your app is providing.

Add an emotional stance to your message, target their pain by giving them the solution and get them connected to your app before its launch.

By crafting a compelling message, you’ll easily show your audience how you are different from your competitors.

·  Identify User Problems

Identifying your users’ problems and improvising on them will instantly get your app ahead of its competition.

One way to do this is to leverage social media by conducting surveys and connecting with your audience to explore new horizons and perspectives.

Also, identifying user problems is very essential, and they give a long-term benefit.

After the identification of user problems, you can create meaningful messages and powerful marketing strategies.

·  Look At Market Trends And Growth Rates

By analyzing the market trends and growth rates, you will gain insights into what is more appealing and a dud to your targeted audience.

You’ll know the trends and how your competition is adapting to excel in the competitive landscape.

Capitalizing on such trends will give you an edge, and you’ll be more precise the next time you want to send a message to your audience.

By the end of the research, you’ll be clear about what is intriguing your audience into downloading an app.

And in which category of a social media app are you observing exponential growth?

·  Create An Effective Value Proposition

Show off your value to your audience. Tell them how you’re different from your competitors.

Also, to create an effective value proposition, you would need to clearly understand your audience’s problems, which we already told you about above.

So, make sure that the problem and the solution are crystal-clear in your value proposition to make sure that you connect to your audience in an impactful way.

Just make sure you have the reason for downloading your social media app ready if your audience asks for it.

· Identify Relevant Audience Engagement Channels

Identifying where and when your audience is active on social media is extremely important.

You don’t want to waste your marketing budget by advertising to an audience with no interest in your product, right?

If not, then take a little more time and identify the channels on which your marketing goals can be achieved.

Finalize such channels and start marketing your app organically. It may take time to market your app organically, but the results will be goal-crushing.

For a social media app, we would recommend App Store Optimization (ASO), which is much like SEO.

ASO will get your app ranked and positioned for maximum traffic that’ll translate into downloads later on.

You can also leverage the option of paid marketing or influencer outreach to market your app.

However, don’t waste your money on trying out each platform by paying for the advertising.

Just do your research, streamline the most effective channels, and start marketing your app.

Because marketing in the digital world certainly calls for a lot of money, and if your marketing campaigns are not effective, you’ll lose a significant amount of money.

With the market research all done – let us tell you how you can build a social media app.

 General Information:

Architecture	ModelView View Model “MVVM”
Programming language	Swift
Framework	Cocoa.
Library	Alamofire.

 

• For building the UI Layer, we use the UI Kit, which is also a feature integrated into Auto Layout.
• We use Codable for parsing JSON responses.
• For loading and caching images, we use AlamofireImage and SDWebImage.
• For automation and code generation, we use Jenkins and SwiftLint.
• For Analytics, we use Firebase.
• For the Unit Test, we use XCTest.

1.  Testing And Analysis

There is a wide range of analytics tools that can help you assess the success of your app. You might look at how long people spend on your app or how many times per week/month they use it.

Keeping track of engagement can help you make actionable changes for the future.

Best Practices To Design The Perfect Social Media App

As a revolutionary tech company, we have our own perspective on how social media apps should be.

We want to tell you some of the best practices that’ll help you build the perfect app.

If we were building a social media app – we would’ve followed the same approach.

When thinking of social media, we think of a few important aspects that should be met to build a perfect app.

Some of these aspects are from, of course, the audience’s perspective that the app should be intuitive, easy to use, and engaging from the audience’s perspective.

So, here are the few best practices that you can keep in mind to improve the usability and experience of your app:

• Your app should have simple and clean designs. It should never be complicated for the general audience.
• Maintain consistency in terms of the design and look across all the pages of your app.
• We recommend using a round profile picture style. This makes it easier for the users to distinguish the person’s picture from other details available on a particular page.
• Integrate features like adding information or statuses to help your audience connect to each other because of matching personality traits.
• Incorporate colors and maintain brand guidelines consistently to deliver a seamless experience.
• Build the navigation, searching, and connecting process easy.

We created an App for one of our clients, and it was one stunning experience for him and us – you can read the case study

Difference In Building An App For Android And IOS

There are several notable differences in the UI/UX of Android and IOS. Your app needs to be tailored according to these differences.

We have listed below some of the most visible differences noted by developers while building an app on either platform.

The Interface

We are going to talk about the visual difference between IOS and Android. These differences will affect your app’s creation so, make sure that you remember them.

• IOS developers will build “XIB” files onto the IOS interface.
• Android developers build “XML files” onto the android interface.
• IOS animation quality is better as compared to Android’s quality.
• Google tried to fix its quality issues with “Android Lollipop” and an app design trend known as “Material Design.”
• Apple focuses on immersive, powerful, and complex animations.
• Google’s prime focus nowadays is on performance and hardware.

The Programming language

Everyone knows the difference between operating systems when it comes to Google and Apple.

However, most non-technical folks don’t know that there is a difference in the programming language.

• IOS Apps run on objective-c/swift.
• Android Apps are mostly Java or Kotlin.

App Testing

App testing is a very crucial stage in your social networking app development process. Before launching the app, one must be sure that the app he develops is working perfectly fine.

However, to test your application on Android and IOS, you would have to use different models.

To test your social media app on Android, you would have to opt for the Android Emulator.

Similarly, if you want to test your App on IOS, you would have to opt for IOS Simulator.

Here are a few differences between both models:

• The IOS simulator is much faster as compared to the Android emulator.
• Android emulator gives you the advantage of being an effective virtual machine as well as a CPU.
• Android emulator representation is more realistic than IOS because it is a virtual machine and a CPU.
• The IOS simulator often fails to efficiently showcase an accurate and realistic presentation of an Apple device.
• Most of the developers test IOS apps on real devices to test possible issues and bugs.

The Back Button

The back button is present in Android but not in IOS. It is important to take this prominent difference into consideration before designing and developing your social media app.

To counter this in IOS, you can integrate a custom “back arrow” with navigation’s intended functionality in your IOS social media app.

This way, the interaction flow will be completed, and the user would not face any navigational problems.

How To Maintain Your Social Media App?

Once your app is ready and performs amazingly well, it is important to maintain this performance in the long term.

To do this, you may need to update your app more frequently, and let us tell you how you can do that.

Ensure That Your App Is Utilizing The Latest Technology

Technology keeps on evolving!

Even if you are not technical, you might’ve seen several Android and IOS versions being released every year.

Or you may also have noticed that mobile devices are released each year with new specifications/configurations.

So, make sure that your social media app is compatible across any platform, specification, or device.

If you don’t maintain your app and your app starts lagging and showing performance issues (crashes), you’ll start losing customers.

So, maintain your app and make sure it is on par with the latest technology and hardware.

Here’s a pro tip for you. You can also leverage technology to integrate a new functionality or feature into your app.

Update Your User Interface Frequently

Incorporate the latest trends, styles, functionality, and accessibility.

Make sure your users have everything available just fingertips away.

Updating your interface will bring your social media app long-term success, improving customer experience.

The more time your users spend with your app, the more mature they are getting, so, to spark interest back in them to keep them engaged, you have to update your user interface.

Monitor Your App’s Performance

This part even sounds essential – monitoring your app’s performance will let you know about the lags, loading time increases, responsiveness, or usability issues.

We recommend you monitor your app’s performance and stay updated with your app’s analytics report.

Keep track of your engagement and conversion rates – this way, you’ll realize what’s working and what’s a dud.

After going through your metrics, you can easily revamp existing issues, and improve user retention, and conversions.

Through this approach, your app will stay in the best shape for a long time.

Regularly Fix Issues

Don’t wait for the analytics report to tell you what’s wrong with your app.

Find errors and functionality issues yourself.

Fixing bugs and lags promptly will also give your audience a message that you care about their customer experience.

At Tekrevol, we opt for the same approach, whether it is our client’s App or our own App – we make sure we find the problems before our client does.

We continually fix the app until it reaches perfection.

If you don’t take care of your app by fixing bugs or issues, your app will eventually crash, and in some cases, it can even fail for good.

So, keep an eye out for bugs or technical errors, fix them ASAP, and keep track of your app’s efficiency.

One way to get issues and complaints regarding your app is by promoting feedback and reviews.

Ask your users to leave feedback so that you can tailor your app according to your audience’s requirements.

How Much Does It Cost To Build A Social Media App?

The digital era is evolving rapidly. It is showing no sign of stopping anytime soon.

People have realized the importance of apps in today’s market, so most search queries related to social networking app development have a business intent behind them.

The average cost of building a social media app ranges from $50,000 to $300,000 and even more, depending on the advanced features and functionalities. Try our cost estimation calculator or book your free consultation with our app development consultants.

Suppose you are interested in learning more about the app development cost. In that case, this guide will help you better understand the cost associated with design, development, testing, and deployment.

After reading, our cost breakdown of creating an app, you’ll have a clear idea of how much finance you need to get started building your social media app.

Over To You

That’s all, folks. Now you know all the ins and outs of social media app development. Make sure you go through each section of the blog in detail to remember all the essential information that you need to get the work started on your app.

However, if you ever get stuck anywhere with your app, please contact us anytime you want.

We’ll be more than happy to assist you with your problem.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the most popular social media app?

With more than 2.41 billion active users, Facebook stands on top as the most popular social media app.

What is the safest social media app?

Today, several social media apps provide higher privacy and data security level, so numerous apps are safe from our perspective. However, some apps are a little low on the data safety and security side, so watch out for them.

How to promote your app on social media?

There are several ways you can promote your app on social media. You can go for the organic approach by posting regularly about your app and about its features. Or you can opt for paid marketing to promote your app on social media.

Which social media app has the most users?

Although Facebook is considered to have 3 billion users, a quarter of these users are either fake profiles or duplicate accounts. TikTok, on the other hand, has over 1 billion active monthly users despite being only four years old.

Is Tinder a social media app?

Yes. Tinder and all the other dating apps are considered social media apps.

Who owns TikTok?

The Chinese conglomerate Byte Dance owns TikTok. It is headquartered in Beijing, China, and has almost 1 billion active users.

How many social media apps are in the Meta?

Meta is Facebook’s parent company that includes dozens of products and services. Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook Watch are the popular social media apps owned by Meta.

Is Twitter a social media app?

Twitter is a microblogging and social networking site primarily used to connect with like-minded people and share your thoughts on the internet.

What is the average cost of building a social media app?

The average cost of building a social media app ranges from $50,000 to $300,000 and even more, depending on the complex features and functionalities required. However, every app is different! It’s impossible to tell the exact cost before the requirement gathering step and conducting interviews with app development consultants.