How to Build a Social Media App?

1990 — You had 10 friends off your class and neighbourhood2010 — You had a gang of friends connected through mobile phones2017 — You have more than 2017 friends, followers and fans!!

That the exponential effect social media has created in terms of improving connectivity. You have your close ones, a person from a third-world, a colleague, a mentor and well-wishers, all connected together and personally across various social mediums.

The ability to share, publicize, get a point across, search for, find memories, topics and interests in social mediums is what interests users. In psychological terms, we call it “Instant Gratification”. Provisions to share a thought or memory in any form and receive instant, positive responses is the key behind social platforms. This happens in trillions in every social medium like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or whatever that’s on top now.

On the whole, ideas differ but the prerequisites happen to be the same and now we are going to discuss on all the essentials a social media app needs to be buckled up with to render a top-of-the-line user experience.

Things to Consider While Building a Social Media App

The first connect — Social Sign Up

Convenience has a significant influence over the experience and so it should be there right from the start to every other use case. To build your own social media app, you’ll have to get social logins into it first to make the first connect as simple as possible. No user will be up for filling forms as they’ve done that enough already.

Being themselves — Profile customization

Once a user is into your app, what do they look for. It’s their presence. Users value their social media presence a lot and look upon it as the opportunity to express themselves the way they want to millions out there. It all begins with profile customizations like photos, backgrounds, quotes and more. Build a social media app with plenty of personalization options in terms of profiles.

The local and global connect — Invite and connect

Now that they are ready to get rolling, users tend to get started with finding their close pals first. Finding friends must be easy and getting connected with new ones too. How to make a social networking app that helps users to find friend easily ?

Conceptualize an algorithm that maps friends and people with common interests so that users can create their own community of friends in just a click. Fabricate options for invites, follows and friend requests appropriate to the concept of your social media app.

Quenching the thirst for content — Content feed

People find social media apps interesting because it’s never the same the very next second. You open Facebook and see new posts, notifications on instagram, new pings in Whatsapp. That’s why users thrive on social media apps and content feeds keeps their interests alive and kicking. Connecting friends’ actions comments, posts, recommendations will help in this respect.

Interconnect with other platforms — The social media ecosystem

Access to other social platforms enable users to stay connected to other social media apps they are already a part of. Like an omni-channel connect. If users are able to connect to several other social apps, your social media app become the super admin of their social media presence guaranteeing more in-app time.

Tech Stack Involved in Building a Social Media App

Web backend for app management: Database and hosting

When your social app idea turns viral and takes off, the efforts involved in keeping the app up and running is almost a nightmare for the off-stage techies.

Backend:

In general, social media apps are prone to get bombarded with http requests as there are numerous user actions to be performed. Node.js is one of the best options to consider to build super fast and highly scalable network applications.

Hosting:

Multimedia file uploads and on-demand videos, apart from actions like clicks, shares, add more to the server stress. It is of prime importance that you have a well planned hosting plan to handle any kind of traffic fluctuations. Cloud hosting like Amazon Web Services (AWS) can adaptively scale according to server loads.

Additionally, AWS can mediate other services like multimedia file storage in S3, transcoding of videos using Elastic Transcoder and you can automate data archival as well.

Database:

For social networking apps, MySQL databases are much better in terms of managing dynamic contents. SQLite and NoSQL are other options worth considering.

3rd party API integration

3rd party APIs are handy and reduce the job of developing every single aspect that you need to build your own social media app with. APIs can be used for payments, notification pushes, geo-location, presence indicators and more.

Finally — The Result

Analytics. Knowing this is crucial for your next step. User analytics indicates the areas where your app has scored and the downsides as well. Google Analytics is one of the widely preferred third-party analytics tool. For in depth analytics, you can go for paid tools like Kissmetrics.

In case if you are into paid advertising campaigns for your social media app, you should be calculating CPI (Cost Per Install) CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) to evaluate the effect of paid campaigns.

Social media apps can be agonizingly hard to manage from the technical point of view. It is essential that you have the right combination of team put up to take care of the crucial technical departments that collectively form the management console of your social media app.

Our advice is to go for a professional app development company that has enough seasoning in building social media apps. Only these players can get things done on the app’s interface side and the technical aspects done to perfection.

How to Build a Social Media App? was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.