Are you planning to make a social networking app? Today it is relevant, because almost everyone uses social networks in one way or another to communicate and work. To surprise the modern user, you need to take bold steps. It is an interesting way to invest your capital. But it is important to understand the peculiarities of developing such projects.
How to make a social networking app? Having spent some time and effort, you can learn everything, the main thing is not to rush.
Let’s start with a plan of action:
- Before you make a social networking app, come up with an interesting idea so that you have a chance to surpass your competitors or occupy a new niche by being a leader in it.
- When considering different names for your app, you need to pay attention to sound and informative options.
- Try to collect start-up capital, if you have funds it is much easier to launch a quality resource and promote it quickly.
- Look for people who are interested in your idea and involve them in your business. It is easier to work in a team, and it is impossible to understand everything.
- Start developing a resource as early as possible. Maybe your project will be interesting to investors and then you will not have to look for seed money.
- Run the resource only when it is fully finalized. The first visitors should not see a lot of flaws.
- Start actively promoting your project. You can use any means to do this, from advertising on social networks to the purchase of links.
- A simple plan for doing the necessary work on your project. Do not miss important points, every mistake can be a reason for failure.
How to make a social networking app – technology
Do you want to make a social networking app? It is important to use other approaches that are different from classical development.
Social networks are highly loaded, horizontally scalable projects (splitting the system into smaller structural components and spreading them across separate physical machines and increasing the number of servers performing the same function in parallel).
Do you have an idea for a cool product? Dreaming of pushing Facebook off the pedestal, but not sure where to start? We’ll tell you the key steps to make a social networking app.
Define your purpose
Since it is very difficult to create a social network that will attract the attention of any visitor to the Internet, and this process is very costly in terms of time, effort and money, it is better from the beginning to think about creating a specialized site, designed for a certain range of users.
In determining the concept and the idea in the first place must understand that the pursuit of meeting the needs of all users of the network will lead to the inevitable collapse of the project.
Take time for different ideas, define and write down on paper what your social community should look like, show your imagination and decide in advance what you want to end up with.
Imagine your project in your mind and reproduce it down to the smallest pixel, because only this kind of planning will help you see your work through to the end.
At the planning stage, determine the target group of users. A certain topic will make your brainchild unique and allow you to win your niche, because you should agree that it is not possible to compete with universal sites at the present time and with your limited labor and financial resources.
How to make a social networking app: Target audience
There are no universal projects; each has its own audience – people of a particular age category, interests. 83% of Facebook users are under 45 years old. They check the news about 8 times a day; they like to update their statuses and upload photos.
The more detailed the portrait of your audience, the better. At a minimum, identify users’ gender characteristics, age, values, and targeted actions in the app.
Mobile functionality
Do you want to make a social networking app? The first thing a user does is to register and fill out a profile. If something goes wrong at this stage, the user may well abandon your app in favor of a competitor.
Therefore, decide in advance how the user will add personal data to his profile: manually or by pulling information from other products automatically. The event feed is another must-have feature.
Facebook suggests responding to posts with different emoji: A couple of years ago, 5 more emojis were added to the classic “Like”. On Pinterest, users save interesting pins on their board, and the app selects new pins based on the user’s preferences.
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Work out your interface
You’ve studied your audience. You figured out what target actions your users are going to perform, and what kind of functionality they need. It’s time to work on the interface. Ideally, it should be so intuitive that people do not have to constantly look at the FAQ.
Development and testing
You’ve successfully gone through all the first stages. Choose the developers and let’s go. If there are more questions than answers – start with the app MVP and test the viability in a test build. And then expand the app’s capabilities step by step.
Conclusions
Do you want to make a social networking app? You can highlight some type of communication and take a specialized product as an idea.
- Now the idea needs to be finished: give the visual concept a uniqueness (brand book with a corporate font, color palette, special design elements, etc.); come up with a catchy name and buy a domain name.
- To create a platform, use ready-made CMS and frameworks – study both types of technologies carefully, and see what you and your team will be able to do.
- Then there is a test run (to identify bugs and provide a smooth interface), after which it is worth investing in PR and SMM promotion for brand awareness and increasing your audience. Contextual advertising isn’t superfluous for increasing app traffic, either.
- Once the momentum gains and the number of members reaches the 50 000 mark, we can congratulate you: it’s time to monetize with ads that will already be placed with you and other tools to increase profits.
Now you can think about how to make a social networking app or get started immediately.
