Winning Philosophy On How To Create A Social Media App

A defining phenomenon in the marketing field, that in present times is reshaping the world is through social media apps. Popularly also is known as social media marketing. 

“If you don’t start in the right spot, you are going to lose the game before you even get started.” 

Social media was initially a computer-based technology facilitating the sharing of ideas, thoughts, and information. Based on the building of virtual networks and communities to connect people over a platform. It used to generate engaging content and become an attractive, user-friendly alternative to other communication methods. Social media vastly relies on internet and gives users quick electronic communication of content. This content includes personal information, documents, videos, and photos. Social Media Users engage with social media via computer, tablet, or smartphone via web applications, often utilizing it for messaging.

Approximately for the last 10 years, the online world has been dominated by the social media revolution. With the growing use of mobile devices and the advancement in tech solutions, a report came out in January 2020. According to that, 94 percent of responding social media marketers used the network to promote their business. In recent years, social media marketing has become one of the most popular forms of digital marketing for business purposes. Social media platforms have many benefits for customer engagement. Industry professionals particularly value the increased exposure for their brands and products and increased traffic on their websites. The possibility of reaching millions of potential customers at the click of a mouse is a living business reality.

How Marketers and Brands Benefit from Social Media Apps

In today’s digital age, social media have become the ultimate platform to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. It has also become a mainstream choice to promote a product or service. With the introduction to this, a means of analysis has been adopted by companies and investors to gauge how well businesses are treating their customers. This is known as Social Sentiment Indicators. It is used to analyze social media data. This helps businesses understand the public perception of a company, in terms of what is being said on social media. It helps companies gauge the health of a brand, and keep tabs on how it competes.

Usage of Social Sentiment Indicators

This self-analysis of the brand on social media, majorly helps them identify trends to target new customers. They accordingly, develop successful marketing campaigns and gauge if they are spending marketing dollars wisely. It plays a key role in learning the ground reality and determining how consumers feel about competitors and similar products. The accurate data helps in assessing and re-considering what to expand on and what to drop or change. This process ultimately proves to benefit in terms of protecting and improving brand identity and image.

Connecting and addressing questions and problems via social media app reduces the communication gap between brands and customers. This appeals to the masses easily. Doing so helps in Better Brand Promotion, Faster Service/Product Demonstration, Unparalleled Insights about Your Target Audience, Increased Search Ranking, and Conversion Rates. This indirect marketing, a non-traditional marketing strategy helps in creating engagement, brand value, brand identity, and presence. Any smart marketer looking to update on his marketing strategies will understand it. The fact that there is a psychological trigger involved in creating that sale or adding that subscribers to their list. To ensure maximum growth a well-experienced marketer will take the necessary actions to get their audience to do so. 

Usage of Social Media Apps in the E-Commerce Industry

Not only brands and marketers but also the E-Commerce industry can significantly leverage social media apps. This can be done through the means of Strategic targeting and Functional Content.

Strategic targeting

Social media advertising allows eCommerce brands to target users who are likely to become a potential customer of your products. Facebook, in particular, offers the ability to target users based on some pretty specific demographic information. Brands can now with the help of strategic targeting, target users based on life events. For example, a furniture renting company might target people who have recently moved.

Functional Content

When running paid social campaigns to capitalize on functionalities for specific platforms and tailor your CTAs to suit each platform. Targeting to increase sales allows users to shop easily. This can be done with the click of a button regardless of the platform.

Types of Social Media Apps

• Social Network Apps

Social software includes communication and interactive tools with users connecting either for their personal needs or professional communication. These are often Internet-based. Such tools are usually used to handle the capturing, storing, and presentation of communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. A few popular examples of this could be Facebook and Twitter for personal connection, whereas LinkedIn is apt for professional networking.

• Media Sharing Networks

Media sharing networks give people and brands a place to find and share media online, including photos, video, and live video. In recent times these sites have increasingly become valuable for brand awareness, lead generation, audience engagement, and most of your other social marketing goals. Examples for such could be Examples: Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube.

• Community and Discussion Forums

These networks are popularly used by people to find, discuss, and share news, information, and opinions. It is one of the oldest types of social media. Such platforms have an influential and variety of users in terms of usage. Information. Examples: Reddit, Quora, Digg.

• Networks for Consumer Reviews

Consumer reviews can use these apps to find, review, and share information about brands, products, and services, as well as restaurants, travel destinations, and more. Examples: Yelp, Zomato, TripAdvisor, Snackpass

• Blogging Platforms

As discussed earlier, content marketing within digital marketing can be a highly effective way to engage with your audience, build your brand, and generate leads and sales. People use these social media apps to publish, discover, and comment on content online. Examples: WordPress, Tumblr, Medium.

• Anonymous Social Networks

These networks are merely used to anonymously gossip, vent, snoop, and sometimes bully people. Examples: Whisper, Ask.FM, After School

• Relationship Networks

These are some of the most popular apps globally. Used to meet and build connections with apps that help communication between people. A popular example of such dating services apps could be Badoo or Tinder in this category.

• Messenger Apps

Messenger apps such as Facebook, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Viber, etc have become increasingly popular over the years.

• Bookmarking Networks

These networks are used to discover, save, share, and discuss new and trending content and media. Popular apps such as Pinterest, Flipboard can be highly effective for driving brand awareness, customer engagement, and website traffic.

• News Apps

News websites have now started providing their users with the latest news, and video streaming over apps. Flipboard and LifeHack are some cool apps in this category. Economic Times, Indian Express, inshorts are other popular news apps among people.

• Interest-based Networks

These can benefit one’s business if there’s a network devoted to the kind of products or services you provide, these networks can be a great place to engage with the audience and build brand awareness. People usually use these networks to connect with others around a shared interest or hobby. Examples: Goodreads, Houzz, Last.FM, ClassPass.

Must-have features of Social Media Apps

Almost all social network apps have user-generated content. It is vital to develop features that let the audience generate the content and share it within their network. As per statistics social media use among Americans has risen from 5% in 2005 to 69% in 2016. A related research was done by We Are Social, and Hootsuite for The Digital in 2020 Global Overview. It reveals that digital, mobile, and social media have become an indispensable part of everyday life for people globally.

More than 4.5 billion people now use the internet while social media users have passed the 3.8 billion mark. Nearly 60 percent of the world’s population is already online. The latest trends suggest that more than half of the world’s total population will use social media by the middle of this year. 

Social media also seems to have taken over, major business industries to remain relevant by adapting to the change. A strategic social media app developed for your business can give you an edge over the competition.

Quick Login/Sign Up

Customers wish to have an easy, quick, and effective login way as possible. Ensures that the application should provide easy login options. Integrating one’s mobile app with popular social media platforms to offer user-friendly services is another way to access quick login.

Customers wish to have a procedure that is easy, quick, and effective. Hence, if you are developing a social media application, ensure that the application provides easy login options. You can also integrate your mobile app with popular social media platforms and offer better services. With a user-friendly application there are more chances of remaining in the minds of the users.

App Developers should make it a point to offer users several registration options. For example, one can integrate options like email and password, phone number, and password. To make a social networking app more user-friendly, it’s necessary to add the ‘Forgot password’ feature. In the case of technologies, developers can use Facebook or Google SDK. It’s also possible to choose Amazon services like Amazon SES (signup via phone number) or Amazon SNS (SMS verification).

News Feed

News Feed is a reasons why apps like Facebook, Instagram have managed to take off over the last few years. It is due to their ability to show ‘real-time’, engaging content to the users on their news feed. Social media empowers users to connect with peers, friends, and family across the globe in a captivating manner.

Flexible Search

Including search functionality in your app saves the users time to get access to a vast amount of information. Integrating the live search results and filtering option in the app helps in engaging the users. When smartphone users type into the search box, the results filter out automatically and show quickly in a drop-down style. This will help the users to easily find the content they were looking for, without going through irrelevant data.

Customizable Profile

Social media is the new medium of expression. Users like to update their social profiles according to their mood, interests, activities, or environment. During such events, the app can prove it’s leverage over others with options to upload pictures, bio, interests, etc. Authority of customization tends to give a sense of control and command to the user over their profile. This makes them a regular user of the application.

Network Building

 Network Building is one of the most important features, to begin with, social media in the first place. Connecting is the underlining prime concept of social media. While creating a social network, easy connecting options should always be part of one’s mind to make it popular.

Push Notifications

Push Notification is something that has become a necessary feature. With the increase in population opting for mobile devices, most social networking apps now deliver everything over mobiles. Push notifications are a powerful medium to keep the users notified with all the recent activities that cause the user to come back to check out the updates. In today’s time if a platform doesn’t allow push notifications then it can be a major drawback. One can employ the push notifications to provide trending, customized, and smartly-targeted promotional content to the users.

Transient Content/ Stories

It’s the type of content that stays live for some time, so you can add stories that vanish after a limited time. Most social media apps have a 24-hour window before the content tends to vanish. Almost all social network apps like Whatsapp, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram, have introduced this feature to their apps.

Live Video Streaming

Through this feature users now choose to engage with their audience through live videos over written posts. This feature is getting increasingly popular especially among social media influencers and celebrities as it helps indirectly connecting them to their followers.

AR and Face Filters

One of the most growing features lets the user’s camera detect the presence of a face in real-time and overlays digital objects and animation. Through mobile devices or web interface, users can take a photo or record a video to share on social networks. Fun morphing, Famous celeb look, Cartoon characters, Beauty face filters, Background changer filter are some of the popular examples for AR. Such features help apps to grow organically and increase retention, and engagement. Apps like Instagram, Snapchat, Face Camera, YouCam Fun, LemoCam, B612 are a few of the well-known examples for AR and Face Filters.

The Virtual Reality (VR) Shift

VR environments can be the future of social media interaction. With Facebook investing through Oculus, VR tech could enable people to interact in VR environments. One will find plenty of opportunities to incorporate trending and cool features. It’s an exciting phase for social networking app development. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Chatbots

A chatbot is an artificial intelligence (AI) software that can simulate a conversation or a chat with a user in natural language through messaging applications, websites, mobile apps, or through the telephone. The need for the feature will continue to grow as they are quite popular in the social media landscape. 

Facebook Messenger chatbots are one of the fastest-growing and most effective ways to connect with customers. Since their launch in 2016, bots have helped brands scale the way they interact with customers and have made it easier to provide one-on-one service. By giving personalized recommendations, scheduling help, and so, Messenger chat boxes can help you interact with customers for a fraction of the cost of a human counterpart. Pizza Delivery Service Domino’s uses their chatbot to take customers through the entire ordering process. It gives them three choices to start. Order, Track Order, or Customer Support.

Multi-Language Support

Market research helps in understanding the need for your app language support. Social networking apps should be the ones that attract and reach an international audience. For example, 49% of users on Twitter select a preferred language that isn’t English.  

Privacy and Security

Privacy and security are the two most important and basic features to start with any social networking platform. Platforms need to provide enough security to the users so they do not end up losing their private information. With the user’s details and content application development agency must work on higher grades of security and privacy features. The introduction of app updates, fixing the bugs, and loopholes is a must at regular intervals. 

The Future of Social Media Apps

Social Networking Apps have gone from being an entertaining extra to a fully integrated part of nearly every aspect of daily life for many. What was once seen as a communications channel between friends now became multi-billion-dollar platforms that have an incredible influence on people’s lives. Social media has evolved in the past decade immensely. With the world being struck down with pandemic due to coronavirus, the social, economic, and psychological impact are the ones to be most assessed in changing times. Keeping this in mind, there is a higher possibility that social media will continue to trend amid the remote work/working from home movement.

Evaluating the past trends one could track the rise of some of the most popular social media apps, which began as an MVP product before rising to become a million-dollar platform.

Apps Like Instagram

Back on October 6, 2010, Instagram launched an application where users could take photos from the app and edit them. This was a location-sharing application. It was recorded that about 25,000 users signed up for the platform almost overnight. As per the recent estimate today, Instagram has over 1 billion monthly active users and 500 million social stories are created every day. Instagram over nine years,  has enabled video content support, introduced direct messaging, added Stories, and much more. As Instagram iteratively improved their product, the MVP turned into a full-fledged social media platform.

TikTok

Another example of such unforeseen development in the world of social media was with the launch of TikTok. 

“Until some years ago, if you came out with a new social network, people said the market was saturated. Then came TikTok and changed everything for everyone. It opened up investor sentiment and believed a new social network can come and capture the market.”

Wondering where to start to develop an app like TikTok or Instagram? Contact us for free consultation.

TikTok allowed users to watch, create, and share 15-second videos shot on cell phones.

TikTok’s growth was explosive, and it peaked success earlier than compared to other platforms. It had lowered the barrier of entry for influences dramatically. TikTok became an assembly line for influencers where they made creative content. The app hit one billion downloads as of February 2019, with two million downloads alone as of January 2020.

Mobile App Development for OTT Platforms

An over-the-top media service is a streaming media service offered directly to viewers via the Internet. OTT bypasses cable, broadcast, and satellite television platforms, the companies that traditionally act as a controller or distributor of such content. In the fiscal year 2019, the revenue from subscriptions for over-the-top video platforms across India amounted to approximately twelve billion Indian rupees. This was said to shoot up to 74 billion rupees by the fiscal year 2024, marking a growth rate of 44 percent. Overall, the digital market within the media and entertainment sector across India is set to become the second-largest by the fiscal year 2022.

Industry estimates indicated that OTT viewers spend an average of 24 minutes per session deciding what to watch. With more streaming services and content in the pipeline, the hassle will possibly only increase. Acknowledging this issue Shashank Singh and Mayank Mishra came up with an idea for a unique app called FLYX.  It is a cross-platform aggregator of OTT content on top of a streaming social network that helps viewers engagingly discover shows and movies from all major services, including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ Hotstar, Apple TV+, Hulu, Google Play, etc.

FLYX’s unique algorithm provides quick and targeted recommendations by weighing users’ viewing tastes as well as suggestions offered by their peers and social networks. New York-based startup, FLYX wants to make decision-making easier and faster for viewers. This streaming-focused social network pulls content from 100+ OTT apps.

Prediction for Social Media Apps

Social media is a phenomenon, which continues to thrive despite the great variety of already existing successful examples. More than 67% of people use social media apps daily and spend more than an hour every day.

With the social distancing prevalent in our day to day lives, communication has never been more critical. This is especially an essential factor for those employees who traditionally worked in offices with their colleagues. Encouragement of effective, digital communication is a must factor to maintain healthy work and personal life balance. This will possibly continue to be prevalent in 2020 and beyond. Social media seem to grow rapidly, fuelled by people taking initiatives to promote positive mental health in both the workplace as well as in our personal lives. 

To Read About BeaTrust App click here- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tech-startup-designed-help-employees-discover-working-ankit-chhabra

How Much Does it Cost To Develop Social Media App

The idea and design of social media apps are one of the critical factors affecting the cost structure. The Process of app development is usually outsourced to a mobile app development company. This is done in two ways particularly – Fixed Price and Hourly Based Price

Also, to estimate or calculate the accurate cost to develop a social media app, one needs to consider and plan the required feature. The difference in price they cause can be significant. The two main types of features are MVP and Advanced. While taking into consideration the required features one should remember that these features should fulfill the expectations of your target audience and be able to deal with generic problems. 

Platforms, Complexity of Features and Functionalities, Custom Designs and Animations, Traffic Estimates Expected For The App are some of the other basic factors affecting the cost structure while developing a social media app.

Yati Labs has built app and given screens to some extremely unique ideas for their clients for social media apps. A couple of them being – Zabing and Barchamped.

From Customer-Centric to Customer Success

In case you are looking to further discuss and understand the details of the cost structure to develop a social media app, we at Yati Labs are always available with answers to your queries. It is the best mobile app development company as the team here believes in transparency in working style. To reach out to us, you can easily book a free consultation with our business experts. We look forward to discussing your app ideas and potential behind them now.