According to DataReportal, in July 2020, there were 4.2 billion social media users in the world (which is more than half of all humanity), while the number of smartphone users reached 5.22 billion. Impressive, isn’t it? Social media applications have taken up a large part of our life. So many hours a day are now spent on social networks chatting with friends, sharing photos, audio, video, looking through the news, and even offering goods and services.
However, although there are monopolists like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook on the market, new social network solutions continue to be offered and some of them achieve true success and audience recognition.
In this post, you’ll learn what features they should provide, what purposes they can serve, and how to create your own social media app from scratch. What’s more, we’ll give you some cool ideas and recommendations for the development! Well, let’s start our journey!
What is a social media app?
Before getting down to the topic, we should clarify what a social media application is. Someone can confuse it with a messenger, especially if it has some other features besides message exchange.
A social network is an online service for communicating with people who have similar interests or backgrounds and sharing content between them. The primary goal of any social media is to build connections with others, but today they went way further than this. A modern social network is a platform for sharing opinions and ideas, public debating on urgent topics, maintaining a personal brand, and even making payments and purchases. Also, now it’s a powerful marketing tool.
The most successful social media like Facebook or Twitter have a user-friendly interface, an open opportunity to connect with people all over the planet. In addition, they have something that makes them stand out.
There are several things that make social media apps different from other products and the key ones are content + communications. Look around: almost all social network solutions allow their users to interact with the content - share it, react to it, and discuss it.
Types of social network apps
Now, when we learned the concept of social media, let’s look at the various forms this software might have. Doing so will help identify the most appropriate niche, at which we can gain the most revenue while presenting the greatest value.
- Relationship networks: Most popular social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, fall into the relationship category. They are created to connect people, enabling them to interact with each other and share information.
- Media sharing networks: TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are the most notable representatives of this group. These social-media apps allow users to share media like images and videos.
- Blogging platforms: With the help of these solutions, people can create blogs, publish and edit content, and manage comments. For example, Tumblr and Medium work like that.
- Content-only networks: These apps are created to share, comment, look for and save various types of content. Of this type, Pinterest and Wattpad are among the most popular apps.
- Forums: Participants discuss urgent topics, ask and answer questions, and share insights and experience, as you'll find in Quora or Reddit.
- Customer review networks: People use this type of app to look through reviews about a certain business or leave one about a company they had any experience with. Services like Yelp and TripAdvisor give this opportunity to users.
Each type of social media is defined by a certain purpose and desired functionality. So, prior to the development stage, you should consider what you want to include in your app and what needs you want to address.
The article was originally published at https://yellow.systems/blog/how-do-you-make-a-social-media-app-from-scratch
