How to Create a Social Media App: Steps, Features, and Reasons

How to Create a Social Media App: Steps, Features, and Reasons

Despite it has all the typical features of an oligopolistic system (dominated by a few, big players), the social media app niche is one of the most promising ones. Why? Primarily because people are constantly connected to one another. Social media took up a huge chunk of our daily lives: according to Oberlo, the overall number of users across the globe hovers around 3.5 billion, which is more or less 45% of the entire population (and this number is only growing further). Take also into consideration the fact that mobile users, and it’s likely that you think about the possibility of creating a mobile marketing social media app yourself. But is it possible? With such a huge market share, it’s likely that creating a mobile marketing social media app has probably been an option for you. However, doing it is not impossible, and in this article, we’ll show you what it takes to do it the right way.

 

Table of Contents:

Steps for Creating a Social Media App

Competing with giants might not be ideal for many, but following the right principles and putting into practice the steps that we’ll outline in this article will certainly give you a headstart, should that of creating a remarkable social media mobile app be your decision.

  1. Choose a catchy name

Think about how you would like to name a social media platform, and choose an app name that synthesizes your tone of voice and personality. Some tips that might help you out with that are the ones that follow:

  • Core Benefit

Try to convey, through your app’s name, what is the one thing that your app does best. It doesn’t have to be disruptive, but it has to give an idea to consumers about what should they expect the moment they decide to download it.

  • Easy to search

Make your app name easy to search for. Preferably, your app’s name should be the same one that consumers use to search what your app does: align it to your brand and identity.

  • The shorter, the better

The longer the name, the tougher it might be for people to remember it. Make your app name as short as possible, so as to simplify consumer searches and also make it easier for them to share it with other people.

  1. Design a user-friendly interface

Once you have a name, it’s time to think about how the whole interface will look like. When crafting a social media app, among the best practices there is always an interface that perfectly caters to what the consumer finds comfortable (you don’t want your app’s bounce rate to skyrocket right off the bat, right?). As it pertains to social media users, what they usually look for are components such as:

  • An app that is extremely easy to understand;
  • A high level of navigability within every single section of it;
  • An easy way to connect your app to other social media platforms (i.e. Instagram, Twitter).

Also, ensure that your customers have all the tools they might need in order to maximize their stay within your app. If, on one hand, every platform should be designed to interact with the other ones, it’s important to create an ecosystem that does not entirely depend on an external feature to get a certain action done by the end-user.

  1. Follow the main social media principles

I get that your aim is to differentiate your app and your brand from the rest, and it should be that way. However, it’s also important to follow what works within the industry. As a matter of fact, there are fundamental principles that every single social media platform available today has been able to implement successfully, and they are the followings:

  • Opportunities for personal expression

Social media were born with the intent of connecting people and let them share their opinions. Within any social media, there has to be a creative component that allows each user to express themselves in some way. Through Pinterest, for instance, you can showcase your best ideas, just like on Twitter you can post your personal opinion on a wide variety of topics. Every social media has a different way to let its customers give life to what they think or like.

  • Network growth

The second keyword of every social media mobile app is network. Every platform shares a commonality, which is the opportunity to grow a web of people that either share our same interests (such as LinkedIn), or that is close to us in some way (like Facebook).

  • Privacy policies

This principle is applicable to everything that is web-related, but it is even more important when it comes to a social media app. People will be more comfortable in sharing their personal and professional information if a platform guarantees upfront that their data will be taken care of.

  1. Market your social media mobile app

Once your creation is ready for launch, you have to consider which ones are going to be the most suitable channels for promoting it. Among the top choices, there are:

  • Mobile ad networks

Mobile ad networks are one of the best choices for marketing your app. Networks such as StartApp, ironSource or Google AdMob can not only give you an extra marketplace boost through a better ranking, but they also represent a fairly good way to earn extra revenue.

  • Website and landing page

Creating a website for your social media app is always a good idea. It allows you to have an independent touchpoint where your interested prospects can get more detailed information and also a positive and professional first impression from you as a business. For any app that is trying to get major traction, a clean and minimalistic landing page should also be treated as a minimum requirement, and should therefore never go missing within a properly-structured promotional strategy.

  • ASO

Finally, we can’t talk about mobile app promotion without bringing ASO into the discussion. Unlike a website, ASO helps you in promoting your app directly within app stores, which leaves you with less control over your ranking. It is, nonetheless, a given if you are an app developer, since it helps you in taking advantage of the exponential user base that populates mobile-only stores and increases your overall visibility.

  1. Stay always on top of potential updates

Mobile marketing for social media apps is necessary, but it is not the last step of the process. Apps are just like plants: in order for them to grow, they have to be constantly watered. Hence, a special effort should regularly be made on your part in order to keep your social media app up to date, which means taking care of changes within SEO and ASO algorithms, modifying or substituting part of your website that might be obsolete, constantly look at upcoming mobile ad networks that could give your app a better positioning and revenue, considering new features to add, and paying attention to the community that grows around your app. The optimization phase is a continuous process, and if you don’t take a methodical and consistent approach to it, your social media app is quickly going to get left behind.

Is it Worth it to Create a Social Media Mobile App?

The answer to this question is “it depends”, mostly on what you’d like to see happening because of that. Social media apps fill the need that, as humans, we have for connections. However, there are already major players that do that close to perfection. What would your app do differently? And why should customers care about it? If you’d like to enter the mobile social media ecosystem, you should do it with a decisive goal in mind and a key differentiator in terms of the value proposition; otherwise, people will always lean on what’s more familiar to them, and turn their backs on your app as a result. Despite creating a mobile app, in itself, is never going to take you a lot of time, there is a heap of factors to consider in order to fully satisfy your customers and reap major rewards from your efforts at the same time. When you start out, your main objective is that of creating something that people will appreciate. As things move forward, though, your focus will likely shift into how you can maintain a loyal tribe of customers while optimizing your app’s presence in the process. It is in this very scenario that you should take the components that we’ve discussed in this article as inescapable rules to abide by if you are to make a dent within this industry.