Social media websites have become a crucial part of our everyday life. We use multiple social media sites and apps to connect with our friends, family and even co-workers every day.
Humans have never been so connected before as they are now. No matter where you live, you can talk to another person across the globe with a social media app and an internet connection.
But, what does it truly take to create a social media platform? With social media being a common platform, people often forget what it truly takes to make a social media successful. Today, having an active social media app is as important as having a web version.
Related: Social Media Strategies For Brands, How To Use Facebook Messenger For Business
Most people today browse internet through a smartphone or a handheld device, such as tablet. The development cost of the platform is highly dependent on what functionality do you intend to offer and how you would like your platform to look to the user at the front end.
Let us take a look at how to create a social network app, which is interactive as well as functional:
A Connect With Other Social Media Options
With so many companies focusing on the social media platforms, it can easily become overwhelming to register on so many with the same details. A “Connect with” or “Login Using” option gives the user flexibility to login with their existing credentials from another social media platform.
This is a great feature for everyone, as it offers quick login facility and the same security and credentials that you would normally enter.
Opportunity To Showcase
All social media platforms must contain ways for a person to exhibit their creativity or post about their daily routine. A platform where a person can share their memories in the form of videos and photos is the one that will likely get the most attention. The more unique your way in presenting this, the better your chances are getting at the top.
Build A Network
Alright, you have set up an interface, connected with other social media platforms and built a unique way of sharing a story. Now, you have to get people through people.
No social media can work with only a set amount of people. You need to have a good algorithm that identifies good friend suggestions or have the existing people on the platform to invite their other friends.
Creating A Suitable Newsfeed
Depending on what type of platform you have created, you will want to create an interactive newsfeed. Each day people share thousands of statuses, photos, videos and even share someone’s else content.
The right content must be visible to the right option via your newsfeed, so the people can truly be connected and have informative and interesting content right before them.
Interact With Different Services
In order to make your platform user-friendly, you need not create a lot of different services. Rather, you need to implement support for third-party applications, which are already in use by your customers.
This way, you will save the hassle of developing multiple services, while your users will have less confusion in choosing and going forward with a service. These services type can extend, but are not limited to:
Relationship Networks
Networks are built to simplify communication between people. Today, a number of networking sites that connect people are Facebook, LinkedIn, Tinder etc.
Media Sharing Networks
These type of social media platforms offers user the opportunity to share their phone and video content. These include Youtube, Snapchat, Instagram, among many others.
However, each one have their owns strengths, as some may allow users to put in full-length videos while other may only allow short clips.
Discussion Forums
Discussions forums, Q&A services, communities are great implementation of social media. Modern representation of these is done by Digg, Reddit, and Quora. At the very core of these are people interacting with each other, solving one another’s problem and sharing their knowledge.
Micro-Blogging Platform
In these type of platforms, users create, share and publish content, which can be text or media. These types include Medium, Tumblr, or Twitter.
Bookmarking Sites
Pinterest, StumbleUpon are examples of bookmarking sites, which allow users to collect various different form of content in their personal collection. This can be followed by other members in the same community, expanding their own list of relevant content.
Interest-Based Networks
Interest based networks allow for people to find like-minded people with similar tastes and interest in things. This is an attractive opportunity to get to know people who are similar to you. Last.fm is a great example of this for all the music lovers.
Integration of such services can provide to be very useful for any social media site/app. This can allow users to have a more comfortable experience on your platform, while the usage of such cross platforms can also attract others users from these services to your app..