Trends of the past few years have resulted in a windfall for social media apps. From traditional players such as Facebook and Twitter, users have quickly shifted to new ones like TikTok. The reasons for this shift are many and have several lessons for upcoming mobile app developers or entrepreneurs who have an interest in creating the next best social media app.
Creating a social media app is hard, and creating one that sells; can be even more challenging. Billions of people worldwide use social media. In fact, it is not unreasonable to assume that a vast majority of domestic users with internet access are also on some form of social media. The time that users spend on social media is limited, and the number of platforms growing by the day. To acquire customers, a new social media platform practically has to take customers away from another platform through its features and capabilities. And taking customers away from multi-billion dollar companies can never be an easy task.
So, what do you do? Creating the best social media app is no piece of cake. As with any enterprise, it requires perfect ideation, execution, and maintenance. Every decision you make during the journey of developing the app and setting up the infrastructure to keep it running will be integral. Let us look at the top five tips that can help you create the best social media app.

Top 5 Tips for the Best Social Media App

1. Know Your Customer

A social media app cannot be created in a silo. By definition, the app is meant to be social, so you must know how your customers think.
In the world of social media, customers are continuously looking for new trends. Trends can be new activities that they can carry out, new ways that they can share information, or even new types of information that they can share. Novelty is what sells and what makes people shift from one platform to the other.
When you add a prospective feature to your social media platform, make sure it isn’t simply a refined or improved feature of another platform. Enhanced versions of other platforms’ features might be enticing but hardly enough to make users change their platforms. For a mass transfer of users from other social media sites, you need to offer something drastic, even revolutionary, yet simple. You could always share short videos on Facebook and Instagram, but TikTok revolutionized the way that these stories could be consumed by focusing completely on videos. This is what led to its huge customer base.
To know what your prospective customers think, you can have a marketing survey conducted regarding what features they most prefer in other social media apps and which one they consider the best social media app. In fact, there are also hundreds of such surveys in public and available for purchase, which you can analyze to make decisions.

2. Choose a Developer Wisely

Creating a social media app isn’t the job of a single developer. Multiple developers have to work on the creation of a robust social media solution for the masses. They have to choose a platform, add the basic features, improve the design, and continuously test their app. So, if you were looking to create the best social media app by yourself at home – not great news for you.
If you do not have enough knowledge of programming, it is best to shift the task of app creation to a mobile app developer. In such a case, the developer’s choice is probably the most integral decision that you will make during the course of app creation. You need to provide your developer with a vast amount of data regarding your aim for the app.
It is important to provide a list of features and requirements of the app and bring the developer on the same page. You need to make the developer aware of the technical challenges and the exact cohort of customers you are targeting with your app. However, you must sit down with your mobile app outsourcing partner and decide on a project timeline, required resources, and finances of the deal as well. Only after all of these has been done, the process of app development begins in the right earnest.

3. The Importance of Design

It is hard to understate how important the design of your app is in the development process. A complex design is the first component of an app that will turn users away even before they start actively using it.
The design of a social media app must be intuitive. The aim of your app should have to target the in-built assumptions of your customers. Creating an altogether new design that confuses customers and makes them unable to look for the simplest of settings. It can be counterproductive and make your app lose users even before it gains them. Over the past decade, social media users’ intuition has been shaped by other social media apps such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. A close survey of these apps’ designs will tell you that the basic design doesn’t change for either of these apps. Over time, they seem to have taken inspiration from each other and developed a nearly identical design.
You, too, can take inspiration from these conglomerates. You don’t need to copy their design. In fact, it is highly recommended that you don’t – but keep the basic elements of your app where your customer can easily find them.
This is where the importance of focus group testing comes in. A focus group can give you great insights into where your design is lacking. Such a group doesn’t necessarily need to be a formal entity – it can simply be a group of your friends who review your app’s design.

4. Pick a Niche

Among the slightly easier pathways to creating a really popular social media app is to build the best social media app of a particular niche. In fact, with the great saturation of social media apps observed in today’s age. It is probably wiser to choose a particular niche of social media before you expand to a greater number of users.
It is unreasonable to assume that everyone will like the app that you create in a hyperconnected world. In fact, by simple crowd logic, a large number of people will probably not like your app, and a large number will, but a majority will simply be indifferent to it. Your aim must be to create a positive opinion among this indifferent cohort or initially not have them as users.
One of the best ways to do so is to limit the kind of users that your app caters to. When you cater only to users of a particular niche, your chances of creating an opinion among the people of that niche increase. If you are able to develop the best social media app for that particular niche, you can improve your user base. With a particular niche exhausted and with better revenues and a loyal user base with you. You can now work on expanding the capabilities and user base of your app by adding features.

5. Competitor Analysis

When you create a social media app, you are indirectly and sometimes directly- going up against some of the world’s best social media app companies. This might be intimidating, but learning from the changes these companies are making and the changes. They made when they were perhaps as small as you currently are, you can have some truly awesome insights.
The key here is to realize that the largest social media companies have an army of people working for their marketing department. They continuously keep their hands on their customer base’s pulse. When they make a decision or add a certain feature, you can rest assured that there is a solid rationale behind it. Simply following their rationale can help you end up at a good place in your quest of creating the best social media app.
Alongside the largest social media companies, it is also essential to always keep an eye out for your direct competitors in niche and scale. Always be on the lookout for the changes they are making to their apps, whether those features can aid in your growth.

Conclusion

Decisions such as choosing the right features, platform, and capabilities for your app can be aided greatly by choosing the right app development partner. In your endeavour of creating the best social media app, Supersourcing can help you find a partner who aligns with your aims and goals and can provide you with just the right expertise to fulfil them. Just share your business idea with us along with some other details. Hence, in no time you are going to have a number of expert agencies for your product development.