Building a Social Media App: A Breakdown of Phases and Costs

The increasing usage of social media worldwide is a compelling endorsement of how it has been uplifting the lives of people, redefining the experience of virtual socialization, and building networks. Take a look at the following report.

The report is a conclusive delineation of social media growth, confirming how it is deeply ingrained in human’s everyday life. The increasing popularity of social media in the life of people has understandably led to an emerging and promising market for social networking apps.

Do you want to build a social media app to leverage the expanding growth opportunities in your niche? How about growing in an endlessly vast social media ecosystem?

Read the blog that talks at length about the necessary phases of social media app development processes and the related cost breakdown.

How to Develop Social Media App: 5 Key Phases

PHASE # 01: Dive Into Comprehensive Research

To avoid imitations, copyright infringement, ending up with a dud product, or ideating a unique brainchild, conduct comprehensive market and competitive research. It will provide you with the most detailed and valuable information on how to bring your app idea into a successful business outcome.

Market Research:

According to the report by Statista, social media usage has crossed over 4.26 billion people worldwide, a number estimated to grow by nearly six billion in 2027.

The report is quite encouraging of the concept of utilizing the insane growth of social media usage into building an app to grow in a globally extensive social media marketplace.

Therefore, a detailed and deep market research will enlighten you with crucial data and facts to build a digital product resonating with the exact needs and interests of your target customers.

The market research also means getting deep insights into building your app for a specific category of social platforms, as shown in the following presentation.

Research The Competitors:

I know that’s the typical advice you may have read from various sources on the Internet. However, I am also sure that you would agree with the logic of this suggestion.

Researching the competitors is one of the most intelligent techniques to review the pros and cons of apps of different competitors and then gain insight into what you can build that would make your product stand out from the rest, uniquely.

The competition research enables you to ideate the launchable features you would want in your MVP (minimum viable product) to make it distinctly unique in the market.

PHASE # 02: Ideate The Best Features For Your Social App

Isn’t that obvious?

I mean, what’s the productivity of an app sans relevant features?

That said, ideate the relevant features, functionalities, and all the technical aspects you would want to have in your app. This is the phase if effectively brainstormed would pave the path for building a profitable monetization model for app.

5 Quick Ways to Monetize Your Social Media App

1. Video Marketing: One of the most essential digital content types, video marketing drives greater engagement – 10x more on Twitter, 20x more on LinkedIn, and 2.6x more on Pinterest.
2. Freemium To Premium: Freemium model leads to premium conversions based on the quality of content. Choose a freemium model just like LinkedIn or go for a premium model just like Facebook does.
3. Direct Sales: Use Instagram Stories and Facebook business pages, provide a direct CTA for inbound traffic to your website, or pay to promote your posts. Create content that informs, inspires, educates, and entertains.
4. Lead Generation: Encourage social media followers on their way down the sales funnel through well-developed content, promoting webinars, virtual events, live streams, and free resources.
5. Sponsorships: Apps with considerably higher user engagement can opt for sponsorships. Consider utilizing influencer marketing, for example.

PHASE # 03: Design and Development

Once you have mapped out strategies for research, functional specifications, and features for your social media app, now focus on design and development aspects, including UI/UX design, front-end, and back-end development.

Ideas to Come Up With The Best Design Aspects for Your App

One of the most fundamental aspects of designing your social media app is to make its UI and UX attractive, intuitive, and user-friendly.

Keep in mind these following suggestions

• Make the design clean and simple. For example, keep the number of steps-to-follow requirements minimum so that users to centralize around steps before using the app.
• A successful design showcases a great color palette. Therefore, include colors looking great to users and accentuate your brand to boost its identification.
• To unify all the visual elements in your app, follow a design language pattern to give your product a unique and consistent visual appearance, in terms of patterns, texts, layouts, and shapes.
• Include a consistent design accommodating all the platforms for a similar user experience.
• Have in place important design tools, like mockups, wireframes, and sketches to help your design team visualize the functionalities of the app. As a result, it will ensure a seamless design process.

Lastly, the kind of technology you choose relatively affects the overall performance of your social media app. Therefore, we recommend using the most appropriate, advanced, and relevant tech stack to build a futuristic app equipped with better security features.

One of the most essential things you need to prioritize is the target platforms, such as iOS, and Android, or go for cross-platform development. Since we talk about tech stack, understand that both Android and Apple use different tech stacks.

PHASE # 04: Testing and QA (Quality Assurance)

Both testing and Quality Assurance collectively result in a successful social media app development process. Remember that they are integrated at the beginning of your app development process, ensuring you continue to apply them throughout the SDLC.

Testing and Quality Assurance serve the purpose of fixing bugs or technical snags in the app before the product is launched. This is what makes it invaluable to help a company avoid the exorbitant fixing of bugs in the app later. This is exactly where you need to ensure that you are working with the right social media app development team, along with experienced testing and QA experts to help develop your app efficiently and successfully.

Also, testing and QA depend on the project size, complexity, and other requirements.

PHASE # 05: Post-App Launch Analysis

This is the phase when you need to understand how to analyze the growth of your launched social media app. Once the app is deployed, it goes through more testing and fixing, ensuring updates are maintained regularly and bugs (if any) are fixed.

Quantitative Metrics (e.g., user activation rate, user retention and churn rate, user engagement, traction, etc.) and KPIs from the app will also help you determine its growth. You can also identify gaps, and weaknesses, and generate data-backed insights to improve and personalize your app based on your user’s expectations.

Social Media App Development – Best Practices

• Security: That’s self-explanatory. Ensure the sensitive data of your app’s users is well-protected using advanced security protocols, including data encryption.
• Horizontal Scalability: It supports your app’s architecture to handle increasing data and user growth, by employing load-balancing and clustering for solutions, including such as hardware and software load balancing to DNS load balancing.
• Selection Of Architecture: The back-end architecture of your app defines its efficiency. So, consider carefully which model of development you should choose. Take microservices architecture, for example, as you can use it to write a project in different programming languages at the same time, enabling scalability and flexibility.

List Of Basic To Advanced Features Your Social Media App Must Have

BASIC FEATURES:

1. Sign up & login: A basic yet indispensable feature that allows users to access to the app. It must be hassle-free, least troublesome, supporting multiple ways to sign-in and sign out, including email & password, phone registration, etc.
2. Friendly UI: Easy and simple User Interface (UI) in terms of navigation, media layout, and input controls encourages enhanced user engagement, an important factor to monetize your app in the future.
3. User profile: A customizable user profile boosts users’ delight, enabling your app to engage them more.
4. News feed: Real-time engaging content on the news feed of users based on their preferences boost engagement and retention on the app.
5. Enabling Dynamic Post: Allow users to create and upload content in different formats (e.g., texts, images, video, etc.), plus functionalities like filters for videos or images to enable users to make their posts more dynamic.
6. Post interaction: Allow users to like, react, repost, or comment on posts. An interaction of this type lays the groundwork for more engagement on the social media app.
7. Notifications: The feature of real-time notifications helps users stay in the know.
8. Search bar: A must-have feature that allows easy navigation, helping users find anything like pages, pages, or relevant content using hashtags or keywords.
9. Responsiveness: Your app must feature versatility and responsiveness without compromising the inherent quality.
10. Privacy: This should allow users to control their privacy settings according to their preferences.
11. In-app messaging: A key feature that should allow users for private communication. It should include group chats, audiovisual chats or voice notes, etc.

ADVANCED FEATURES:

1. Geolocation: A great feature that allows users to mark locations on pictures, find locations and people nearby, or update one’s location. Also helps brands to promote ads based on user’s interests.
2. Live Streaming: The feature of live video streaming, allowing users to exchange ideas, and celebrate the moments with friends and family, will enhance the creative appeal of your app.
3. AR filters: A must-have feature in your social media app to add witty twists to the posts of users, along with enabling them to change their avatars, or create a gamification effect for more delightful visual content.
4. Ephemeral content: Video content in the form of gifs, images, or videos that disappear after hours boosts the engagement of users on social apps. Prioritize ephemeral content on your app as it’s getting trendy among Gen-Z and millennials.
5. AI Chatbots: Add this feature to your social media app to facilitate user interaction on your app easily, helping you analyze users’ behaviors to improve your targeted audience marketing for profitable growth.

Technology Stack For Social Media App Development

1. Front-end Development

Front-end development basically covers the user interface that users interact with and that’s one of the most essential elements in the social media app development process. Frameworks, such as Angular and React are considered an excellent choices for front-end social media app development.

2. Back-end Development

The server-side programming or backend development ensures the scalability, performance, and efficiency of your social media app, as well as setting up storage solutions, databases, servers, APIs, etc.

An ideal tool here is Node.js for creating dynamic social media apps, as it also features excellent data processing capabilities. Back-end development should resonate with the requirement of your app, like the number of users the app will have or the expected load time to handle.

Back-End Development Features For Social Media App:

Database:

You need a database tier for your social media app to handle huge amounts of data. From SQL to NoSQL database, you can also opt for options, like MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, etc. according to the anticipated requirements of your app. Most importantly, your database for web app must be scalable, flexible, and equipped to handle increased data volumes in the future at a time.

Admin Panel:

Admin panel to monitor and access the sourced data from the social media app is essential. It helps you with insights into the number of active users, the content they share, their interaction with the posts, activities, etc. The admin panel allows you to manage users and the content, like helping you filter out useless content, delete a user account, etc.

One more thing, if you add third-party analytics tools in the admin panel, you will get proper insights into users’ behaviors and interests to accordingly add features to your app.

So, the admin panel is your monitoring tool providing a vantage point of your users’ activities, along with insights into accelerating the value of your app based on user-generated data.

How Much Does It Cost to Make a Market-Ready Social Media App?

The question has its own dimensions, meaning its answer is not straightforward. Why? Because multiple factors determine the eventual cost of building a social media app. These factors include the complexity of the project, development team, features to be added in the app, tech stack to be used, etc.

Here’s the cost breakdown in relation to different stages of mobile app development for a better cost projection.

Social Media Application Development Cost

The cost of app development is largely influenced by development hours based on different factors, including the complexity, features, and functionalities of the app. In addition, the number of APIs or complexity also influences the development cost. Also, features; from basic to advanced, would respectively influence the cost of building an app.

The projected development costs of building a social media app:

Target Platforms And Devices

The number of platforms and devices you want to target also influences the cost of building an app. You are advised to choose either Android or iOS for a mobile app development purpose based on market segmentation, localization, target audiences, etc. Obviously, the number of platforms increased would correspondingly influence the app development costs.

Prices Charged By Developers

The hourly rates that developers charge for building a social media app influence the cost of overall app development. Ensure you don’t compromise the quality of development by hiring an inexperienced development team.

Involve experienced designers, developers, testers, and project managers with the right skill sets. In this context, you have the options, such as choosing to hire freelancers, outsourcing, or dedicated remote developers.

Also Read: Chat App Development

Build a Futuristic Social Media App with Binmile!

Thrive in the booming social media app market with the technical assistance and expertise of development specialists at Binmile. Trust our team of experts to translate your brainchild app idea into a successful digital product.

Schedule a call with our experts for cost estimations behind building a great social media app.

Conclusion

Building a social media application involves multiple stages of development processes while ensuring the end result of the development pans out cost-effectively. While it is imperative to analyze every aspect of the social media app development process, we have detailed the required development stages and cost estimations for building a social media app for your business needs.

Given the increasing popularity of social media platforms worldwide, leveraging them to create your brand presence and generate leads and grow profitably is a great business strategy. However, it would only pan out in reality if you have the app designed intuitively with capabilities to serve your target audiences satisfactorily. This is where working with the right software development company is crucial.

Author

Avanish Kamboj

Founder & CEO