Complete Guide Social Media App Development for Startups in 2024

Social media can serve a variety of goals, from meeting new people and promoting job placement benefits to launching marketing campaigns.

There are plenty of ideas to grab onto other products: text and video blogging, live streaming, advertising, custom news feeds, and much more. We suggest you focus on one thing — let’s call it the ‘core’ task — and extend the project. So, here are the three main goals of building a social media app that we’d like to highlight:

Solve a narrow-focused audience problem(s): Create a social media app that adds value to some specific group of people, e.g. dog owners, art lovers, professional photographers or retired people. Imagine a social media app that allows dog owners to arrange to walk their dogs together, find a dog walker, or find new dog owners. Pick your audience and think about how you can impact their lives.

Execute an idea: You can connect people or their specific groups around some product idea. For example, location-based, as in our SpeakFree mobile app. Or you can enable users to find the company to attend quiz and presentations or create their own events.

Connect with people under this unifying theme: Build a successful social media app that connects people with their interests. The focus here is on content. Imagine, for example, a social media solution for sports fans that allows users to discuss contests and competitions, publish interesting content about sports, fitness, healthy lifestyle, and so on.

Social Media App Development Features

Sign Up

You need to provide users with multiple registration options. For example, you can combine such options as email and password, phone number and password. Adding the ‘forgotten password’ feature is necessary to make a social media app more user-friendly. In terms of technologies, developers can use the Facebook or Google SDK. You can also choose to register by phone number or by SMS verification.

User Profile

Depending on the social app version, you should allow users to create various profiles. This screen should have options like connecting with other users and viewing their media files or documents. A smart profile can get customers to subscribe, so you need to pay attention to user experience and page layout.

Search

Users need a nice search bar to find friends or bloggers to follow. For example, make labels, usernames, and locations searchable.

Newsfeed

This process helps developers get noticed. All updates and new information from friends and family are available here. This feature can be linked to what Instagram does. In this case, the news feed becomes the home screen of the social media app. How Much Does It Cost To Develop An App Like Instagram?

Chat

How to build a social media app and avoid errors? It’s a way to supplement a positive communication process. Sending messages, photos, or video files is essential for any social networking site. It is possible to connect group chats and channels for users to talk to two users. Use common socket.io to create scalable conversations.

Add Post

Social media apps like Instagram or Facebook offer the creation of posts with different content (photo, video or text). So, users need an opportunity to add photos or videos from the gallery or take pictures with a smartphone camera. After that, they can make a short explanation and post it on social media.

Push Notifications

There are various push notifications by users like a new pоst from the community they are subscribed to, new post, a reaction or comment to their post, etc. Push notifications are good for user engagement, and users choose FCM to create push notifications .

How to calculate social media app development cost?Social media app development cost depends on many factors like

The scale and complexity of the app
If you are planning to build a social media app with lots of complex features, then it will definitely cost you more compared to building a simple app with just the basic features.
Where the app developers are
Where your app developers are on social media plays an important role in determining the final cost of the project. A social media app development cost of hiring a company which is located in western Europe or USA is around 3–5 times more than an Indian social media app development company.
Type of app
Another factor that plays a vital role in determining the revenue of your social media app is the type of app you want to build. A native app, for example, will cost you more than a hybrid app. A native app is an app that can only work on a single platform. For example, if you build a native iOS app, then your social media app won’t work on Android. With a hybrid app, you can create an app that works on both iOS and Android. For example, you can cut social media app development costs in half if you choose to build a single hybrid app instead of two native apps. Taking all of the above factors into consideration, the estimated cost of developing a social media app can range from $80,000-$175,000. Note that this is a big step, and you should ask your social media app developers to find out the actual social media app development revenue.