Mediaboss Marketing

Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram these are the household names you hear and probably even use every day.

If you are a bit deeper into the subject, you also know that those are unicorn startups with current valuations ranging from $37 billion to $328 billion.

Starting your own social network may sound like a good plan in theory, but the entire processes is a bit more complicated than just building some app and watching the raving fans coming in.

In this guide wed like to outline not just how to create a social network in terms of tech stack, but what additional considerations you should take into account for such project.

Do you really need to be the next Facebook? Smaller niche social networks can also become popular and profitable if you know how to play your cards right. Theres a good reason why new websites and apps are being launched faster than you blink since the days of MySpace.

The niche is still ripe and striving. And heres exactly what it takes to make a social networking site that doesnt run flat in just a few years.

Facebook has been often accused of reaping off MySpace concept. They didnt quite invent the bike they modified an existing idea and expanded it based on the user requests. As Mike Jones, the former head of MySpace admitted:

The real problem was that the world had been trained by MySpace that social networking was interesting, but the actual product had been perfected by Facebook.

If you plan to start a social network, you dont need to re-invent the concept either.

In fact, users may be put off by the unfamiliar functionality and too out-of-the-box features. Intuitive web design guidelines exist there for a good reason it suggests the user how a certain product works and encourages faster adoption.

However, building a complete Facebook clone is no longer a viable route either.

While your app should look familiar and intuitive, it should also have a unique twist (aka your unique value proposition) to foster that user base growth. Here are just a few possible ideas and examples:

Bottom line: To make a social media website, you need to think of a unique twist and how you can market it to your target audience. After all, no matter how awesome is your product, its worth nothing without a growing user base.

Theres no definitive rule whether you should build a website or a mobile app for your social networking site.

Instagram, Vine, and Snapchat made it big as mobile-only solutions, while Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest took a while before releasing native mobile apps.

In general, it all boils down to the type of features youd like your product to have and the kind of audience you wish to pursue. Obviously, if youd like to allow blogging within your app, making it mobile-only wont make much sense and if you encourage instant sharing - a web app isnt your best bet either.

The development costs, in this case, may vary slightly, as the pricing for mobile apps is usually lower compared to web apps. However, if you plan to launch an MVP first with only a limited amount of features to test your concept, a web app may be a better route to take.

If you are still wondering how to start a social network like Facebook with little to no tweaks, heres the exact tech stack theyve used:

Facebook Messenger features its own unique architecture, which is based on infrastructure sharing and dynamic cluster management. Basically, for each group users they create a special cell, which encapsulates the overall business logic and persistence (using HBase). To scale the app, they just need to add a new Cell.

Facebook additionally consists of a large number of custom-built apps and elements with the hush-hush stack they are not disclosing publicly. In fact, Facebook developers are not allowed to talk of their job a lot and share what exactly are they doing for the company.

In any case, when you decide on the technology to use for social networking website development, consult with the developers you hire. Based on your new website features and estimated traffic, they should be able to suggest you the optimal architecture.

Now apart from a powerful backend, your app will also need a pretty face to woe in those early adopters. Facebook may have gotten along with being pretty ugly, but today thats no longer a strategy worth copying.

In general, all social networking website feature a similar structure and user screens:

This is the skeleton of a social networking app. Obviously, you will want to add some additional functions to make your product stand out from the crowd.

UX design here is highly important. You need to make sure each and every step of interactions is highly delightful, intuitive and gets the user exactly where they have anticipated.

Your best bet here is to create a list of user stories one-two sentence descriptions of what your app needs to be doing (A user can register using an email and receive confirmation link).

Based on these stories UX/UI designers will be able to propose the ultimate product architecture and create the initial wireframes. The development team can also adjust their project more accurately if you have those in place.

Now, you are probably interested how much an online social networking site will cost you to build?

Bad news here its really hard to give a precise estimate when you dont know all the required product features. So here are some educated guesses for a start:

What you should keep in mind is that social networking websites are usually developed continuously. All of the big name platforms got started with a minimal viable set of features to validate their concept and steadily grew larger over time.

You can build a simple social app with truncated functionality starting from $35,000, yet it will require much more investment over its lifespan. So start thinking early about your monetization strategy and how you plan to gather investments for your next big thing in the world of social!

Original post:
What does it take to start your own social network - BusinessZone (blog)