How To Design An App Like Facebook

Develop A Social Media App Like Facebook: Its Features, Business Model, Cost etc.

The way success stories of mobile apps like Airbnb, Uber, Amazon, eBay or Instacart are ruling in their respective domains. Likewise, applications like Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat have become titans in the field of social media and strongly connecting people from all across the globe.

It won't be wrong in saying that social media apps are drastically revolutionizing how people communicate with each other. Apps like Facebook make people badly addicted to their platform and increase the excitement among users to check what's new on their page.

"Right from the features like multi-media content sharing to re-posting, picture uploading to tagging friends, exploring catalogue of pages to following groups, Facebook has a list of engaging features that makes it quickly set their journey from 1 billion users in 2009 to 2.7 billion monthly active users in 2020 ."

The outstanding success and ever-growing addiction towards this Facebook have pushed many entrepreneurs to think of having a social media app like Facebook. If you are also one of them, then you are in the right place. But quickly, you will be driven to another question: "How much does it cost to develop a social media app like Facebook?".

Considering the survey report of Clutch carried out with the leading mobile app development companies have revealed that app development cost can vary from $37,000 to $171,000 and the cost can also climb up to $500,000+.

Now you must be wondering why there is a massive variation in the app development cost? The experts have replied to this question because the biggest cost-driving factors are the number of hours your project takes to design and develop such features. Accordingly, the variation comes in the final pricing of the project.

However, coming to the other side- an increasing number of software development companies are offering you to build a social media app like Facebook, even at less than half of these cost estimations…How?

Let's start with the key highlights of the content:

Overview of Facebook Clone App Without Code
The Success Mantra of Facebook: How Does Facebook Algorithms Work?
Features And Functionalities to Develop A Social Media App Like Facebook
Tech Stacks and Team To Deliver Seamless User Experience
Selecting the Best Monetizing Strategies to Reap Benefit from Your App
Cost of Developing Social Media App For iOS/Android

Sounds interesting! Let's get into the detail discussion of each point:

1. Overview of Facebook Clone App Without Code

Facebook is one of the world's extensive social networking apps that has quickly drooled over the world and taken it by storm since its inception in 2004. With approx 2.7 million monthly active users, Facebook has globally recorded as the first social network platforms that boast the highest number of users.

Initially, Facebook was launched on the iOS platform. Still, with the impressive user base of 1 million in 2012, Facebook has created their presence on Android and has turned to be the most used social media platform surpassing Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

The prime strategy of Facebook is to allow users to get connected with people from all across the world. Anyone with the age of 13 and above can quickly start with this application and start playing with its magical yet addictive features.

If you think that Facebook is just a chatting or multi-media content sharing platform, then you should know about these facts and stats:

The average engagement rate of each Facebook post is 3.4%
Facebook users watch 100 million hours of video content on Facebook per day.
74% of high-income earners are Facebook users and surpasses even LinkedIn, which has only 49% of users.
3.21 Billion users visit Facebook daily, and overall active users continue to increase every year across the platform as a whole.
Since 82% of college students are on Facebook, therefore it has over 9 million advertisers.
6.1 Million marketers used Facebook advertising actively in 2020.

With all these statistics, it is safe enough to say that Facebook is preaching to the choir and allowing all sorts of businesses to leverage Facebook as a potential marketing tool. But before you get started with the Facebook app clone, it is worth knowing what's the success mantra of this social networking app.

2. The Success Mantra of Facebook: How Does Facebook Algorithms Work?

Are you wondering how Facebook's engineers keep the site up and running smoothly with around 2.7 billion active users and keep all the users engaged with the app longer?

Before you get into the way to unlock the success mantra of Facebook, here are the few significant scaling challenges of Facebook that you should know about:

In every 60 seconds- 317 thousand status updates are added, 147 thousand photos are uploaded, and 54 thousand links are being shared on Facebook.
Facebook videos leverage 8 billion views per day on average and 20% of which are live broadcast.
Facebook will boast 2.7 billion users in 2020 and offer services in over 100+ languages.

To overcome these scaling challenges, Facebook uses PHP to ensure excellent performance and has built a compiler to be turned quickly into Native Codes on its web servers.

For storing more than 20 billion photos in further four different resolutions resulting in 80 billion photos- Facebook uses Haystack to ensure high-performance.
To manage massive amounts of data, Facebook uses Hadoop that assist Facebook engineers in managing data analysis without any hassle.
To make their app run seamlessly on multiple platforms, Facebook uses various programming languages including PHP for front-end, Erlang for Chat, Java and C++ for other features. But, Facebook majorly uses Thrift for cross-platform compatibility.
Further, Facebook carefully tracks the performance of every single PHP function in their live production environment. Therefore it uses XHProf.

To sum up these facts, Facebook leverages multiple technologies to make their page run smoothly and seamlessly on different platforms and in different environments. The real backbone of Facebook is the strategy of managing algorithms that assist in keeping their users stick to their page longer.

The simple strategy they use is to design content that evolves around an individual's friends and family members instead of focusing on businesses' spams. This way, they put genuine brands and enterprises in a loop of Facebook marketing and allow users to get in touch with content that perfectly fits their interest and needs.

But still, the understanding of Facebook algorithms often feels like a mystery. It puts brands in a dilemma on leveraging this platform for their business success and getting connected with the users rightly through this platform.

And that's where Facebook's features and functionalities came into the role that majorly contributed to the success of Facebook. You can also choose to hire a mobile app development company to integrate the features into the app easily.

3. Features And Functionalities to Develop A Social Media App Like Facebook

Creating your own social networking app provides you with a huge number of benefits, from adding the ease of connecting with the targeted audience, creating brand awareness to enhancing user engagement. Facebook has turned out to be powerful marketing tool that can aid your business. But, its only features and functionalities that make your app functional and allow users to get connected with your brand.

So let's talk about the essential features and functionalities that enable you to build a social media app like Facebook:

Registering Profile: To get started with any application, it is essential to add the feature in the app to create a profile using an email ID.
Integration of Other Social Media Platforms: To make your social media app popular among the market, it is essential to link your app with other popular social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. With the integration of social media platforms, you can easily increase your app's popularity and increase organic traffic in quick time frames.
User-Interface: If you follow the Facebook clone app, keep in mind that it has a user-friendly and highly engaging interface that keeps users stick to their app for long hours and makes them return repeatedly. So make sure you have a simplified interface and allow users to get registered with your app without any hassle.
Editing Profile: Provide the facility to make changes or modifications to the profile to attract more users and retain the existing ones. At last, the user's experience is all that matters for you.
Push Notifications: By adding this feature to your app, you can make a huge difference in the user experience and make them informed when they receive a message.
News Feed: This feature will help users to receive the latest news updates. Apart, an app like Facebook provides you with other options including private, group and public chats.
File sharing Feature: Whether it be an image, audio or video content, make sure your app provides the feature to share any kind of image with others. Also, an application like Facebook, allows you to send emojis, stickers or GIPHY on the post.
Customization: Make your app flexible with the feature to add, remove, or edit friends or group connections.
Messaging Features: The primary reason behind Facebook's expanding user base indicates that people have a deep interest in instant messaging. Adding the feature of instant messaging to your platform is important to allow users to communicate with their friends easily.

Developing and customizing the social media app like Facebook with all these features can be highly simple and easy if you choose to hire an app development company that has experience in developing such apps. These are the rough estimation of the time it takes to build an app. Rest the final estimations are totally dependent upon your choice of features and complexity of the app.

But reputed software developers will help you go a step ahead by simply developing an app integrated with such modern features.

Trending Features to Add In Your Social Media App

- Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Chatbots

With AI and Chatbots integration in the app, you can make your app ready for the future market and serve better services to the users. AI better helps you understand a user's behaviour and predict what next they are expecting to have on their page.

- AR and Face Filters

Like Instagram or Snapchat, you can consider adding face filters to your social media app by leveraging AR features. Facebook lacks these features, but you can attract more users by using trendsetting features on such apps.

- Transient Content

These days, this feature is in high trend. Upload the story for 24 hours and after that- whoosh, it will disappear. You can add the feature to allow users to upload the content that stays live for some time and after that, it vanishes after some time. Snapchat and Instagram are leveraging these features to the fullest.

- Live Video Streaming

It has been noticed that users prefer watching live videos over reading posts. To increase the popularity of your app, make sure you are adding this feature to your app.

- Multi-Language Support

To make your app reach the international audience, it is essential to add the multi-language support to your app. 49% of users select English as a preferred language and the rest of the users may select their local language.

4. Tech Stacks and Team To Deliver Seamless User Experience

When it comes to building a social media app like Facebook, you need to hire software developer skilled with different technologies, tools and frameworks. Since Facebook seamlessly runs on multiple platforms, therefore, it's important to understand what team and technologies you would require to develop a social media app for iOS and Android.

So to develop an app like Facebook, you need to have a team of:

Project Manager
UX/UI Designer
iOS Developer
Android Developer
Backend and Frontend Developer
Quality Assurance Engineer

Once you have a team of developers, you need to learn what tools and technologies you can use to create social media apps like Facebook.

5. How To Monetize Your Social Media App Like Facebook?

At last, so now you are familiar with the technologies, features and complexity of the social media app, but what is worth developing an app if it does not help you generate any money. To make a profit from your app, you need to have a proper monetization strategy to keep your foothold sustained longer in the market.

So here are the few app monetizing strategies that enable you to make a profit from your app:

A. Direct Sales

Generate revenue by making direct sales to your social media audience. But to leverage this strategy, you need to hire app developer to create a balanced post with exciting content and attractive visual image.

For example, if your product has a visual nature or appeal such as interior design, fashion apparel or real estate, you can take advantage of the direct sales.

B. Lead Generation

Generating leads from the social media post can be really overwhelming. The only principle of using this strategy is to provide something appealing, engaging and valuable to the users that they directly drop you a query regarding purchase.

C. Premium Features

A lot of social networking sites including YouTube, LinkedIn and more offer premium subscriptions to get some additional features to provide better insights into their app. As if we are developing a social media app like Facebook, therefore, you can provide the feature to make your profile filtered with the relevant ads only.

6. Cost of Developing Social Media App For iOS/Android

Calculating the final price of the social media app? There is no app development company that can reveal the exact cost of creating an app like Facebook without getting into a detailed discussion with the clients. The reason being, several factors are affecting the financials for building your social media app.

So here are the factors that are majorly contributing to the final pricing of the app development are:

Number of features and its complexity
Technology stack
Timelines described for the project
The project UX/UI design
Quality Assurance
Business Analysis

These are the factors that can affect the costing, but now it's time to think of development and it is always worth going with the latest yet best practices. So let's understand how much it costs to build an app with different MVP levels.

Cost Estimations of Developing An App With MVP

Conclusion

So at the end of this post, you have complete guidelines for developing a social media app. But to be honest, developing an app like Facebook, actually demands time, financial resources, careful planning and development tools. Developing a social media app like Facebook is not just about replicating the features, functionalities and technologies of the app clone. You need to make efforts to add some unique functionality and features to your app that makes your app stand out in the crowd.

Only having a million dollar app idea will not help you gain success. In fact, the real challenge is how to turn your app idea into a practical product. And that's where a software development company comes into the role and can help you build a product that perfectly fits your business needs and satisfies the end-users requirements.

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