Build A Social Media App In 10 Easy Steps!
Hello developers! Are you planning to build the next big social media app for users around the world? Well, we are here to help! In this blog post, we will look into the quick and easy steps to build an app for social networking purposes.
Furthermore, we’ll walk you through the key elements, factors, and strategies that will go into creating a social media app that your users will love!
Table of Contents
The Market Scenario Of Social Media Apps
It’s common these days to find a social media app coming with any smartphone you buy. In fact, a report by Smartinsights claims that almost 59% of the world’s population uses social media and the average time spent per day is more than 2 hours. As true as it sounds, the numbers clearly reflect the growing landscape of these networking apps and the need for modern features in them.
In other words, although Facebook, Twitter or Instagram are most commonly used social media apps, users are open to welcome new and modern applications as years roll. The finest examples among them include Discord, Tiktok and Clubhouse that have their own strategy for attracting users with different interests.
So now that you know there is an ocean of opportunities in social networking app development, let’s quickly look into the steps to build one right away!
10 Simple Steps To Build A Social Media App!
Developing a chat app is simple and easy if clearly planned and executed. In order to make the process smooth and effortless, we’ve boiled down the complete development process into simple steps below:
Step 1: Define the purpose of your social media app
A social media app can be built with different goals and purposes. It can include communication, information sharing, networking or purely entertainment. So, firstly it is necessary to decide on which sole purpose your app will be built for.
Step 2: Identify your target audience
On deciding the purpose of your app, it is now easy to define the audience that your app will cover. You’ll need to keenly consider the age, interest, demography and various other factors to define the set of customers your app will serve. This ensures perfect clarity and focus on how to build a social media app for creators and instagram influncers.
Step 3: Perform customer mapping
After defining the type of audience for your app, you’ll need to prepare a full layout of the customer journey. This way you can identify each touchpoint on your app that will attract and retain a larger user base down the lane.
Step 4: List out the right features
In my opinion, it is best to have a short yet the best list of features on your app rather than having a whole pack of unwanted/unreliable features. All that your app users will need is a good number of interesting and usable features like in-app chat, image sharing, video calling, voice calling, and more.
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Step 5: Make the build or buy decision
There are 2 different ways in which you can build your social media apps – you can either build it from scratch or use pre-built SDKs to build a complete app in minutes. You’ll need to carefully consider the pros and cons of both options by relating it to your requirements before arriving at a decision. However, I’d recommend you to go for the latter to add video, voice, and chat SDKs to easily build a social media app with minimal effort and time.
Step 6: Choose the right tech stack
Tech stacks are typically the backbone of your apps and that is why it is super-important to choose what’s optimal for your requirement. The right tech stack lets you flexibly scale as your app grows and secure user information at all levels. Also, both the front-end and back-end frameworks you choose must be able to smoothly implement the features you’d include in the future.
Step 7: Design Your App’s UI
An intuitive and user-friendly interface does half the job of attracting, engaging, and retaining users on your app. You can either use our chat UI Kit or hire a professional visual designer to achieve greater results. On comparing both options, the latter is much more reliable and cost-effective.
Step 8: Implement Agile Development Methodology
Once all the prerequisites for the app development is set up, it is time to define the process with supreme consistency. So, we’ll call upon the agile methodology to define sprints for each stage and phase. This way, your social media app development will happen without any mishaps or confusion.
Step 9: Test Your App
No one likes to use an app that crashes. This is why you need to test every feature and functionality of your app before you make it to the big release.
Step 10: Launch Your App
Once you are done with the testing and know that it is completely error/bug-free, it is time to take your social media app to the world. Go ahead, launch it on the Google play store or Apple App Store, and work on your app marketing strategies to reach millions of audiences around the world.
Tech Stacks For Building A Social Media App
There are various technology stacks you can use to build a social media app. Here are some popular ones:
Backend | Database | Frontend |
---|---|---|
Node.js with Express.js framework Ruby on Rails PHP with Laravel or Symfony framework Python with Django or Flask framework | MySQL PostgreSQL MongoDB Cassandra | React.js Angular.js Vue.js |
Cloud Service Providers:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Microsoft Azure
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- Heroku
Other Tools and Services:
- Redis (for caching)
- Kafka (for message queueing)
- Elasticsearch (for search functionality)
- MirrorFly (for messaging, video, and voice features)
Smart Ways To Monetize Your Social Media App
Social media apps are one of the most important sources of monetizing brands and businesses these days. In this aspect, you can use your social media app to generate revenue in different ways:
- In-app Advertising: Display ads to targeted audiences/specific groups in the form of banners, sponsored posts, and native ads.
- Freemium Model: Avail basic features for free and monetize the premium features on your social media app.
- Subscription Model: Provide access to exclusive content via a monthly or yearly. subscription.
- Affiliate Marketing: Promote businesses and earn a commission out of it. For creating engaging content to boost these strategies, consider using a social media post template that streamlines your posting process and enhances user interaction—something the best affiliate marketers practice.
Conclusion
Coming to the end, this blog post discussed the steps to build a social media app, the tech stacks needed and the effortless ways to generate revenue out of it.
However, it is important to remember that building a social media app is not a one-time event; it requires constant iteration, testing, and improvement to meet the ever-changing needs and preferences of your users.
Hoping this article helped you, we’d love to hear feedback and queries on the comments below. And, my team and I would be happy to do the necessary research and get back to you with the right solutions!
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
When you build a social media app from scratch, you have an expertise in coding to keep your app development process running smoothly. Moreover, it will take up to a year to launch the app. Whereas, building an app using pre-built chat SDK is easy and will take only 30 minutes to go live.
On an average, the overall time taken for developing a social media app is 7 – 12 months. Breaking this down, It takes up to 3 weeks for idea and validation, 3 weeks for product strategy and prototyping, and almost 10 months for design, development and launch.
Fortunately, a pre-built SDK like MirrorFly lets you build an app in less than 30 minutes.
The cost of building a social media app widely depends on several factors like your app purpose, feature-list, design requirements and choice of tech stack. Also, the cost of an app can increase or decrease the overall complexity of the app.
As of 2025, the top 3 social media apps are Facebook with 2.96B MAUs, Youtube with 2.2B MAUs and Whatsapp with 2B MAUs. Other popular social apps are Instagram, WeChat, TikTok, Sina Weibo and QQ with more than 5M MAUs.
Facebook is the best social media app as of 2025, with over 2.96 billion monthly active users. It drives more than 1.9B visitors everyday and 7M active advertisers.
Yes, you can create a social media app with Mirrorfly’s messaging SDK. It is completely free of charge and does not require any programming expertise.
Other Articles
- How To Build An Instagram-like App: The Ultimate Guide[2025]
- Top 7 Social Media App Features To Keep Users Active!
- What Is An Activity Feed & How Does It Boost App Retention?
- Best Activity Feed APIs & SDKs For Social Apps (2025)
This one of the best article about building social media app I’m looking for. Thanks for sharing this with me and keep up the good work and very detailed information.
Interesting Article! Thanks for the sharing I am also looking to know the steps for building social media app. I will pin your post to read more about voice talking app.
Never saw someone wrote this deep Guide on making social media app . So deep it is, don’t have to look anywhere else. thanks keep writing
This is really a great article. I just started looking to know the steps for creating social media app. this article realy helped me lot and time saver!!!
Wow what an Epic Blog post thank you so much and I am on the way to looking to know the steps for building social media app. definetly this post will help me to get success
I think very very detailed article for those who are looking to build social media app. There are some drawbacks in each social media app so you should choose them carefully.
My Product based on Call center software, CRM, Social media app, Agent workflow management. I need a live chat features.
I would like to have a demo of social media app for android and I would be glad to arrange that.
Nice article it helps me to understand the full concept of developing social media app. Let me know for One to one call solution or for Conferencing how much does the license cost and what the time will be taken
We are a production company based out of chennai India and we are looking to build social media app like twitter. We would like to know more about the pricing and other commercial details from your team.