Are you interested to build a Facebook Clone App? Well, you are at the right place!
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With 2.91 billion monthly active users and over 5 billion app downloads on Google Play and Apple store combined, Facebook is one of the most successful social networks. And why wouldn’t that be the case? It connects people to their loved ones and lets them share photos, videos, and events on the go!
However, Facebook is more than that.
Over 200 million businesses use Facebook’s app and its free tools to market their product and services. That’s 93% of the total business existing today worldwide!
Now, if these statistics feel like an opportunity to start a similar endeavor, you might come across an obvious question – how to make an app like Facebook?
Well, we have got it all covered in this blog. It offers an insight into all the crucial aspects to create a social media network like Facebook along with its cost structure. Now, before we get on with the technical aspects of its creation, here are a couple of things you should know.
Well, for starters, it’s not true that there were no Facebook competitors back in 2004. But that didn’t stop Mark Zuckerberg from starting the project. Starting as a college-level social networking website at Harvard University, it gradually grew to become a preferred platform for top companies to take their business online.
Facebook gained 9 million users in the first two years. This led to a chain reaction and it started getting more monthly active users than other social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, etc over the years. However, in hindsight, there were three aspects that Facebook covered more efficiently than other competitors.
Facebook makes the best use of its massive user base and gets huge advertising revenues from a majority of small businesses. These businesses advertise their brand, products, and services on the platform. In addition, its targeted advertising solution gives a customized approach to clients for better advertisement results.
Whenever a user accesses the Facebook app – where do they stop at, what they scroll through, what do they click on, Facebook keeps track of its user engagement. In return, advertisers use this crucial data to analyze and repurpose their marketing strategies.
Facebook grew exponentially since it rolled out Messenger app in 2011. In addition, instead of competing with established players like WhatsApp for instant messaging services, Facebook acquired it in 2014. This clever move brought over a billion users to its platform.
You must offer equal or better features than Facebook – it’s that simple! Your audiences are accustomed to the ease of Facebook UX/UI and everything they want to see on its application. Moreover, Facebook is making its services more convenient for users with every update. Here is a list of some go-to features you must have on your version of the Facebook app.
Nothing attracts a user more than the simplicity of the application interface. The more a user finds it easy to use and navigate on your Facebook clone application, the greater the chance of its retainment. However, you must also ensure that your users are able to register and use your services on the website as well.
A push notification service makes a huge impact on the way a user uses your services, especially the ones they have subscribed for.
If you manage to add different dynamics and make it more nuanced in the way a user creates his profile, greater will be chances of user engagement.
A user spends more time on the news feed than any other feature on Facebook. It offers all the content based on a user’s likes, comments, reactions, preferences, and locality among other factors.
Your Facebook clone application must have a file-sharing feature that allows users to share photos, stickers, emojis, audio files, and videos on the go!
Whether someone wants to remove a post, change preferences, or create a list of ‘close friends,’ a user should be allowed to make changes to their social media profile.
Facebook has over 3 billion people using its Messenger application. This makes it a quintessential feature to have on your Facebook alike app.
This is a recent evolution in the past couple of years that allows users to show a glimpse of their daily life using short video clips. These short clips are commonly known as stories that disappear after 24 hours.
Apart from the above-mentioned features that a user directly engages in, you must also avail security features, geolocation, in-app communication, payment integration, and user management features among many more.
The complete process to make a social media app like Facebook goes through different stages.
What is your idea and purpose for making an app like Facebook? Why do you want to launch a similar app apart from the market business opportunity? How different will it be from the existing one? These are the basic questions you must ask before making any major investment in your application development.
Here’s how you can try to come up with an original idea.
Once you finalize the ideation behind the Facebook alike application, you can design the application outlook. This saves you a ton of time and money spent on mobile app development. Besides, it’s far better to experiment with an app design at an early stage than to change the code later on.
Now, the app outlook is divided into four sections.
Create a unique outline for the app that gives an intuitive look & feel. This will help you to better visualize your application and its different components.
Develop the main structure of the application where web designers visualize the wireframe of the application.
Once the outline and wireframing of the Facebook application are finalized, create a functional prototype of the application. It will give you a better overview of the app and also allows you to make altercation to the design before the development team starts coding.
As you might already know, the world is majorly divided into two categories – Android and iOS users. And both of these categories serve a large user base using Facebook services. As per Statista, 70% of the world population are Android users and 25% are iPhone users. In addition, here’s a look at the results from a survey on worldwide device usage of Facebook users.
As per this data, not only you should provide services to both Android and iOS users, but also integrate a website portal for Windows, Mac, and other UI-based computers.
There are two sides to coding any application – frontend and backend. Interestingly, the frontend coding is one-fifth of the total application development. The rest is backend development – where a diverse range of app development tasks are carried out. It includes API integration, data sources, and business rules among other essential operations.
Now, there are two ways to code your Facebook alike application, either code from scratch or use the backend as a service. But just because you want to make a Facebook clone app doesn’t necessarily require you to code. You can outsource the application development.
Speaking of outsourcing your app development, you can highly benefit from our years of experience in app development at Code Brew Labs.
A landing page is a crucial part of your app development and its business strategy. It’s not limited to motivating a visitor to download your mobile application, subscribing to the newsletter, or downloading a brochure. It also represents business values & morale and all kinds of services & conveniences you’re providing to a user.
Above all, it helps to increase the credibility of your application and its services.
An app analytics dashboard gives you access to the vital metrics of your application. Here is a list of other conveniences it provides,
Now, when you are done with designing, prototyping, coding, analyzing, and debugging the application, you may launch your app. However, the process of registering and launching your Facebook alike app on the Google Play Store and Apple Store is different.
Make sure you thoroughly go through their respective registration processes.
The cost to create a social media network like Facebook depends on two factors – the features you choose to integrate into the app and the list of services you’re providing to the users. These factors also dictate the timeline of app development. Usually, it ranges from 300 hours to 800 hours, depending on the version of the application. A basic feature version may cost less in comparison to more standard and complex feature versions.
Here’s a cost comparison of outsourcing the development of a social media app in the US and India.
A Facebook clone app is, undoubtedly, a great business idea – but also a difficult one! Why? Because Facebook is a social media giant and it has always been at the top of its game since its inception.
As a result of its mammoth success over the years, many entrepreneurs have tried to replicate its business model – one way or another. Nextdoor, Vero, MeWe, and Minds.com are some of the establishing competitors. However, they are only succeeding because they came up with a different yet innovative idea, rather than only working on a similar business version.
So, you must come up with a different idea to make a Facebook clone app. As mentioned earlier, start looking for the shortcomings in other social media apps, and their business models, not just on Facebook. Once you do that, half of your work is done!
But if it feels like a lot to pull off the other half, outsource your Facebook alike app development to Code Brew. Our expert team has a record of developing a wide assortment of mobile applications in several industries. Check out our portfolio here!
So, what are you waiting for? Contact us today and get a free demo!
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