Powerful Social Media Features Custom Made For You

Feed Contents

The feed - also called as a Timeline or Forum - contains a list of posts (with images, videos, text and links) curated for the user. The feed is infinitely scrollable - new posts are appended to the feed as the user scrolls through, as long as there are more posts to show.

Feed Algorithm and Personalisation

The posts in the feed have to be chosen, in real time, specifically for each user to match their interests. If the posts does strike a chord with the user, the chances of him sticking and spending more time in the app are more.

Even the order of the posts is important - the most appropriate posts at the top of feed can evoke user interest and increase the users engagement. Thus, the feed (or timeline) algorithm - that selects and orders the posts - is crucial.

Feed Monetisation

The feed is also where the platform owners can insert sparingly, content other than user generated content such as Advertisements or promotional content, User and Post recommendations, Announcements or Events, increasing platform revenue.

Provide features and tools to people, to discover, connect and engage with others. A high density of connection among the platform users, creates a stronger community.

Friends & Followers

Relationships could be of different strengths; Friends - people whom we are know personally, Followers - people who don’t personally know us, but interested to hear from us, Followings - people whom we don’t know, but interested in hearing from. Our application can support any or all types of relationships among the members of the community.

People Recommendations

Discovering potential friends and followers in the platform should be made easier. Facebook recommends people based on information such as your contact list, people from your college or work place, people in your location with similar interests, groups that you are member of etc.

Likes, Replies and Bookmarks

Allow users to like others’ posts, save (or bookmark) and reply to them. This provides multiple benefits - content creators receive appreciation for their efforts, the platform discovers the interests of the individual and discover popular topics and trends of the community. With this information, the platform can deliver posts that are most appropriate for each user.

Social media attracts people with varied interests and purpose. Whether your social media app is general purpose or targeted, it could grow large enough for a wide variety of topic discussions to coexist in a single feed or forum. In such a case providing the ability to create multiple sub groups or communities can help de-clutter the platform.

Group Criteria

Groups can be created based on several criteria - groups for topics such as politics, music, sports, groups to discuss matters specific to a particular country or a city, groups for college alumni or work colleagues, groups to organise a particular event such as a upcoming football tournament.

Private/Public Groups

Groups can be private or public or somewhere in-between. Public groups can be discovered and joined by anyone, whereas private groups are hidden from public view and members can join by invite only. Groups can also be public but to join a member might have to make a request and get approved by a group admin.

Group Settings

We can provide settings to control how the groups are created and organised - who can create a group, how a group can be discovered by others, who can join the group, who can post and who can view the posts.

Country/City Groups

In one of the social media apps that we developed for a medical community, we created country specific groups and members would be automatically added to the group of their country. Users cannot see and join groups belonging to a different country, but users can create public groups such as “Radiology Conference - Chicago 2024” which anyone can discover and join.

Hashtags can be used to quickly convey the topic or purpose of a post. Tags such as #Covid19, #DonaldTrump, #RussiaUkrainWar clearly indicate what the post is about. Events in the real world such as a global pandemic, a presidential election or a war can cause many people to write about a particular topic simultaneously with similar hashtags.

Hashtags are a powerful tool, since by looking at the volume and frequency of posts with similar hashtags, we can determine the most popular (or trending) topics of the day (or hour, since a day can be too long a duration in social media). The trending hashtags, can then be displayed prominently on the social media app, so that users logging in can get a gist of what is happening in the real world and join the conversations.

Why Search Feature is Important?

Social media operates in real time. Timelines and feeds are refreshed constantly and newer posts appear at the top, as soon as they become available. Due to this fleeting nature of social media, if a user sees a post that is of interest but forgot to like or save the post, then trying to lookup the post at a later time becomes difficult.

In one of the social media apps that we developed for a US community, users posted as many as hundred thousands posts per day, and a few hundred posts in a minute. An interesting post can get buried deep in this avalanche of posts quickly. Hence, a feature to search and find posts is critical.

Search Criteria

Search should support searching by post content, people or hashtags. Users should be able to perform advanced search operations such as “posts containing the words ‘election’ and ‘funding’ in any order and posted by @elonmusk”.

Advanced Search

If your social media app includes additional functionalities - for example fund raising, events, marketplace, movie reviews - then provide search functionality on these additional features as well. In one of the socio-commerce (a social media with eCommerce capabilities) app that we developed we provided an option to search for products and services in addition to People and Post Search.