How to Create a Social Media Platform: Step-by-Step Guide (2024)
The total number of social media users has reached 5.07 billion, meaning it has become overcrowded and difficult for users to form true connections with people. A potential way to bridge the gap between social networks' popularity and user experience and communities' coziness and intimacy is by creating your own social network website.
building social network site where your team, community or clients can seamlessly connect, share insights, and engage in meaningful discussions sounds more complicated than it actually is.
This article shows how to create your own social network by following 12 simple steps.
Let’s explore how to create a branded social media network with a feed page, sections, sidebar, and many more!
How to create a social network website in 12 steps
When building a social media website, you can invest in professional developers, designers, and web domains and plugins, which can take a long time and a lot of money. Another way to build your social media site is with a simple tool, minimal investment, and by yourself.
We aim to show you how to create a no-code community platform with Bettermode and design every aspect of your social network with just a few clicks.
Let’s get started.
Success begins with thorough planning:
- Conduct comprehensive market research to identify opportunities
- Define your target audience clearly
- Plan core essential features that align with user needs
- Develop a strategy to build a social media presence
Step 1 - Start with a free Bettermode account
You are one step away from reading this article to creating your own social media website. Go to Bettermode and sign in to your new account with Google or another email address.
To make the process easier for you, we will suggest the best templates to get you started. To understand what you need, we will need you to answer a few simple questions.
Step 2 - Select the perfect template
A good template can be handy if you don’t want to start from scratch. In this article, we will use BetterX, a designed social network you can tailor to your needs in only 4-5 hours.
.png)
Step 3 - Define the basics
Once you set up the theme of your social media website, hit the C button and open the web app builder.
First, your social media app needs a name and a brand. Customize everything from your logo to the color palette, shape of the post boxes, and design of icons.
Setup brand name and domain
Start by naming your social media platform and adding the main terms and privacy policy which are transparent for all members.
After you’ve typed all the information in the text boxes, click Update to prevent the loss of valuable data.
Once you finish this step, go to the domain section and book an original subdomain to make your social media network easy to find. Bettermode will check if your name is available and migrate your community for you.
Brand your social network website
Under Appearance, you will find all the features you need to fully adapt all visuals on the site to match your branding. You can customize:
- Social media website logo
- Fonts
- Themes with colors from your brand palette
- The shape of fields, buttons, and icon style
You can design appearances for all types of devices accordingly and see the live preview before you make further updates.
Essential Technical Considerations
Before diving into the design phase, consider these crucial tech stacks and features for your social media application:
- Integration capabilities for push notifications to keep users engaged
- Mobile-responsive design for social networks apps
- Robust content sharing mechanisms
- Advanced user engagement tracking tools
Step 4 - Design the default home page
The default home page for this theme is the feed page, where each user can see the main updates from you and other members. You can change this under Settings > Community > Homepage settings. Explore the default home page option for new users, such as a welcome page or their profile page, and a different home page for returning users.
Step 5 - Customize different website sections
In our design studio, you can edit existing and add new pages to your media brand community with a simple block builder. All pages are under Collections and Spaces.
Set up the feed page
Your home page can be a simple feed like one on mainstream social media, where active users scroll through the content others have shared. However, within our builder, you can decide whether to include other segments, such as company updates, scheduled events, and featured top posts.
We suggest adding a brief description of each segment to improve the user experience on your social media site. This will also be useful for new users, helping them navigate the social network.
Design the sidebar
Keep the intuitive menu on the left side, and add fields to the right sidebar to make other site sections more accessible. Add the sections relevant to your target audience:
- Announcement banner
- Members
- Quick links
- Header
- List menu
And other sections you want people to find easily.
Add new spaces to the social media website
The default sections with this theme are Home, Events, Discussion, and Explore. Depending on the purpose of social media platforms, different niche sites have sections such as Wishlist, Q&A, Jobs, and others.
For example, niche social media apps centered around a popular podcast have a pre-designed space template for Podcasts. You can upload episodes directly to the site and add links to other platforms where your audience can find you.
Step 6 - Define profile sections for your members
Social media networks are places where internet users with similar interests can connect and get to know each other. Thus, a vital part of designing your network is optimising user profiles.
Bettermode offers a variety of pre-made fields, such as birthday, pronoun, bio, and location, as well as fields where users can link to other social profiles, such as Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
However, you can always design a field specific to your niche. For example, a community portal for networking centred around activism for an NGO can have a tick field for members to check if they are dedicated volunteers.
That way, other members can know whether to approach them to organize an event together if they live in the same city or country.
Other custom fields you can design include:
- Text
- Number
- Multi-select list
- Date, and
- Rich text with formatting options.
Creating effective user experiences requires careful consideration of how members interact. Implement:
- Interactive profile elements to encourage users interactive behavior
- Tools to track website visitors and their journey
- Features that facilitate natural community growth and user base expansion
Step 7 - Incorporate a moderation policy
The success of any social network website highly depends on whether the users feel safe and respected within the community. Your job is to provide an open space that advocates courteous communication and has no tolerance towards those members who violate human rights within the social media website.
With Bettermode, you can address these issues in the Moderation settings and ensure fair app usage for each user. A beta version of the AI spam detector will help you instantly filter all the bots that join your social network and harass other users
Furthermore, you can create alerts for specific keywords, such as your brand name to keep track of all mentions of your brand across the social network.
Other keywords you can track could be malicious - “trolling,” “abuse,” “hack,” and other potentially harmful activities that can occur on any social media platform.
Monitor member activities
Social media websites should have age-based moderation to monitor content from newer accounts. You can track the behavior and content of underage users to help protect them from issues they might be facing.
At the same time, you might find members who are flagged as potential troublemakers. Bettermode functionalities include making a watch list for selected members and reviewing their content before publication.
Step 8 - Design the content publisher
When creating a social media app or building a social network app, you must dedicate another key element to designing a content management system (CMS). Most no-code web builders, such as Bubble and alternatives don’t have an integrated CMS. In that case, you must purchase a third-party CMS software and navigate through complex integrations.
Bettermode's own CMS allows users to post textual content and events and start a discussion within their social media platform. You can find these settings under Content > CMS.
Select custom icons for each post type and select which fields the users will see when they share their updates. Here, you can set the reactions other members will see when they engage with a post and whether comments will be allowed for this post type.
When developing your social media platform, focus on:
- Implementing robust content sharing capabilities
- Integrating essential social media app development features
- Creating tools that encourage user engagement
Step 9 - Explore SEO settings
Your social networking site can be designed as a private social network or allow potential users to find you on the web.
If you want to share your social networking website with the world and invite target users, you should set SEO aspects of your website, such as the meta title, description and image used for social sharing across other media platforms.
You will find these features under Settings > SEO settings.
Step 10 - Invite people from your inner circle
Start growing your social network by enrolling the folks from your surroundings.
The first group of members within private social networks is the best way to pilot your community and test the basic features before inviting more users.
After you create a social media network, assign the roles to different admins and moderators who will take care of the community's well-being and ensure community engagement. In the Bettermode free plan, you can add up to 3 staff members—for example, an admin/owner, a community manager, and a discussion forums moderator.
Step 11 - Leverage free Figma integrations
Good design prompts the target audience's engagement on every social media website. The BetterX theme includes free integrations of Figma elements you can use to create the most appealing interface for your community.
On the top banner of the BetterX community, you will find a link to download a style guide and design the ultimate UX for your social network like a professional designer.
Step 12 - Publish your awesome social media website
After assigning responsibilities to your team members, you are ready to share your project with other internet users. All that is left for you to decide is whether the social network can be accessed by the invite-only principle or if you’d like to attract users from outside of your bubble.
Go to Settings > Permissions to make final adjustments, and hit the Publish button to make your social network platform live online.
Congratulations! You are all set to introduce your social network to the world.
3 examples of less popular social network websites
Most of us use traditional social media networks like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. These mainstream social channels are cluttered with content irrelevant to the user and ads that get out of control.
To inspire you to develop new social media networks, we will review some of the not-so-popular existing social media platforms with great designs and sections.
- Vero
Vero is the first among the existing social networks to use an ad-free and algorithm-free policy to enable a liberal and simple experience for their members. They are targeting creators, allowing them to share their authentic artwork in audio, video, and other formats, as well as engage others in their personal experience of movies, books, and other cultures they consume.
With about 6 million active users, Vero is one of the successful social media channels that started by simply creating an alternative space for people to express themselves.
- Letterboxd
Letterboxd is a great example of a niche social media created to connect movie enthusiasts and be a non-mainstream social media app. They now have over 10 million users and this number has a strong growth tendency. It is designed as a simple app with few integrations, only to become a favorite app of many.
- Fishbrain
Fisherbrain is a social networking app designed for fisher enthusiasts. It had less than 100.000 users less than two years ago, only to outgrow the number of 15 million anglers today.
The simple idea behind this app is to connect anglers allowing them to share their catches, exchange techniques, and distribute various fishing events. They can connect and communicate with fishing enthusiasts from all over the globe, and the extra sauce the developers have included is the fishing forecast - detailed weather and fishing forecasts to help their members plan fishing trips.
Best practices when building a social network website
Creating your social media can be quite challenging, and while most creators focus on complex functionalities, they overlook the essentials that make the community. Let’s review the best practices for building a social network:
- Spend more time ideating and less time developing
Creating your own social media website can take you down the road of software development, and such a development process can take a long time, not to mention excessive development costs. Such a solution is over the top if you wish to create social network that is brand new and refreshing on the market.
Instead, make sure to focus on what your team needs the most:
- Optimized internal communication
- Prompt push notifications
- Responsiveness and accessibility for multiple devices
- Ios and Android compatibility
- Flexible notification settings (push notifications for likes, comments, etc).
Optimize interconnecting between the users
To achieve the best user engagement on your social network, promote direct messaging and allow the members to discover one another across the community.
Even though connecting your teammates and like-minded individuals is a noble goal, moderation plays a key role in ensuring that all your users are safe.
You can decide whether you will be able to overview private messaging and in which cases, as well as put policies in place on how users can approach the managers or support. On top of that, you need a clear strategy for conflict resolution and what happens if policies are violated.
Explore different community management strategies
Social network built for your company staff, clients, and customers has its own flow and develops organically once you onboard the right people. However, sometimes good community management can spice things up, kickstart a trend, and bring the tribe closer together.
Here are some ideas on how to ensure your social media is active and vibrant:
- Run a monthly challenge. Create a challenge each month with different themes. For example, make October a Halloween month and ask the members to propose a unique way to celebrate this fun holiday.
- Create public polls and surveys. Social media is a great platform to settle the battle if your team wants more plants in the office, which espresso machine to buy, or whether the new Doctor Who is good or bad.
- Design interactive webinars. A webinar can be a simple live video shared with the rest of the community, free for people to join. It can be used as a space to discuss new tech trends and games or plan a team-building event.
- Implement recognition programs. A recognition program where staff and clients can nominate each other for outstanding contributions is a solid incentive to motivate your team members. Make sure to celebrate Employee of the Month with a reward or a bonus.
- Experiment with virtual scavenger hunts. Organize online scavenger hunts with clues related to the company’s history or product offerings.
Conclusion
We know how valuable your time is. You don’t want to spend hours coding a new website from scratch, and hiring a good developer can be costly. That's exactly why we have created Bettermode—a user-friendly no-code tool that enables you to customize everything from branding to automatic processes.
Ready to start moderating your very own social network?
FAQs
How much does it cost to build a social network website?
Social media website development can be expensive and depends on how complex social media you wish to create. With tools like Bettermode, you can set up a social media platform with various functionalities for free.
Can I create a website like Facebook?
You can create a network such as a Facebook web app without sweating. Seek no-code solutions that help you build a new social media platform quickly and open up to the social media market.
What makes a social media website?
A social media website is a virtual space that lets users connect with each other and share different types of content in real time. The core of a social network app is enabling each user to create their own profile and communicate with other users.
