Getting frustrated with social media? Would you like to spend more time marketing your business rather than managing your social channels? Do you want complete visibility into your users' data? Perhaps you should start a social platform within your app! We explore how having in-app social can significantly benefit your users, your brand, and your platform.
In today's world, social media dominates the internet. Everybody uses Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms to stay in touch with their friends, family, and colleagues. The only problem with these social media platforms is that you don’t own them.
If you have a product — like an app — where you want to engage and retain users, that’s going to set you back. Why? Because you miss out on developing lasting relationships with your users, getting first-hand insights into what makes them tick, and worst of all, your product goes unnoticed among the annoying advertisements and posts.
The truth is you don't have to depend on social media sites to benefit from being social. Why not create your social network right inside your platform?
Integrating in-app social features on your platform has numerous advantages over using a third-party one — here are three reasons why it pays to add them into your app today.
You can immediately collect data to help improve your app
When you’re starting a new app, you want to find out it’s crucial to find out what your customers like and don’t like about your brand and then use that information to create a platform that better suits them.
Today, there are hundreds of platforms to choose from in the social media market, and you have to pick more than one — or at least explore them all and experiment with it. This strategy can be good for exploration, but not so on your budget — and your presence.
With your in-app social platform, you can collect all the information you need from your users without relying on other sites. That means you have your data instantly, and you can check them against your app metrics in real-time. This way, you can make continuous improvements to your app immediately. You can minimize your spending on ads to invest more time creating in-app communities and devote more time improving your app to elevate user experience.
Your audience can feel more connected to you and each other
Audience building is a two-way street, and that means you have to be willing to communicate with your audience and respond to them. The best way to do this is by building a community around your brand.
Building a community is a long process. However, using SDKs that power chats and in-app groups to help you make presence and connection will enhance your users’ user experience. You can use these social features to power continuous engagement on your platform, be it something you shared from your brand or user-generated content (UGC) from other users. You can also utilize these to collect your community’s feedback so you can continuously improve your online presence, ideally becoming a primary source for their online needs. That way, you can boost their experience and grow your account base.
When you build a solid in-app community, you create a level of trust with your customers, which translates into increased sales. You gain loyal customers to help bring you more clients. At the same time, you’ll earn brand advocates who carry your message and encourage existing customers and potential customers to grow and participate in your community.
You'll be able to provide users the content they want when they want it
The problem with the content on various social media platforms is that it’s very cluttered. While they present a vast array of information to users, they can become overwhelming, and honestly, some of them are irrelevant.
Having an in-app social platform utilizing a personalized feed allows you to display tailored content to your users based on their app activity and interaction. Using an in-app algorithm, you can display information about your products and services together with UGC from other users for a more dynamic and customized flow of information.
As mentioned above, since you have your own data inside your app, it will be easier for you to understand your user behavior, such as what kind of content your user interacts with, what time they’re usually on your platform, and what they do inside your app. This way, you can also send the right in-app messaging at a time that is convenient and less intrusive to them.
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Time to make your app more social
Building your own social network is a smart idea for any business. However, it’s not easy to create one from scratch. Create a place where you can engage with your users and interact with one another using Amity Social Cloud.
Amity Social Cloud can help provide scalable solutions to allow you to integrate functions into applications and digital channels — without the hassle of software development. Using plug-and-play solutions like Amity’s SDKs can help you build your social platform right in your app. Further, they can enable endless customizations and an upgradable UI, making it easy to add popular features like chat, feeds, groups, bots, and much more to your app.