Have you ever thought about creating your own social media app? As you duke it out against the algorithm on Facebook–paying to get your best ideas in front of your own followers. As you try to avoid controversy on Twitter. As you realize that when you build your brand on a social media platform you’re growing in a place you don’t own and can’t control.
You might have come to the same question a lot of us do.
Isn’t there another option? Couldn’t I create something better?
Social media has become a staple in our lives–the way we communicate, the way we share ideas, the way we market, and the way we buy things. In 2021, more than 70% of Americans were active on social media with 4 in 10 social media users saying influencers shape what they buy.
So whether you want to carve off a chunk of that market for yourself, or whether you want to create a little haven for your brand that’s free of distractions, building your own social media app can be ridiculously good.
Imagine better engagement. Real connections. Real community. More profitability. All on an app your customers or fans will love. That’s a pretty exciting vision.
That’s what happened with Oiselle Volee, a women’s apparel brand that built a community app around the love of fitness. It’s what happened with Adriene Mishler, who invites her 10 million+ YouTube followers onto her own social media app dedicated to the love of yoga.
Moving customers or fans to your own app opens up a whole new world of possibilities: for connection and revenue.
In this article, we’ll explain why and introduce you to 8 social media app development company options that will help you build your own social media platform–one that you own, can monetize, and can build real connections on.
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Why you should develop your own social media app
When we’ve seen creators and brands develop social media apps, it creates something unique. You can harness the power of traditional social media apps: things like user-generated content, push notifications, member profiles, livestreaming, and all sorts of other goodies.
But traditional social media comes with a few universal problems:
- You don’t own it.
- Creators always keep less than the platform does (even when you’re paid for ads).
- You fight the algorithm.
- You could lose it all.
That last one’s the kicker. It’s freaking frustrating when you get locked out or hacked on an account you’ve worked hard to build.
Developing your own social media app can literally fix the problems of traditional social media.
- You control it
- You get your content in front of members
- You can monetize
- You can brand it
- Members see ALL your content
These benefits mean more brands are doing it. Here are a few highlights we’ve seen from brands creating their own apps:
- A non-profit onboarded 9,000 national members.
- A YouTuber launched a live challenge in their app and 4,000+ members joined.
- A faith-based community expanded to 470 leaders in 67 countries
- A health-focused app launched with 100 high-ticket members & added $40,000 in ARR.
- A podcaster and author sold 5,000 seats to a $997 course in 10 days.
- One community launched a 13-week add-on course and generated an additional $100k in revenue in 2 months.
These are the stories we hear. And they show why it’s AMAZING to create your own social media app.
What to look for in a social media app development company
When you’re looking to build with a social media app development company, you can look for a few things to make your experience a heck of a lot easier.
- First, find the company that matches your development style. The main two choices will be between a full custom build and a white-label solution. Custom builds can be great, but are more expensive. White-label companies specialize in building a certain type of app (often better quality because they specialize at it). And often white-label is considerably cheaper.
- Next, find a company that has experience building what you want to build. Collect user feedback from past customers. Do your homework too–testimonials provided by the company don’t always give the whole picture.
- Ask questions about the product. The UX. The interface. The features they can build.
- Make sure you can build in the security and privacy features you need with your social media app development.
- Check that the company will offer you ongoing support, maintenance, and troubleshooting.
7 Social media app development companies
1. Mighty Pro
Best option for community, courses, content, and commerce
If you want to develop your own social media app, Mighty Pro is a powerful option to build with. We build social media apps that center around community, plus add in flexible Spaces with features like live streaming, live events, live and pre-recorded courses, membership profiles, discussion forums, chat and messaging, and more.
Mighty Pro can SERIOUSLY give you pretty much every feature you’d want to replicate from a traditional social media platform–minus fighting the algorithm. And to this, you can add monetization features–charge in 135 currencies for courses, events, memberships, coaching, or bundle any of these together.
Mighty Pro is unlike anything else on the market and makes it RADICALLY easier to create a thriving social media app. And with Mighty Co-Host™, you also get access to AI features like the Infinite Question Generator, automatic course outlines, AI post assist, and conversation starters.
We’ve built social media apps for creators and brands like Adriene Mishler, Drew Binsky, Sadie Robertson Huff, TED, Fortune, and more.
And Mighty Pro adds in one more thing: a world-class team of Account Executives and Community Strategists who have scaled 7-figure creator brands and 8+-figure subscription businesses. We’ll help you strategize and plan while our team of developers creates your app under your brand and takes care of getting it into the App Store and Google Play Store. And we offer ongoing support: troubleshooting, proactive upgrades, and more.
Schedule a call with us and we’ll show you what we could build together!
2. Fueled
Fueled is another social media app development company that’s based in New York. They’ve become known as a company that creates user-friendly mobile and web apps–and this includes experience developing social media apps. Past social-media app work has included building out chat and messaging functions, user profiles, membership apps, social feeds, and discovery options.
Fueled has a strong team behind its builds, offering services from discovery and strategy through to UX design and native development. They have experience with programming languages like Swift and Objective-C for iOS and Java and Kotlin for Android. And they’ve done cross-platform development and web apps.
After launch, Fuel offers QA and testing and ongoing bug fixes, performance monitoring, and regular updates. Fueled is a custom-app development company. That means you get a higher degree of customization, but the cost will be much, much higher. They have worked with brands like Verizon, MGM, 9GAG, and Harvard University.
3. Willowtree
Willowtree is an app development company out of Virginia with offices around the US and a track record of building custom mobile and web apps for Fortune 500 companies and startups. Their team of designers, strategists, and developers does full custom development and creates bespoke solutions to a wide range of business challenges.
With experience developing apps for large enterprises, Willowtree can build, test, and deploy at scale, and can integrate with a lot of different types of products. They offer what they call agile delivery transformation, working alongside of clients’ teams to build apps.
For past clients, they’ve built in solutions like analytics, SEO features (for web apps), CRO, AB testing, and even machine learning algorithms. With a track record of building in high-end marketing features and data-driven functions, Willowtree offers apps that pair well with enterprise operations and growth marketing features, and give you tools to measure retention and CLV.
4. Konstant Infosolutions
Konstant Infosolutions could be considered another social media app development company, with experiences across the whole custom app-development ecosystem with technologies like IoT, wearables, enterprise mobility, and cloud and mobile solutions.
With a range of offerings that are in line with traditional social media platforms, Konstant has experience building out features like: community building, content management, privacy management, profiles and members, reporting and analytics, live chat, messaging, photo/video sharing, and online polling.
5. Chetu
Chetu is a software development company that can also do social media app development. This includes building out things like fully customizable user profiles, content-sharing functions for text, images, and videos, messaging and chat options, and other interactive features like comments and likes.
To these types of features, they’ve also added traditional social media features like discovery, search, trending content, hashtags, and content recommendations. And their builds have also ensured strong privacy and security measures, including data protection, secure login and authentication, and reporting and blocking features.
Chetu offers end-to-end app development services with totally custom builds, from conceptualization and design to development, testing, and deployment. They’re a great place to build if you’re looking for a built-from-scratch, high-end social media app and are willing to pay top dollar for it.
6. Simpalm
Simpalm is a US-based mobile app development company that has experience building out social-media-type apps for iOS, Android, and the web. Most of their experience is in the enterprise space–offering user-friendly apps for business. Like many of the other options on this list, they offer a custom development process from ideation through to testing.
As far as social media features, they have experience building features like text and video chat, video calling, and user messaging, plus the typical “like,” “comment,” and “share” options. They’ve also built apps with content features like a social media platform, including photo and video sharing and editing.
In addition to these typical social media features, they can add in location-based services and geofencing for search parameters, customized push notifications to keep engagement high, and third-party APIs that can connect with traditional social media apps or other payment gateways.
7. Mobiweb
Mobiweb Technologies is a social networking app development company that specialized in providing social network mobile app solutions for enterprises. This could be for things like customer communities.
They’ve got experience building networks for users to connect in, and adding in features like livestreaming, in-app chat and calling features, and content-sharing options with multimedia functionality.
One neat function you can add with Mobiweb is the option for a marketplace feature–which is a neat thing to integrate into your social media app. They can build in payment gateways and business and account creation pages. Finally, Mobiweb is also integrating cool new features like VR and AR to take your network to the next level!
Ready to start?
Whether you’re looking for an enterprise custom build or you’re a creator looking for an app under your own brand, we hope the options above have given you some ideas about where to build.
Here are a few reasons to consider building a social media app with us:
- Mighty Pro is cheaper. We have a track record of building amazing social media apps for a fraction of the cost of the custom development options on this list.
- Mighty Pro is a better product. It’s counterintuitive, but when you go for a custom build you start from scratch and hope you get the right things built into your app. We exclusively build social media apps, and we’re constantly updating and adding new features.
- Mighty Pro gives you engagement unlike ANYTHING else, with the power of Mighty Co-Host™ our AI community assistant will help you launch discussions and create and improve content.
- The Mighty Pro team has your back–not just for product updates, but for the vital strategy you need to be successful.
If all this sounds good, schedule a call with us and we’ll show you what you could build!
