Social Media Apps

Since its inception in 1994, social media websites have flourished on the web, allowing people to connect and share content in ways that had never before been possible. Introduced in August 2003, MySpace – a free website allowing people to create personalised online profiles – peaked in 2005 with an estimated 100 million active users, and today, Facebook boasts an estimated 1.23 billion users, with 170 million people joining and using the social network in the last year alone.

A micro-blogging platform that allows users to create accounts and share 140-character ‘tweets’ with their ‘followers’ – boasts 214 million active users per month, with users spending an average of 170 minutes per month pouring through their Twitter news feeds.

These website’s reach and ubiquity make them a potent marketing tool that really cannot be missed. Did you know, for example, that Facebook’s average degree of separation (the number of friends of friends to connect you with anyone else on Facebook) is only 3.74? That means if one of your Facebook friends shares any of your content on Facebook, and one of their friends does too, and so on, you can potentially reach anyone else on Facebook in as little as 4 clicks of a button! That is any of 1.23 billion people worldwide! And with 1.8 million items shared or ‘liked’ on Facebook every minute, it’s not difficult to see how content can ‘trend’ online.

As social media’s use has sky-rocketed in recent years, websites and businesses are clamouring to gain presence on these social media outlets, and for good reason too! It's something you really can no longer afford to ignore.

Today, Social Media is a massive part of web design and development. As well as integration within the main body of a website, Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook offer the ability to host applications (Apps) within their systems to carry out various features.

This is where AWD can help. Over the years since Social Media became popular, we have developed a number of Social Media apps for a wide variety of customers. As we are extremely proficient in web development and the programming languages that are use, we use those skills in building your social media application

These Apps can be as small as one page features, or can act like a website within. All social media sites are developed using Open Source languages and all offer integration methods into PHP, the very language we use. Facebook itself is actually developed and programmed in PHP.

Facebook Apps

Facebook apps are probably the most common type of Social Media App. Using the SDK (Software Development Kit) that Facebook provide, it opens up a huge array of features that we can develop for your Social Media campaign.

Facebook apps can work in one of two ways. The first is to host a website within the Facebook system. Doing this means that readers never have to leave Facebook to interact with your application. Your app can in addition, interact with the persons Facebook account, access information and pass it on to your application or website.

The other main type of Facebook App is to work on a more data driven approach. Your website acts like a normal website but the app part of the site grabs information from people’s Facebook accounts such as their age, interests, likes and many more.

Twitter Apps

Twitter Apps work in a slightly different way. They are more focused at interacting using tweets, re-tweeting or adding favourites. These apps take place on your website but can then carry out these functions. At this current time, Twitter does not allow for Applications to run within but this may change in future.

Social media apps are great for one off campaigns to accompany your website. These can be for a wide variety of different reasons including seasonal promotions such as Christmas or Easter when accompanying an e-commerce site for example. Many sites that are not e-commerce related could also benefit of using Facebook apps too. Engage with customers. Imagine if you run a bar or restaurant and have an event to promote. You can easily engage with your customers by means of a competition or other reward driven incentive.

If you're looking to attract customers to your site then you can promote your social media app directly on Facebook using the advertising medium that is offered. As the app sits directly within Facebook the customer never has to actually leave Facebook.

AWD can not only develop your app to your exact requirements but we cash handle all the promotion for you by means of Pay Per click.

From the first setup of your social media app, we will take you right through to completion and beyond that with tracking and statistical information on your app.