It adds value to your users
‘Social’ apps make your users feel like they have an identity. This greatly improves user’s willingness to engage with your content. You can personalise your content for each user by harnessing their social context and by making things more relevant to them. In addition, you hand them the opportunity to ‘socialise’ over your content or app by sharing their feelings with their friends and family, which is what humans fundamentally want to do.
It adds value to your app
Making your app social puts it in a position of clear advantage over other ‘not-so-social’ apps. It adds a sense of seamlessness between your app and the social networking platforms, which can make your app feel more familiar and trusted. If you add something as simple as a ‘like button’, it’ll let a user show her appreciation for your app or its content to all of her friends. Her friends see that appreciation, click through to your app, and some of them will ‘like’ or even ‘tweet’ (by using the ‘tweet button’ plugin) about the same content. This will gradually snowball into a considerable rise in the number of users, which in turn will improve the overall ‘social experience’ of your app. Moreover, if your app is built around a business model, the increase in the number of users and higher user engagement will surely map to better revenues for you.
How to make your apps social?
Platforms such as Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter have extensive developer sections, which can escort you towards making your apps as social as you want them to be. Apps can be made social in primarily two ways: Either you can use social plugins and channels to give a social layer to your app or you can use the social networking platform of your choice as the base and build your app over it. The two approaches are meant for entirely different kinds of usage, and choosing between the two depends on the nature of your problem that your app solves.
