Adding a social layer to your app
This is a widely used approach and is suitable for existing web and mobile apps or those that aren’t driven primarily by data originating from a social networking platform. Here you can effortlessly choose the social platforms you want to work with, go to their developer pages, build your desired plugins and paste the generated code snippets inside your app. It’s really as simple as that! Twitter’s ‘tweet button’ is a great example of a ‘build-and-play’ social plugin.
If you like it a little more advanced, you can hook your app to their APIs that provide access to the social graph of your users.
Data rendered by social networking APIs is usually high in quality and natively personalised in nature. With consent, you can pull your users’ preferences and information from their social graph via the APIs, and logically use that information to personalise the content or components of your app. For example, using the APIs, your app can get to know what artists a user listens to. Then it can compute insights about her taste of music and highlight a certain area of your app in response, which would have a high probability of being relevant to the user.
In addition to accessing information, you can publish customised notifications to the social platform in response to the actions taken by the users inside you app. Facebook’s ‘login button’, which allows your users to log in using their facebook credentials or session, is a great example of how useful social plugins can be.
