How to Build a Social Network Website from Scratch

Social networks have become indispensable in today’s world. They make it easy to stay in touch with friends and family, find like-minded people, promote brands, purchase products and services, collaborate, and share information and content.

It’s no wonder 5.07 billion people use social networks and spend, on average, at least two hours per day on them!

With such a wide audience, it seems like social networks were made for doing business.

If the idea of creating a social media website captures your attention, read on to learn about the essentials of building a social network:

• How to choose which type of social network to build
• How to make a social media website step-by-step
• What features are essential to any social media website and what can make your app stand out
• What kind of specialists you need to build a social media platform
• The timeline and cost to develop a social media website

Let’s get started!

Social network types: What will you build?

An online social network is a website or app where groups of users can build their own digital network of contacts. The users can then meet, communicate (typically via messages, chats or online calls), and create, share and react to content.

The variety of social networks available today can be divided into several categories. Learning more about these categories before building a social media platform can help you focus your product vision. Consider these types to choose from:

Social networks for communication

This is the most common type among modern social networking channels. In this sort of network, users can build connections with people they know in real life and others they’d like to interact with. Users share their thoughts, photos, and updates on their social media profiles and build a whole network of users. Widely known examples include Facebook and X — people use them daily to share information and communicate.

Social networks to share media

This is how Instagram was born; this is what Pinterest, YouTube, and even some anonymous social media apps are for. The primary purpose of social networks like this is to enable people to share visual and audio content and communicate. However, right now media-sharing social networks are also widely used to promote businesses and shop for products and services.

Messaging apps

Evolving from text-only communication tools, modern messaging apps like WhatsApp and Telegram serve as convenient social networking tools. People use them to communicate with friends and family via text, voice messages, and video calls, to join interest-based group chats, promote businesses, and to share news.

Professional social networks

If you’ve ever tried LinkedIn, you already know what a professional social network looks like. Here, users highlight information about their career and achievements, present their skills, share experiences, learn new skills, and create communities. The goal is seamless communication focused on professional networking.

Interest-based social networks

This type of social network connects users who have common hobbies or areas of interest, so they can participate in discussions and share thoughts, achievements, work, and news related to their interest. For example, Behance connects creative people who communicate, share their work, and receive feedback.

Academic social networks

Entertainment and hobbies connect people. Science and research do, too. Using academic social networks like Academia.edu, people can share and discuss scientific articles, research results, ideas, and opinions.

Dating networks

This type of web-based app is highly popular nowadays. Although it seems like you can meet your partner on Facebook as well, dating apps like Tinder and Bumble set the market on fire about a decade ago and are still going strong.

Informational social network

Where do you go when searching for answers to your questions? Mostly, internet users ask Google about what intrigues them. Informational social networks changed that tendency. Now, you can find useful answers on social networking platforms like Quora.

Knowing about the types of social networks helps you choose a direction for your social networking app, but that’s only a small first step. Now, let’s find out more about how to start a social media platform. We can divide the development process into several stages:

1. Project discovery: This is when you conduct market research, define project requirements, and create a development plan.
2. Actual development: This is when you build, test, and deploy a minimum viable product.
3. Maintenance: During maintenance, you monitor your platform and plan and implement improvements.

Let’s take a closer look at each stage and its main activities.

Preparing to build a social network: Project discovery

Your journey to develop a social network will take time, effort, and resources. To avoid needless expense, make informed investment decisions, and minimize the risk of a failed project, you need to allow time for preparation.

This preparation is known as the project discovery stage, and its main purpose is to define your product vision, consider all product requirements, create a development plan and roadmap, and accurately estimate the timeline and budget.

Here are the key steps you need to take during the project discovery stage:

Conduct market analysis

After deciding on the type of social network you want to build, you need to learn more about your target audience and competitors. Through research and interviews, answer the following questions:

• What’s the current market situation? How many potential competitors do you have?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of existing networks of this type?
• What are the users’ needs and pain points?
• What value can you offer to compete with the existing social networks of this type?

Market analysis is essential to understand what your potential users want and what features you should offer to cover their needs and distinguish yourself from competitors.

Shape a product vision

After conducting a market analysis, it’s time to shape your product vision by putting all the information about your business idea together. You can document your vision in different ways, but we recommend using a lean canvas and a value proposition canvas.

You should define and document your product goals, target audience, users’ key pain points and needs, and what features will solve them (your value proposition). Also, consider which channels you can use to reach potential customers and an estimate of the resources needed to implement your idea.

Another important factor to think about is revenue streams. How will you monetize your social network website?

These are the five most popular ways to make a profit with a social media website:

• Display ads. If this is your choice, make sure to plan enough space in your app design for attractive banners.
• Promote brands and bloggers. With this method, you promote content published by businesses or individuals at the top of a newsfeed. The brands and creators get post views and followers by paying you to promote them.
• Paid features. You can provide access to basic functionality for free, and offer advanced features for a fee.
• Paid content. You can let users charge for sharing or accessing their content and take a percentage of their earnings. Or, you can sell to users valuable information, such as insights on user engagement and marketing performance.
• Subscriptions. In some cases, users will pay to participate in a specific social network. For example, if you run a powerful professional or job search network, you can charge users a subscription fee or charge employers a fee for posting job ads.

Define and document project requirements

Now that you have a product vision, you can move to the next step of project discovery: defining the requirements for your app.

The requirements guide your development team on what to develop so your social network looks and works as expected. Here are the main requirements to define:

• Scope of work — a high-level representation of all of the website’s functionality and features
• Functional requirements — a detailed description of your social media website’s features and how a system should behave in response to user input.
• Non-functional requirements — describe how your website should perform to provide a great experience in terms of usability, security, scalability, and so on.

All requirements should be documented, usually in the form of a software requirements specification document. You can also outline use cases, create user scenarios, and map out user flows. This step takes time and requires the involvement of technical specialists, but it’s crucial for minimizing risks in software development. Documenting requirements help your team to clearly understand what to build and accurately estimate development time and cost.

Choose a tech stack

To properly implement your idea, you need to choose the right technology stack. Here are the basic choices you need to make:

• Front-end technologies. JavaScript is a must for creating everything users will interact with— the client side of your app — and ensuring a great user experience. We recommend using JavaScript frameworks like Vue, React, and Angular.
• Back-end technologies. What language and framework will you use to implement your website logic, such as user request processing, communication with databases, and integration with third-party services through APIs? Based on our experience, using JavaScript-based Node.js is one of the best options because you won’t need to hire separate teams for front- and back-end development. However, other back-end language options include Ruby, PHP, and Python.
• Database. A database contains various types of data, such as text, video, audio, and photo content. Your database should be powerful, well-secured, and flexible. It should also be scalable so you won’t face problems when your platform grows and requires more data storage. PostgreSQL or MongoDB are popular databases, but make sure to consult with developers before choosing one.
• Cloud services. Cloud services provide infrastructure for hosting and managing your website. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Azure are good options.
• Integrations. Third-party integrations (e.g., payment gateways like PayPal or Stripe to enable credit card payments) can significantly impact your app’s usability and the cost of development.

Choosing the most suitable tech stack is difficult, as the choice depends on your product vision, requirements, limitations, and future growth plans. Again, it’s important to involve technical specialists in choosing a tech stack. They’ll use their development experience to help you make the right choice based on your project details.

Design the UI/UX and create a prototype

Another set of activities during project discovery is dedicated to developing a design concept that supports a seamless user experience on your website.

Designing an intuitive and attractive interface is critical for a social network website. Research shows that over 80% of users abandon a website with cluttered layouts or difficult navigation. Thus, you need to design your social network website with UI/UX principles in mind and ensure logical user flows and consistency of all design elements.

Your designer should start by creating wireframes for the main screens and then they can create a clickable prototype. A prototype is a basic version of the app that demonstrates relationships between different components and screens. These design steps help ensure that the user interface is intuitive and design elements are consistent.

Changing a prototype is much easier than rewriting code in the middle of development. Thus, prototyping is a time-efficient and cost-effective way to experiment with your social network concept, test its usability, and adapt the requirements if you find issues with the user flows.

Create a development plan

After you have a product vision, requirements, a tech stack, and a prototype, you can proceed to the last step of project discovery: developing an implementation plan and making software project estimations.

When planning implementation, decide which functionalities to develop first, create a list of tasks, set timelines, and define key team members. Along with a development plan, you also need to have a product roadmap — a document that describes your long-term goals, key objectives, expected product growth over time, and metrics to measure results.

Estimate time and cost

Finally, with all of the previous steps completed and documented, you can accurately estimate the time needed and cost to create your own social media platform. We recommend leaving some leeway for changes in case unexpected events impact your product development.

Project discovery takes time, but it’s essential for a smooth development process. Knowing what you need to build, what pitfalls may occur, and how much time and money you need to get everything done, you can minimize or eliminate the risk of:

• Scope creep
• Budget overruns
• Rework

The level of risk is much higher if you wait until you’re in the middle of development to identify requirement inconsistencies or overlooked tasks.

Social network website development: MVP, testing, and deployment

After project discovery, but before you create a social media website in its entirety, you should build a minimum viable product (MVP). An MVP is a version of your website that contains only the core functionality needed to provide key value to users.

It’s a great approach to quickly enter the market and validate your idea with minimal resources. Thus, you avoid the risk of investing a large budget in an unviable product.

What features should you include in your MVP? Let’s take a look.

MVP functionality

We’ve shortlisted the features needed to provide a great experience for users of your social media platform:

• Quick authorization lets users log in using their Google or Facebook account. Don’t ask for too much data from users when you roll out your MVP; minimizing the amount of information required by your login form makes for a pleasant UX from the very first interaction.
• Personal profiles should have space for a photo, contact details, and other relevant information. Here, profile management and editing features are crucial.
• Search and filter capabilities will let users effortlessly find each other, as well as the content that interests them. Allow a variety of search options like surname, city, educational institution, occupation, and hobbies, and watch users’ networks grow.
• A contact list is an important feature, too. After filtering existing users, every profile owner should be able to send contact requests and accept those they receive.
• A news feed lets users conveniently view and share news, post media files, and add updates.
• Chats, with no exaggeration, are your social media website's most important feature. They let users create both private and group chats, communicate via text, voice, or video, and exchange media and text files to improve their experience.
• A notification mechanism makes users aware of recent updates, messages, connection requests, and other news. Push notifications and emails are the most common options here.
• You need an admin panel to monitor and manage user interactions on your website, access website statistics, block and delete accounts that violate the website’s rules, and perform other administrative processes.

These functions will cover the initial needs of social media users. However, the feature list will vary depending on the type of app you create. If you’re building a messaging app, you may not need to add a news feed, whereas to create an app like Instagram, you may need to add basic photo editing functionality.

Of course, you want to go beyond those functions and learn how to build a social media platform that stands out from the crowd, not an average one. Thus, along with all the basic features, your MVP should include functionality that brings unique value to your users.

For example, you can make LLM implementation your competitive advantage. This technology has various use cases that can enhance user experience. Use generative AI to offer smart content recommendations, personalized ads for users, and to analyze sentiment and trends among your audience.

Test it, then test it again

Your goal is to build a high-quality network so that users will fall in love with its impeccable functionality. This makes website testing an integral part of the entire development process. You’ll need software engineers to write unit tests to ensure the code works correctly. Then, QA engineers will check whether every website component works well by itself and together with other components. They’ll also confirm whether the developed functionality meets your initial software requirements.

Move on to the production and launch stages

After months of hard work comes the production stage. Your team moves the website into a production environment, making your social app available for users.

Next, you need to implement social network launch activities that increase user awareness of your product. Marketing is a never-ending process; you may start promoting your app when it’s in development, but you need to continue marketing for as long as you want your app to live and grow.

Use existing social networks and popular websites to promote yours. Start an informative blog and create special offers for your early adopters. If you build a web-based application, you can also focus on search optimization for your site. Check our article on SEO with React to learn more about this topic.

Social network maintenance and improvement

After the MVP is built and released, you move to the last stage of the software product development lifecycle, which involves maintaining and improving your app.

At this stage, you monitor app performance, fix bugs, and address user support requests to resolve issues they encounter with your website. Basically, your goal is to eliminate flaws that you couldn’t identify pre-release, and do everything you can to ensure great app performance and a seamless user experience.

Based on user feedback, decide what improvements your social network needs, like what functionality to add, and plan the next development cycle.

More social network website development essentials: Team, time and cost

Now that you know what the typical development process looks like and the essential features your new social network needs, it is time to answer the following questions:

1. Who can develop it for you?
2. How much time does it take?
3. How much does it cost?

Let’s start with the team composition.

Social network development team

To launch a powerful and profitable solution, you need to delegate development tasks to competent experts with deep experience in social network website development. The team should include the following specialists:

• A business analyst to analyze your social network idea and decide on and document business and project requirements during the project discovery stage
• A UI/UX designer to create an appealing and intuitive user interface for your social network solution
• Front- and back-end developers responsible for building the client-side and server-side components of your social media platform. Software developers may also participate in project discovery, helping to create project requirements and advising on the most suitable architecture plan and technology stack.
• QA engineers who perform software testing to ensure that all features meet the project requirements and work well. They also document issues that need to be fixed.
• A project manager to lead the team and manage the development process. This person ensures that development goes according to plan, that deadlines and budget are met, and that risks are mitigated. The project manager also communicates development process details and progress to the product owner. A project manager must have an understanding of engineering and testing processes, as well as advanced communication and other soft skills.

The easiest way build a skilled team to develop your social media project is to use a product development outsourcing service. This way, you delegate your project’s entire scope of work, from discovery to development, testing, and deployment, to an experienced team. You participate in key decision-making, but you don’t need to dedicate all your effort to overseeing the development process.

Moreover, with extensive experience in building products from scratch, an outsourced development team can advise on the most comprehensive product requirements, choose the best tech stack, and execute development using effective methodologies and approaches. They ensure that your product will be ready on time and within budget.

Time and cost of development

How long does it take to make an app? And how much it will cost?

The budget and timeline for development depend on the scope of work. Thus, we find it useful to provide numbers based on the deliverables you expect to receive. Here are the approximate costs of project discovery, creating a clickable prototype, and developing an MVP:

The estimates above are based on our experience working on diverse products. However, the time and cost of custom software development will vary based on your project requirements.

To accurately estimate the timeline and cost, you need to involve competent experts in the project estimation process, preferably those who will actually work on your product, as the cost and other resources will vary from vendor to vendor.

Final thoughts

Building a social network is a complex process, but with the right approach, you’ll get a profitable product.

To bring your idea to life in the most efficient and cost-effective way, you should work with a reliable engineering team that knows how to create a social media platform and how to plan the development process. With an experienced team by your side, you’ll build a high-quality product within a reasonable timeframe and budget.

At Clockwise Software, we’re ready to help you with all development tasks, from project discovery to release, updates, and maintenance. Just drop us a line for help turning your social network idea into a functional product.