What does “integrating social media” with an app mean? What can it do for you?
The benefit most people think of is publicising your app. Everyone who uses Facebook has seen messages like “Fred has just played Candy Crush”, or messages announcing their new high score on Bejeweled. Such messages can help publicise an app – after all, if all your friends are playing, maybe you should give it a try too.
But apps can do far more than simply announce their presence. For example, consider RubyApp
RubyApp (a simple web only app) makes Facebook the core of its service. Rather than building a complex messaging system, I designed RubyApp to use Facebook messaging to send photos and a message of love to recipients on your Facebook friends list. In this case, Facebook provides powerful high performance messaging infrastructure,a rich list of recipients, and free publicity. Facebook have even arranged a special deal to host RubyApp web pages for free – unless 10’s of thousands of messages are sent every month, the only cost to me is the time I invested in building the app – the rest is free.
Of course you can go even further than this. Say I decide to make RubyApp into a fully featured dating app. The new app could build on Facebook to create new connections between people – give people an opportunity to find new friends in their area, who had registered a profile through my app. They could find each other through RubyApp, then choose to become Facebook friends, but at the same time they could maintain their connection to RubyApp – celebrating their successful match with the RubyApp community, even inviting some people they meet through the app to their wedding.
If RubyApp becomes popular enough, entrepreneurs such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg might take an interest. And thats when it gets really interesting.
In summary, if your app could be enhanced by collaboration between users, don’t re-invent the wheel – harness the power of social media, and ask me about how you can leverage the man years of development poured into building the world’s great social networks.