Today, it’s almost universally agreed upon that social media is an important platform for creating brand awareness. On top of fostering a pleasant image, social media provides businesses with a way to nurture relationships with existing customers, prospects, and new markets. When an application is built specifically for your target audience, new opportunities for your business will start appearing in no time.
What makes this process more than simply designing an application is the idea that every market needs different features to suit their experience. You need to find a technology partners who can advise you on how to take your ideas to fruition and experienced developers who know what a successful framework looks like. A technology partner brings the ability to leverage the full power of enterprise applications for your business. Let’s talk about why.
Familiarity with your core business process
Your technology partner(s) should be familiar with the way your business is run; they should be able to analyze the feasibility of your application needs and advise you on the best way to make it all happen. Whether you need an app for commercial purposes, achieving and maintaining brand positioning, capturing real-time customer insights across channels, or even to improve employee engagement, your technology partner should have the knowledge to suggest the best platform and the technology, keeping in mind your organization’s objectives.
Technology Breadth
Designing and developing a social app requires a great deal of technical proficiency, vision, skills, and most importantly, experience. Your technology partner should have a proven record of designing and developing social media apps that integrate the latest technology tools and platforms into modern designs that align with your goals.
Testing Capabilities
Application testing is often overlooked in busy development schedules. A proficient technology partner will be able to automate testing on multiple browsers and platforms to ensure your app runs and scales the way you want it to, not only in usability, but performance. A key part of testing is the ability to gauge scalability and user experience, which can help make an application more successful by maximizing acceptance and usage from your prospects. Partners make this job easier for you because these decisions benefit from unbiased perspective.
Consistent and reliable development practices
A good technology partner should take into account the most appropriate architecture for your application. What you need to look for in a partner is a proven track record of designing superior social media apps capable of transcending screen size irregularities and operating system variances. Equally important, they must be able to test and run your app on every possible device that your customers are expected to use.
More specifically, here are the development practices you should be looking for:
Cross-portability:
Streamlined usability across different devices, platforms, and browsers. This will require a great deal of testing across different platforms and devices.
User Experience:
A rich and consistent user experience that meets design specifications and user expectations. This is necessary to prevent information overload, slow loading speeds, blank screens and user confusion.
Standardization:
Design standardization across platforms. This will reduce any learning curve and improve overall user experience.
Cleanliness
Make sure you have flexible data storage options. Efficient data backups, and routine cleanup of irrelevant data will increase the speed of your application and reduce clogging of the device. This process will also reduce bandwidth consumption during app updates.
Support and Services
Choosing a partner and building your application is just one part of the deal. You’ll also need to make sure your partner offers app maintenance and support in the future. So, before you sign an agreement, ask your partner to demonstrate how they plan to support your application after it goes into production.
Here’s what you need to confirm:
Application Analytics
Ask to be routinely provided with the latest analytics data concerning your app’s performance. With these reports you can see which features are used the most, and which aren’t being used, so that they can either be removed or made easier to access. These analytics help you to optimize the application, making it perform better overall.
New Features and App Upgrades
Have your team look at other apps in your domain and come up with innovative and new feature ideas. Make sure users are given an avenue to provide feedback as well. Plan on developing a long-term roadmap with your technology partner, so that you can respond to market and customer demands or new features within your product.
Knowing what you want and adopting the right screening methods will go a long way in finding a skilled and specialized technology partner for your job. The more you know about what you want, the easier the decision-making process will be for you. Hopefully these tips will help guide you along.
If you have any social media application development initiatives, we can help you develop a solution to meet your exact requirements. Know more
Shashin Shah has been an expert in the Information technology field for more than twenty years. His experience globally and in the US, spanning across several industries has greatly contributed to his unparalleled skill set. Currently, Shashin is working as Chief Business Officer at DTES division of Happiest Minds, where he is primarily handling Pimcore Global Services. Pimcore is 100% open source consolidated platform for PIM, MDM, DAM, WCM & Ecommerce.
