Five failsafe commandments for social media apps

Leverage these technologies correctly, and your company or brand's social media applications can be a great source of information, relaying valuable insight and data in real-time for an even better understanding about your target audience.

So, if you are a marketer or brand manager wanting to spread your social media application wings, here are the most important considerations that you should be taking into consideration.

1. Organisational readiness? Actually the consumer and client decides

Your company or brand can move into the social media marketing if your social media apps will add value to people's experiences online, specifically in a social media community context. When it comes to organisational readiness for these technologies, you don't get to make that decision. The consumer is very much in charge, and circumstances might dictate that you have to get involved whether you like it or not.

2. Research into target audience will determine application's functionality

Begin by looking into the general profile and persona of your typical client or customer. Research and investigate their online social behavior, their interests and hobbies, and even problems or issues that affect them. This will allow you to truly empathise with your target audience, and step out of the role of being someone who wants to promote a product, but rather one of a company or brand offering a social media application that will be of interest, extreme value and socially appealing to them.

After the research, you will also automatically have a basic understanding of the functionality that your social media application needs to perform.

3. Great social media applications are useful, social and crafted

For developing highly successful social media applications, you should always ensure that your company or brand's applications are useful, social and crafted. Something can be incredibly useful, but if it is not relevant to your client and customer's online social community (where they share information and interact - this is, after all, the very nature of social media), they will most likely not continue to use it. Craft or design, and quality, is also important. Applications should look slick, polished and great. Period.

4. Evaluation metrics and defining your success

When it comes to deciding on the evaluation metrics of social media application, the rules are different compared to traditional online metrics, namely page views. What's important is to decide and define upfront what success will look like, and specifically how you are going to measure that. Just remember, the success of social media applications can be evaluated on the degree of desirability, usefulness, and shareability.

5. Beware of the face punch

There are certain pitfalls which you should look out for when planning a social media application. Firstly, don't get sucked into the hype. It used to be enough to sell a website to a client by saying “Everyone else has a website” but then the dotcom boom blew up.

Everyone and their dog (literally) seems to be on Facebook in some way, but if you're just putting some nonsense out there with your brand name on it, you're not doing any justice to your brand, and more importantly, you're not showing your audience the respect that they deserve.

If you don't have anything useful to add to the conversation, sit and watch a bit longer. There's a fantastic cartoon by Hugh Mcleod that says, “If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they'd punch you in the face.”