What is social media application development?

You can’t ignore social media platforms such as Facebook and Google+ if you are serious about creating an integrated marketing campaign. Facebook alone has more than 800 million active users, and can extend your brand and help you connect with prospects and customers in ways that traditional websites can’t. It’s harder to determine how many users are on Google+, but in September of 2011 Mashable reported that it had roughly 43 million users, an impressive number, especially considering it only recently allowed anyone to join the service.

These platforms are powerful, and to take full advantage of each, you need to do more than just create a profile page for your business. Facebook users constantly interact with the people they’ve friended and the companies and brands they’ve “liked” using applications (games quizzes, polls, etc.) specifically built for the platform. These applications, if done correctly, make it easy for people and businesses to generate new, interesting content.

Google+ is Google’s social networking service, and works in a similar way. Google+ users connect with their friends and interests through Google, but they categorize and interact with their social media connections in “circles,” which mirror the relationships they have in real life. Because Google+ allows users to create more targeted relationships with their circles, some think it will be a more powerful platform than Facebook. (But that’s another blog post entirely!).

Before you jump into developing a Facebook page or Google+ application for your business, take the time to check out what other brands and businesses are doing in these spaces. Look at the applications they have developed and think about how those applications reflect and reinforce what their brand is all about. Do they integrate blogs into their Facebook page? What does their Google+ stream look like? Are there a lot of fun games to play and other things to do, or is the content more serious and product-focused? How robust is the content overall? Do they update it frequently, or is their page more of a static, information-only page?

Once you’ve seen what’s out there, plan your strategy. Make sure the applications you build and the content you develop synch up with your overall marketing plans, and again, dedicate resources and time to updating these pages. Engaging your audience is easy, but to be successful, you have to feed them a steady diet of fresh, interesting content—via applications and other Facebook-specific content—to keep them coming back.