Social media has become a significant part of our lives these days and we have multiple social media applications for multiple purposes like snapchat for photo editing, Twitch for live streams and Spotify for music. This made many entrepreneurs transform their business ideas into development of profitable apps like Tik Tok and Musically.

Apps like TikTok have become an amazing entertainment source and can easily keep millions of active users glued to it. Therefore we can say that developing one such app can be a good turning point in your career.

Here is a step by step guide for creating and growing high-class Tik Tok alternatives. But before discussing the steps let us brush up on how Tik Tok works.

How does Tik Tok work?

TikTok has inspired many people to explore and create a social media website. It is basically a video sharing platform where users can create and share their videos online. It allows users to upload film content and videos. In TikTok the users can edit videos after creating as the application offers many filters and editing effects. 

In addition to that TikTok is the appropriate  platform for sharing knowledge and showing talents to so many audiences together. It can also modify a video into a live wallpaper and you can save these videos in the settings. The platform has become so much popular in a short span of time. 

Now we will check out the five steps for developing and growing a Tik Tok alternative:

Five vital steps for developing an application like Tik Tok

Step 1: Properly Research the target market 

Before creating a social media application like Tik Tok that contains music videos, it is important to conduct research on your target market. This will help you to get a crystal clear picture of the market dynamics, what are the leading players and trends and how customers are interacting with brands. After that you should validate your initial assumptions and adjust your projects accordingly for the business goals. 

But the vital elements amongst these which need a thorough understanding is your target audience. For that research on two things:

  • Demographic Profile: Try to find your users age, location, financial situations, types of their devices and and how often they get access to an internet connection
  • Behavioral Trends: Every application is unique in its own way, you can still find certain trends that you can incorporate to your future application. 

For creating a better product that will respond to your user’s requirements, we recommend you to create a buyer persona.

Step 2: Selecting the monetization model

After properly knowing who your potential users can be, the next important thing is to choose the future business model for your TikTok alternative. Below we are providing you three monetization strategies that you can implement for your video editing music app. 

a) Fundraising: At the initial stage of your application development process, you can arrange money with fundraising. This is one of the earning premium modes even for applications like Tik Tok. Recently a rich investor has funded the app with $3 billion. 

b) In-app purchases: TikTok used to support live streams with in-app purchases of coins bought for actual money. Users used to exchange coins for gifts and give them to others during live broadcasts. You can implement the same monetization strategy for the application for the application that you are planning to launch. 

c) Advertising: It is another option available for monetizing your future application.It includes many kinds of in-app advertising, like:

  • Cost per click where advertisers pay every time users interact with the ads
  • Cost per mile, where app owners charges advertisers for 1000 impressions of their advertisement inside the application
  • Cost per action, where advertisers pay for clicks that lead to certain actions like app installation or or website registration, etc. 

After selecting your future business model, you can directly dive into the app development process. 

Step 3: Hire a good app development company

After doing proper research on the target market and audience and selecting the business model, you should contact a good mobile app development company and start the discovery phase of the project. The discovery phase is the first phase of a software project that involves business analysis, technology stack, requirements elicitation, cost estimation and planning. 

Developers usually conduct the following activities during the discovery phase:

  • Properly define the scope of the project, main features of the application and business objectives
  • Consider the monetization strategy for creating an app development workflow
  • Identify the basic application features
  • Create a future app concept

After that the development team will create the project’s MVP prioritizing the app features 

Step 4: Creating an MVP for TikTok alternative

Developing a social video application is a complex process and that is why we recommend you to launch your TikTok alternative as an MVP or minimum viable product instead of creating a fully functional and costly app. 

In this way you can check how users are liking your application and consider their reviews for further improvement of your project. 

Step 5: Grow your application 

Below we are providing you three most effective ways for making your TikTok alternative famous as the original application:

a) App store optimization 

With millions of daily application downloads, the application marketplaces has become the number 1 driver for application discovery. You can add your application to Google play store and App store for bringing in new customers and for improving your application marketplace search ranking you should optimize your application. You can optimize your application for driving high quality traffic in the following ways:

  • Including vital and relevant keywords in the title tag
  • Posting eye-catchy screenshots
  • Developing a recognizable icon 
  • Writing an engaging and interesting description 

b) Increasing user acquisition

For increasing user acquisition in your application, you need to re-target traffic from organic channels like social media profiles and websites to the application marketplace’s page.

For this purpose, you can use:

  • Smart Banners: As these are vital for moving mobile website visitors from website to your mobile application
  • Content Marketing: For implementing this strategy, you need to create high quality contents including blogs, videos and infographics on topics that are well known among  your target audience 

c) Paid Advertising

You can run paid ads in social media, PPC campaigns through Google Adwords and cross promotion with partner applications for boosting the install of your mobile application. 

Conclusion,

Creating a social media application is quite a complicated task and it requires a lot of expertise if you want to create a mobile application that can beat the competition. You will require the appropriate business idea, application development and design experts for launching a top class social media application like TikTok. 

The best thing that you can do is to reach out to a reputed app development company providing top-quality app development services in India for converting your creative dream into the next viral social media application.