Introduction

Twibs.com gives twitter users a place to find businesses on twitter and Peter Denton is the man behind it. You can find Freelance Review (C McConnell Design) on Twibs here. In this post, Peter shares what it takes to make a successful social app based on his experience building Twibs. Here's what he had to say:

Building twibs.com was an exciting and educational process, experiencing the huge potential and requirements of building a successful app in the social space. Below are a few items we deemed critical to success in the social space for applications and services.

Related Post: How to Build a Successful Web App

Easy to Talk About

Above all, apps need to incorporate ways consumers can spread the message. With twibs, we added a way businesses could be voted onto the homepage. They did so by tweeting to their followers, "take a minute and vote for us on twibs.com" with a link to their profile page on twibs. Voting for a business took one click and it was a nice way followers could support a business through twibs. If your app doesn't have a nice, non-spammy way of letting other users know about it, it wont have much of a chance of growing and reaching its potential.

Adding Value

Above all, users want value for their investment in your service. If they spend 10 minutes signing up for your service, you should be able to provide them something in return. With twibs, we wanted to give businesses another place to be found on the web, and lead consumers to their twitter account so they could over time grow their following. By aggregating content and allowing users to add more, in the form of locations, reviews, tags, product lists, etc we created a space for businesses to quickly create a space on the web that would add value to their twitter presence without competing with it.

Stay Fresh

Social apps don't have a long shelf life. Once you open them, its important you keep the experience fresh to keep the user engaged. We started with a small feature set and continually added features over time to let the users know we were working hard on solving their problems. All too often, people release products and seemingly disappear. Remember, its a conversation and your app should reflect that. If you don't give people to keep getting excited, they probably wont.