Many people want to learn how to make a website like Facebook because it is one of the most coveted websites for entrepreneurs. Facebook is extremely popular and has over 2.7 Billion monthly users worldwide. The social networking giant is extremely profitable and made over nearly $18.5 Billion in net income for 2018.

If you want to learn how to make a website like Facebook, you will need to understand a few things including what makes the social media platform so appealing to users. This article will help you to understand the difference between your average website and a social media website, the key features you need to include in a social networking website, and what makes websites like Facebook so successful.

What is Facebook and Why You Should Create a Social Networking Website

Facebook is one of the world’s most popular social networking websites. The social networking platform allows users to interact with friends, family, celebrities, and brands that they love in a safe and comfortable manner. Facebook also offers groups, events, games, and live video to give its users more value.

If Facebook is so popular, you might be wondering why you should even try to learn how to make a website like Facebook. But there are many reasons to do so.

1. Targeting a Niche Community

One reason why you might want to create a website like Facebook is that you want to cater to a niche community. You might be a bicycle enthusiast and want a way for bicycle riders and lovers to connect in a deeper more meaningful way.

Learning how to create a social networking website is a good idea because people of specific communities will enjoy finding an app that caters to them. It’s why social networks like LinkedIn that are specific to the business community are so popular.

2. Providing an Alternative

You may have found that Facebook and its algorithm aren’t useful to you. Facebook has updated its algorithm to make it harder for businesses who have pages to connect with their fans.

People have complained so frequently that they believe that Facebook limits their posts to a select group of their friends that it has been addressed by fact-checkers. Despite the assurance that it’s not, many are still looking for a more useful social networking site.

3. Making Money

As stated earlier in this post, Facebook has made billions of dollars in revenue from its platform. Facebook primarily makes its money from selling advertisements to businesses and people looking to sell services and products to users of the platform.

Gaining income from social networking advertising is a great reason to learn how to make a social networking website like Facebook. It can be a great source of revenue if you’re smart.

4. Building Something New

Creating something new is another great reason why you might want to learn how to make a website like Facebook. People are always searching for the next big thing and according to statistics, as of 2019 nine percent of people had deleted their Facebook accounts.

Many younger people are using TikTok, a Facebook competitor more. By creating something new, you appeal to people that have grown bored with Facebook.

5. Creating New Features

Another reason why you might want to learn how to make a website like Facebook is to add a new feature that you think people would find more useful. Facebook offers users a large array of options but there are many things that they don’t offer that you might think are useful.

Since you don’t work at Facebook, the best way to offer a new useful feature might be to create your own social networking website.

Features that Make Facebook Popular

There are a few things that make Facebook the iconic website that it is today. These things have been the core features that protect, entertain, and keep users coming back for more. When you are considering making your own social media website, it is important to consider what your competition is offering.

1. Customization

Facebook users enjoy the ability to customize their profiles. Customization gives the user the ability to show off their unique and important personality. When you create a website like Facebook, it will be important that you allow your users the customization options. Some key customizable parts of Facebook are:

Profile Pictures
Cover Photos
The about me section
The featured Photos section

When users can customize their profiles it increases their attachment to your website. Customization will make users invest time and effort on your website to improve the way that they can create content that shows off their unique personalities.

The more a person is invested in learning, customizing, and getting involved with a website, the more the website grows on them. This is something that Facebook does really well.

2. Photos, Links, Videos, and Other Media

Facebook makes sharing photos, links, videos, and other types of media easy. People enjoy using the site to keep their friends and family members updated on what is going on in their lives through the use of photos and videos. Facebook also helps people spread ideas by posting links to articles, videos, and other content they find on the web.

While Facebook does limit the quality and size of uploaded video, they do allow people to upload an untold amount of videos and photos. Many people use their Facebook accounts as a way to store videos and photos. You may want to think about creating a social networking site that allows users to share higher quality photos and videos as part of your offering to make your site unique.

The newest feature available from Facebook in regards to Media is its Facebook Live feature. In order to rival twitch, they’ve even added the ability to stream mobile games. This can be another feature that you can include on your social networking website to improve usefulness for your users.

3. Newsfeed

Facebook’s newsfeed is what keeps users coming back. The newsfeed is essentially a compilation of videos, photos, articles, posts, ads, promotions, and other things that users find interesting.

Facebook uses an algorithm that helps to detect what you will find interesting and serves more posts of that type and quality to you.

When you create your website like Facebook, you will need to consider investing in creating an algorithm that can detect the interests of your users to make the things they view more personal and relevant to them. By creating their algorithm, Facebook has ensured that users keep coming back to see things they like to see.

Facebook’s algorithm is so good at detecting users likes that it can even accurately suggest pages, people, and groups that they may find interesting. When you learn how to create a website like Facebook, make sure you consider this useful feature.

4. Networking

Facebook is a social network and this requires users to add friends, follow pages, add interests, and more. The more information the users add to their social media profiles and the more friends, places, and groups they like on the website, the better Facebook is able to give them what they like.

Facebook will help people to build their social media network by suggesting pages, people, groups, and even businesses that they might find useful or interesting. While the algorithm is complicated, the social networking website is easy for almost anyone to use. The ease of use and its helpful suggestions are what makes Facebook so popular.

And with Facebook’s Messenger function it allows users to talk to each other privately, almost easier than they could with their smartphone. All of these features should be considered when you are making your own social networking website.

5. Security

Facebook provides its users with security in three ways. The first way is by having strict community rules. When users violate the rules by saying violent things or doing something else that makes people feel unsafe they can flag the post and Facebook will review the post and either remove it or issue the user a temporary ban.

The second way that Facebook protects its users is by providing a fact-checking feature. The fact check feature will help to tell users that a post may be false news or suspicious in some way. While many users like this feature, some do not. You have to choose if you will include this when you create a website like Facebook.

The third way that Facebook protects its users is by allowing them to set their own security settings. Users can use special passwords for apps, use two-factor authentication and store and delete devices that have access to their accounts. This helps users feel like their information is secure and should be a feature that you add when you create your website like Facebook.

6. Groups

Facebook gives people the ability to socialize and connect with new people from around the globe. Facebook Groups have been around since 2010 and allow people to socialize with like-minded individuals about a particular topic.

Some groups are simply meme groups where members share memes of a particular type. Other Facebook groups center around things like business owners looking for advice, beauty and makeup tips, or exercise and health. To be completely honest, there are Facebook groups for nearly anything you can think of.

Anyone can create a Facebook group which is why there are over 10 Million Facebook Groups as of 2020. When you learn how to create a website like Facebook, you may want to consider adding groups as part of your social networking website because it’s such a popular feature.

7. Pages

Facebook is successful because of the revenue it makes from Ads. One of the ways that a business is able to make Facebook Ads is they have to first make a Facebook Page. Facebook pages allow businesses to connect with their clients and customers in a more meaningful way.

Having a Facebook Page helps to add credibility to a business and to make it more useful for businesses Facebook has added the option of selling products and services directly from the platform. This feature makes it easier than ever for people to create their own businesses.

When you make a website like Facebook, it can be important to add pages for businesses. This will help you to monetize your website so that you can be as successful as Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook.

How to Make a Website Like Facebook

Learning how to make a website like Facebook is not going to be easy. You have two options for building a social media website. You can choose to hire a web development agency or you can try to create a social network yourself. If you decide to create your social networking website yourself, here are some simple steps to doing so.

1. Brainstorm an Idea

The first step to make a website like Facebook is to come up with an idea. Remembering your reason for wanting to create a website like Facebook is key to helping you come up with an idea for your social networking website. As discussed earlier some of the reasons to build your own social media website are:

Catering to a niche community
Giving people an alternative to Facebook
Making money
Building something new
Incorporating new and unique features

While all of these are good reasons to make a social media network, making money is not going to help you think of a platform that people will want to use. So if making money is your only idea around building a social media platform try and think of ways to make it unique to ensure your idea is a success.

2. Choose a Focus for Your Social Media Platform

The next step to create a website like Facebook is to choose the focus of your social media platform. As we discussed earlier in this article, there are many things that you can do on a social network. Choosing a focus will help to differentiate your product from others.

You can create a social networking website that focuses on many different things including but not limited to high-resolution images and videos, a niche group of people, features like messaging or groups, or anything that you can think of not listed here.

Whatever you do make sure that your focus is unique. When learning how to create a website like Facebook, you want to be more than a clone of the famous social networking platform, you want to be different enough to bring users something of value.

3. Choose a Domain Name

Choosing a domain and business name is important to ensure that your social network is successful. When you choose your domain and business name you want to make sure that there isn’t another business with a similar name that will confuse your customers.

If you want to learn more about how to pick a name for your new business venture, you can read this post by Idea Maker. Overall, you want to pick a name that people will remember. Like how people remember the name TikTok for the popular Facebook competitor.

4. Build the Back End of Your Social Networking Website

There are many things to consider when building the back end of your social networking website. Did you know that nine different programming languages were used to create Facebook? Facebook’s back end was created using Hack, PHP, Python, C++, Java, Erlang, D, XHP, and Haskell.

There are a large number of programming languages used on the platform today outside of the original ones.

Learning some of these programming languages can be important if you wish to learn how to make a website like Facebook. You will also need to learn how to create an algorithm. As we discussed early the algorithm is important to giving users posts that they will like and continue to share, making the social network you create useful.

If you don’t know how to create an algorithm, this can be the time where it is important to contact a professional. A professional development agency can help you to not only build the back end of your social networking website but you can also provide guidance with creating an algorithm that works.

The back end of your social networking website will also house the security features. Make sure when you are creating your website like Facebook that you use security features that make it difficult for hackers and scammers to bother your users. This will ensure that users keep coming back.

5. Build the Front End of Your Social Media Website

To build the front end of your social media website like Facebook, you will also need to know how to code. Facebooks front end uses JavaScript and Flow to give users a friendly and functional User Interface.

While front end programming languages tend to be easier to learn than back end languages. They can still be tricky to learn. This is why many people that create social networking websites hire development teams to help them with the website development process.

If you are dedicated to creating your website like Facebook, you can easily learn how to program using JavaScript. There are many places online that you can go to learn to program including Codecademy and W3Schools.

6. Consider Your Server for Your Website Like Facebook

The thing about websites like Facebook is that they slowly expand along with the growing amount of content users put in and the growing amount of users hopping on to the website. This is made possible by a server like AWS.

Aside from investing in a decent amount of storage, it is also wise to invest in a company that can help you optimize your site making sure whatever people upload won’t cause your website to crash. This is something Facebook has been able to do well, despite the massive amounts of files and data being uploaded.

7. Beta Test Your Website Like Facebook

Beta testing is the process of trialing your software or website when it’s in the final stages of development. Typically beta testing is completed by people that are unconnected with the development.

Beta testing is important because it allows you to understand what features work or don’t work as expected. It allows you to gain useful insights from potential customers to see if you have created a quality social networking website. If you don’t complete a beta test of your website you may introduce the world to a buggy problem-ridden website that they will quickly flee from.

8. Launch Your Social Network Like Facebook

The final step in how to make a website like Facebook is to launch your project. Launching your project may require you to invest in advertising and marketing campaigns. You can invite celebrities and influencers to join your social network to give it an air of exclusivity, it is the kind of social network you want to create.

Another thing you will need to do when you launch your social media network is to think about how you will monetize your website. Monetization helps you to make money off of the website and can help to pay for upgrades to your services and features.

You can monetize your website in a few ways. You can do one of the following:

Require a Subscription: You can charge subscription fees for either using the website or for enhanced features.
Use Ads: Most social networking websites use advertisements to monetize their business, you can charge companies and people money to serve ads to users.

After reading this article you should know how to make a website like Facebook. While it may be difficult to create your own social networking website, it doesn’t have to be. You can contact Idea Maker, an Orange County web development agency today to get started.