Why Your Community Needs an App

You want to create an online #community. You have the idea and you you've identified your audience. Great. And you know a Facebook group simply won’t cut it. Makes sense! A key question you’ll face early on, when planning your community will be how you want your members to access your community. Will it be through an app or through a browser? The decision you make will affect your development costs and time to market and can have a direct impact on member adoption.?In this post, we make the case for creating a community app.

Why build an app?

A massive 88% of time on mobile devices is spent using #apps. And 70% of that time is spent using social apps! The message here is clear; If you are a community owner, you need to be in the #ios and #android app stores. But what about the technical benefits? Community Apps can:?

• Notify. Having access to notifications is a massive bonus for social apps, that rely on keeping people up to date with interactions from other members.
• Promote.?Having your service on the home screen of your members devices is key for promoting service recall
• Focus.?Each view of your community should be focused on a specific task. #Mobile optimised websites can get close. But they can never compete with an #mobileapp designed to focus in on specific activates - think posting, messaging, live chatting, viewing activity feeds.
• Optimise. Good apps. Those that are built well are laser focused on offering an optimised user experience that's fast and consistent. Websites by their nature have to be much more flexible.

Problems building an app

Nothing is without problems. Community apps have traditionally had their downsides too:

• Cost. App development can be expensive! And developing complex platforms, like social networks can make the costs astronomical.
• Quality. 65% of app users are turned off the brand experiences when using a poorly made app. If you don't have a Facebook sized budget, there can be an incentive to go for low quality solutions. Typically this involves squeezing a website into an app. It may look OK at first glance. But you can guarantee members will soon work out what's going on.

But don't worry. We have something that can help!

ZippApp: The Community App solution

Zipline have been building online communities for 7 years. We've been aware of the benefits of community apps. And conscious of the problems too. Luckily we have some super clever people working here! It's enabled us to develop our community app platform which we call ZippApp.

ZippApp allows us to create high quality, custom built community apps, which we can publish on behalf of our clients to the iOS and Android app stores. We've spent years making sure every experience is focused and the interactions optimised for the wide range of tasks members of our client's communities carry out. It looks amazing. It's intuitive to use and it can be adapted to fit any design guides thrown at it.

What's more, it's incredibly cost effective. ZippApp, which is part of our Community Package is an order of magnitude cheaper than typical custom app solutions. Something we have been able to achieve through years of focus and dedication building #socialnetworks and community-powered platforms.

You can find out more about ZippApp here. Read our?Case Studies page for some real world examples. Go to our website and get access to your very own app demo or get in touch for a one-to-one demo session.