Skills you need to develop in-house social media platform as India looks to become self-reliant

After the ban of 59 Chinese applications including Tiktok, there is a huge cry over making applications in India. The demand that local platforms such as Roposo has seen is a testimony that there is a huge demand for these platforms.

India has 574 million active Internet users as of 2019 and is the second-largest online market, behind China. India has about 290 million active social media users in the country.

If you look at digital ad spends on social media platforms, it is expected to reach USD 210 billion by FY20 end, according to Statista.  A big chunk of these revenues go to the US-based tech majors Facebook and Google, reports revealed. This is a huge opportunity here for Indian firms to tap into.

However it is easier said than done given that it requires deep pockets to acquire customers and an enabling ecosystem apart from technical skills. According to reports, Tiktok parent Bytedance has invested close to USD 1 billion to increase the user base in India.

While the former is subject to mindset change and willingness to invest in technology and Indian products, let us look at the skills that needed to build and develop a social media app like Tiktok.

The skills needed could be divided into front-end, back-end, and ability to deal with data, which also includes using artificial intelligence and machine learning to make your application more intelligent and intuitive.

Front end is what users interact with and that is why the user experience design is one of the most important aspect to attract the consumers.

Take the banned application Tiktok for instance. It was attractive to users, especially in tier 2 and 3 towns, because it was simple, interactive and easier to use even for those who are not tech savvy.

Janice Verghese, who works with Cyber Peace Foundation, a cybersecurity think tank, explained in an earlier conversation that unlike Facebook and other social media sites, signing up with Tiktok is much simpler, which could be the reason why the app was popular among teenagers and rural population.

According to a LinkedIn survey, UX (user experience) design is one of top 10 skills in demand by employers in 2020.

There are multiple front-end languages you could use but the most popular and in demand languages right now are Java script, PHP and Java. Other languages commonly used are HTML/CSS. Knowledge of design tools such as Sketch will be important as well.

According to PayScale, average salary of UX designer is Rs 7 lakh per annum.

Back-end refers to the architecture that is required for the application to run and for users to access it. This includes servers and databases, which could be either on premise or cloud.

The skill needed can be divided into two, programming language needed and knowledge of databases that will store the user data.

Programming skills that are popular include Python and Node JS. As for storage, most of the social media sites use SQL or NoSQL data base and store them in their cloud infrastructure, which has been a point of contention in recent times due to privacy issues. For instance, most of Indian’s Facebook data is stored in cloud, which is a data centre in the US.

So knowledge of cloud computing and its certifications would be necessary. Most common cloud infrastructure in use are Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Azure.

To deal with huge volumes of data generated from users, one should also need to work with frameworks such as Hadoop for processing these data.

Unlike few years ago, processing data is key to building a network. For this you need data engineers and data scientists. While data scientists help the company make better sense of data, data engineers help create a common format needed for data scientists to work with.

Anand Narayanan, chief product officer, Simplilearn, explained that data from voice, text and email need to be structured in a common format before they can be used.

For instance in social media this could be targeted advertising, recommendations you see in e-commerce sites or Netflix that displays options based on what you have watched earlier. Businesses use the data to get better understanding of their clients need.

There are three key skills needed to become a data engineer. Apart from programming language such as Python and R, engineers should know more about data frameworks such as Hadoop and cloud computing.

Tech platforms define Hadoop as a set of open source tools to store and process large volume of distributed data. Other popular tools include Apache Spark, which pays the highest at Rs 10 lakh per annum, according to a report on Analytics Insight.

Average salary of a data engineer ranges from Rs 5 to Rs 15 lakh depending on experience, with the demand increasing in the recent times across tech firms.

While data engineers create the data pool in a structured format, it is the data scientists who work on the data to make sense of it. Narayanan explains that data scientists should have knowledge about programming languages such as Python, statistics and big data and ML tools such as Google Tensor flow.

Role of data scientists are the most in demand with more than 20,000 roles currently available going by job search portal. Their salary may range between Rs 9 lakh to Rs 60 lakh as they accumulate experience.