Social media is an integral part of the web these days, and many of the user-centric web applications we build end up requiring a social component down the line to drive user engagement.

For our first real-world MERN application, we will modify the MERN skeleton application we developed in Chapter 3, Building a Backend with MongoDB, Express, and Node, and Chapter 4, Adding a React Frontend to Complete MERN, to build a simple social media application in this chapter. While doing this, you will learn how to extend the integration of the MERN stack technologies and add new features to grow your own full-stack web applications.

In this chapter, we will go over the following topics:

• Introducing MERN Social
• Updating the user profile
• Following users in MERN Social
• Posting messages with photos
• Implementing interactions on posts