Social media is everywhere, and it makes everyone accessible irrespective of their demography. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc. are the new melting pots of the society. Now that you have a wonderful app ready and have launched it on all the prime platforms, you probably are waiting with bated breath to see how it fares in the market, would it go up the ranks, or would it be downloaded as many times as you would want them to? Amidst all this conundrum, all you need to do probably is leverage on the one tool of marketing that has a lot of scope and potential as a free method of marketing your app!
Whether you have just launched your app or are ready to launch it, you probably should be thinking about how to create a demand for your product i.e. the app you have so painstakingly created. It is a common myth among the run of the mill appreneurs that mobile advertising like in-app advertising is the only way to go, when you are looking to build an audience of your own. However, that’s not all that you need to depend on for giving your app a visibility and raising curiosity among the target users.
Utilizing social media in an optimized manner can help you cut through all the noise on the app stores without digging deep into your pockets, opening up the playfield for you to stand alongside the big players.
So, the big question now is, how to do it, and how to do it well? Penguin Apps Builder has compiled a list of simple yet effective tips that can help you leverage social media and maximize mobile app marketing.
1. Make Content Your Hero
The primary intent of designing and employing a social media campaign is to bring in visibility for your app. When you are preparing to build a social media campaign where must you begin? If you ask me, it should all begin with creating good content. This good content should be developed in great amounts as well, if you are to sustain the social media campaign and offer some value to the target user group.
You must carefully plan and create content that has the potential to keep your target audience engaged. As an example if you are building an app (or have built it already) that is about fashion, then you have a lot of scope in creating content around the fashion trends in different continents, the fashion capitals of the world, the top designers and their profiles or if you are lucky even interviews!
Get your creative juices flowing and get working now!
The content may be in any from blogs to images to videos. You might create videos to let people know what your app can do, what problem it can solve, and what difference it can make in their lives and demonstrate it in real life situations. Design the videos or images in such a way that your users would want to download your app and use it too!
The posts should indicate what the users can do with your app, if it works, then add an element of quirk to it. The content should be designed in such a way that it can get people excited about your app without you having to push it down their unsuspecting throats, and once you get them excited slip in an appropriate call to action and get them to download your app! Choose the right social media channels including but not limited to Facebook, Instagram, Google Plus, etc. and share this carefully designed content.
Another great way to create content is by tying your content to popular or viral content, and you can piggyback your way to fame too! The idea behind creating good content and helping it go viral is by keeping it simple, and to create a moment or a series of such moments so that they are motivated to share it with their friends and family, who in turn would share with their circle of friends and family.
2. Optimize UI/UX
This is important as well! The onboarding experience needs to be designed with a great deal of thought and attention to the experience it offers to the user going through it. Will it help them use the app better, would they go through the whole onboarding smoothly, would they want to skip it, or would they abandon your app because of it? All these are important questions and you must keep asking these to yourself and to the beta testers as well. Once you have launched your app, you can employ visual mobile analytics tool to understand the experience and behavior of the app user in order to refine the user experience further.
When you employ a good visual mobile analytics tool, it helps you understand the reasons for the way your users are behaving within your app, the actions they are taking, and the time when they are taking these actions. This tool is a step up from the traditional analytics tools and lets you observe the user experience at close quarters, analyze it, and then optimize it accordingly. This whole process is an ongoing process and it won’t take a lot of time or efforts for you to get used to.
3. Facebook Is Not the Be All End All of Social Media
To truly unleash the potential of the social media, you must include all possible social media channels. Begin by setting up a profile on the social channels and post statuses that are more neutral instead of promotional but are interesting and engaging for the audience. Each of the social media channel has its own characteristics and traits, which means each channel has unique benefits too! Let’s get to them one by one!
To say that facebook is big, might just be an understatement. The scale of it can be understood when we tell you that Facebook enjoys 2.2 billion monthly users. Now, that IS big, isn’t it? this humungous number of active users on Facebook makes it ideal for promotion of any content, including your app! When you set up a facebook page for your app, you are giving it a solid presence in the world of social media and thus open up a valuable channel to garner feedback. A Facebook page also helps you gain credibility and create a buzz around the app. The basic rule that you must follow here is to create content that is peripheral yet relevant to your app but is not about the app itself.
Encourage people to share the content you have been posting.
It is natural that you would not have many followers to begin with. You can gain more followers by following them and getting in on conversations that the users are having. Offer valuable inputs or information to gain their respect and make a good impression, they will definitely follow you.
Google+
As Facebook broke the user barrier and quite a few proverbial records, Google+ took its time to catch up and now has begun establishing itself as a valuable social media channel. The biggest edge, Google+ has, is that it is the brainchild of Google! One big benefit your app is going to have, because of that is, your app would come up in organic search results, due to the built-in power of Google+.
Another strong feature on Google+ is the unique use of hashtags. Initially, using hashtags on it might seem to be quite like Twitter and the rest of them, but Google+ is different from the rest in its ability to auto-create hashtags!
You can put the Google+ hashtags to power up your SEO, but you have to be careful not to over do it! Google is infamous for dumping content overstuffed with keywords or hashtags for that matter.
This is a great channel to leverage the power visuals can have. The trend of banking on visuals to market your product has been here for a couple of years and is sure to continue to greater heights. Instagram has 800 million monthly active users, and now you know how effective this can be!
You must create a strong presence on this channel to work towards garnering success for your app. Talk here about your target users, let them know what you are doing and what you can do for them, but talk with pictures, and build stories with a set of images or short videos.
The micro-blogging site, Twitter is awesome for networking as it lets you reach out and deliver content to influencers just by mentioning or tagging them in the content that you create. There is a limitation employed on the number of characters you can use in a tweet, but once you learn how to use that, you can get influencers to retweet you and drive up your downloads by a huge margin!
4. Make Use of Hashtags
Hashtags are a great tool to get your app the maximum visibility and market it to the right kind of audience. When you use them strategically and properly, you have the opportunity to expand your audience and reach out to them effectively. The best part about hashtags is that they are media agnostic and can be used on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even on Google+. However, practice some kind of restraint and avoid overdoing it.
5. Leverage Sharing Within the App
People or users connect the most with the app when they are actually using it. Give them the option of sharing content from within your app on any chosen social media channel they might prefer. Make it easy for the users to share your content. Not only should the sharing button be easily accessible and visible, but it should also support sharing on multiple channels in one go, thus encouraging maximum sharing among users across platforms.
6. Inspire With Visuals
We might repeat the old adage “Don’t judge a book by its cover!” but it is effectively what we do! We judge an app a lot with the visual appeal that it has, and the first impressions usually stay for the longest time with the users. We tend to make decisions on the basis of the visuals in front of us. Hence, the importance of visuals on your app, in the posts on various social media channels is a lot higher than you’d think! People or your users, no matter which demography they belong to, are looking for visual content. When they come across posts that contain images or videos, they are more likely to engage with the post and the chances of them being converted to customers is a lot higher, when compared to posts containing only text.
7. Schedule Your Posts
If you are planning to do the posting all by yourself, you might either need a lot of time on your hand or employ a dedicated resource. This is simply because there needs to be a healthy influx of posts at frequent or well timed intervals. There are a number of social media tools that can be used to schedule your posts on different social media channels without having to keep an eye on the clock! There are some tools that can even measure the engagement of your posts across the spectrum.
8. Incentivize the Shares
You want users to share your app on the social media, but what do they get out of it? Give your users something that they would want, like a freebie, some promocode for discount, an extra that no one else has. Let them know what they will get in return for sharing or recommending your app.
9. Keep Analytics Under Consideration
If you keep doing your thing and do not observe what fruits your actions are bearing, you might end up somewhere you didn’t want to go! Keep a close eye on and monitor the impact of the changes that you might have made to your social media campaign. When you make changes in your social media campaign, keep an eye whether there is any perceivable change in post activity. To monitor this, you may go with your gut, or employ Google Analytics or Bit.ly.
10. Use Influencers To Spread The Word
It is the friends, family, or social fraternity that we look up to for news. When people hear about an app from someone they know or trust, they’re going to be more inclined to actually engage with it. Hence, hearing about your app through a review or even a mention on a popular influencer’s media channel, can work wonders for you. Approach an influencer who has relevance to reach out to the right kind of audience in an expedited manner.
11. Timing is Prime
Consistency is a prime factor if you are looking to build a big followership for your app on the social media. If you are consistent with the posts you publish on the social media, the odds of getting a higher visibility are better. However, once you get the spike, you must not stop or slow down on your posting. In order to effectively build your social media traffic, you must keep a daily publishing schedule. This schedule must take into consideration the number of posts and its timing on different channels. Ideally, you must post from about 3 to 10 times on Facebook & Google+, Tweet at least 5 times in a day, post on Instagram between 1 to 2 times a day, and 2 to 5 times a week on LinkedIn.
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