Social media is by far the most effective platform for app developers to promote their products. Nearly 20% of time Americans spend online is spent on social media platforms.
Developers also can target very specific demographics with Facebook ads and other social media sites, which yields a better ROI than other advertising platforms than Adwords and other advertising platforms. They can also use viral marketing strategies to promote their products without spending a penny.
Unfortunately, social media marketing is far from foolproof. Many app marketers invest countless hours in their social media marketing strategies, but never have anything to show for their effort.
For example, in 2011, a group of developers in Northern California began developing a mobile textbased werewolf game. They promoted became heavily on Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. However, the marketers failed to reach their target audience, due to a poor understanding of the target market and inconsistent marketing message.
Without a consistent and well thought out strategy, you may be leaving your success to chance. Here are some guidelines to create a better social media strategy.
1. Identify your Fanbase
Every successful marketing strategy revolves around your target customers. This is one of the problems the text based werewolf game faced. After spending a year and a half developing the game, they still didn’t know their target audience.
Social media allows you to target users by age, income, gender, geography and interests. However, these targeting options are only useful if you understand your customer in detail.
2. Be Consistent and Active
You probably won’t create a strong fan base overnight. You probably won’t even create a strong fan base over the course of a month.
You have to invest in social media over the long term to make any real progress. This means that you need to login every day to engage with your followers and share new content.
3. Work With Social Media Influencers
People don’t have an equal voice on social media. An industry influencer can have more leverage than thousands of regular users.
If you want to draw attention to your app, you’ll need to identify leading influencers and reach out to them. Bloggers and industry journalists are some of the best professionals to work with. Make a compelling reason for them to draw attention to your app.
Keep in mind most bloggers aren’t sharing information out of the kindness of their hearts. They are typically compensated through advertising, so you need to provide content to engage their readers.
4. Reward Users for Social Shares
Your users can be some of the best marketers. Find creative ways to use them to get more exposure for your app.
Zynga found ingenuous ways to capitalize off their user base for free marketing. They offered free “farm cash” to users that followed them on Facebook. They also allowed users to ask others for items they needed, which meant they had to invite new people to the game.
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