Mobile apps are penetrating every sphere of life and are increasing at a rapid pace. Already there are close to 6 million apps in the market comprising the Google Play Store and the iOS App Store. From this, the overwhelming level of contest among mobile apps is quite evident. While increasing competition among the Mobile app developers for securing growth and market presence has reached to a phenomenal level, innovative and less expensive marketing strategies and techniques are more relied upon by the app marketers now.
This is precisely why social media marketing has become so popular for the vast majority of mobile apps. Social media marketing is now almost at par with the mainstream media ads in terms of effectiveness while it comes cheap. The best thing is you can scale your marketing efforts on social channels as per your need and capacity. You can do a lot of stuff for free and later on grab the opportunity of paid ads or sponsored posts for a limited period.
Now that you are convinced about the indispensable role of social media in the mix of mobile app marketing strategies, it is time to cut out the perfect strategy for an impressive social media footprint that builds your brand image and boosts acquisition and engagement over time for your app.
Here below we explain a few of these key strategies.
1. Choose the Platform Wisely
As a new app in the market, your resources are likely to be limited, and you cannot engage a fully dedicated team to look after every different social channel. Moreover, all social media platforms cannot be equally effective for your niche or the type of app you have built. So, you need to pick a few platforms where you can concentrate and give your valuable as well as result-driven efforts.
To start with, you cannot leave aside Facebook which happens to be the most widely used and popular social platform as of now. Irrespective of your niche and the type of app, you are bound to find traction on this platform. It is also the leading platform for generating leads for all types of businesses and apps across the niches.
Twitter as the social microblogging platform is popular for announcing updates, events and create the buzz around an event or popular hashtag. If you can catch popular hashtag trends of your niche going on Twitter and accordingly weave your message to piggyback the trend, you can create buzz.
Pinterest and Instagram are particularly good platforms for all apps that deliver a lot of visual contents to the users. Among them, Pinterest is particularly useful for apps with a predominantly female audience. LinkedIn is an excellent platform for an enterprise audience, B2B segments, and tech companies.
2. Make Use of Visual Contents to the Maximum
When marketing your app on social media, you must remember that the average attention span of your audience is now drastically low and they don’t give a damn to large text passages. Most users on social media while scrolling down the timeline mainly concentrates on eye-grabbing visuals that range from exciting and funny memes to cute high-quality images to relevant infographics to engaging GIFs and video contents.
3. Seek User Reviews
How can you boost download of your app exponentially by building trust and engagement among social media audience? Well, there is no better way to do it than by asking for reviews from your social media audience. When your existing users talk about your app and openly clarifies the benefits for the audience, you could quickly generate the stamp of trust for your app.
In this respect, always remember that publishing fake or sponsored reviews won’t help your cause much as the users can check out those profiles. When real and organic reviews are published by people from your friend list and followers, it makes the truly effective impression.
4. Develop a Community
Social media platforms represent different communities of users. But unless you can create a steady and regular engagement and you are heard like a human voice behind a brand, you cannot get full support of this community. Only when you can build a strong loyal community around your app, you can ask them to give their valuable feedback and ratings. This is how you can organically go up the app store search rank easily.
You can build a community around your app in two ways. Firstly, you can ask your followers to give feedback and express their opinion about the app. Secondly, you can also invite your existing clients to connect to your app page on social media and provide feedback and engage in conversation. The ground rule of creating a great social community is answering their queries and communicating them with valuable updates and information.
5. Make Use of Innovative Promotions
Finally, you can use social media channels to promote your app with a lot if innovative means. When running social media promotions for your app, always remember that the audience is already habituated with the regular promotional methods and the marketing messages. To ensure instant traction and their attentiveness you need to devise clever and innovative methods.
The promotion of your app on social channels will also depend tremendously on your monetization model. For example, if your app follows the pay-to-download monetization model, a temporary and limited-period price drop can be an innovative way to gain new acquisition.
Utilizing merchandises to promote your app can be another effective way to create buzz around your app and boost acquisition. Such innovative measures are particularly effective for game apps as the audience of game apps are more prone to such track measures.
Conclusion
So, from the outset, it is clear that while social media marketing for apps come without big price tags unlike the regular media ads, social media demands more attentive and alert engagement and innovations. Social promotions work great if you know how to tweak the social conversation in your favor.
Author Bio:
Atman Rathod is the Co-founder at CMARIX TechnoLabs Pvt. Ltd., a leading web and mobile app development company with 13+ years of experience. He loves to write about technology, startups, entrepreneurship, and business. His creative abilities, academic track record and leadership skills made him one of the key industry influencers as well.
Social Links: