How to Use Social Media as a Mobile Marketing Tool for your App?

With nearly three billion users worldwide, social media platforms dominate opinion building among almost every age group and demographic category of people. Particularly young adults, a good 90% of them prefer social media for all sorts of activities. Similarly, one third of millennials like say social media platforms for purchases and business communication

Social media platforms are where people spend their bulk of leisurely time and they watch news, read articles, engage with other people on issues, have conversation, showcase their creativity, play games, learn new skills and shop products and services on social media. How can any business stay aloof from the importance of social media platforms, let alone app businesses? A whopping 68% of marketing professionals said in a survey that they regularly keep track of social media traction and KPIs.

In fact, app businesses can take more advantage of social media presence than other businesses. Simply because the vast majority of people access social media platforms through their handheld devices, trying a new app through App Store or Play Store can be a lot easier. But since most apps are after social media traction, you cannot take these channels for granted. 

Mere social media presence is far from enough now. Just as you have raked your brain on things to consider when developing a mobile app, you need to give a lot of thought on social media strategy. On an average a person opens just 9 apps every day. Only a handful of leading apps are used by the vast majority of users on a regular basis and remaining ones are contested by all other apps.

In a chokingly competitive scenario, you can give your app marketing a solid boost with the right social media marketing practices. Here we are going to explain some of the most time-honored practices to promote your app on social media. 

Selecting Your Social Media Mix

Social Media Platforms

You have hundreds of social platforms at your disposal and all have their equal share of strengths and weaknesses. Some platforms are literally irreplaceable and must-have for every business, while some have a niche audience. On the other hand, irrespective of the usefulness and relevance, you cannot afford to target all social media platforms unless you have a robust marketing team and budget. This is why selecting and prioritizing the right social media channels is absolutely crucial for your app business. 

To create the right mix of platforms for your social media marketing, here we would like to explain the strengths and key attributes of each channel. 

  • Facebook is the largest social media platform having 2.45 billion active users is irreplaceable in the social media strategy of any business. The key strength of Facebook is its ability to create like-minded and committed communities. Facebook Official Business Page, Facebook Group and Facebook Ads are three effective ways to promote your app and build community support for your app on the platform. 
  • Twitter as the microblogging platform with 145 million active users comes second among the most influential social media platforms. Video ads and community building through industry relevant messages and updates are two important ways to use this platform to boost traction. 
  • Pinterest is particularly great for an audience dominated by women and posts dominated by visual media and graphics. It is a go-go channel for all apps targeting the right audiences with visually engaging content.  
  • Instagram is a social platform for visual and graphic media and posts having close to a billion active users. Instagram Stories is a popular feature for discovering brands and Instagram Ads is another popular feature of the platform. Trending app ideas for startups can fit this social channel for marketing and promotions.  
  • Snapchat targets millennials to young adults as their audience is highly popular among people falling under the 18-24 age group. Since a huge number of users prefer using audio while using the platform, marketers can easily connect their target audience. 

Set clear goals for social campaign

social campaign goal

Social media presence is not a customary task for app marketers. A happy-go-lucky attitude in making social media posts without any clear objective can only drain resources without any significant results in the form of new user acquisition, improving business conversion, generating leads, enhancing user session duration, etc.  

Through various types of social media interactions and activities such as likes, shares, comments, reactions, etc you need to achieve specific objectives on social media platforms. For every social media platform you need to set specific goals. Let us mention some of these objectives. 

  • Establishing brand awareness and sensitizing people about the business brand.  
  • Pushing acquisition of new app users by making posts garnering attention of the target audience. 
  • Providing customer service and offering customer support through the social media channels. 
  • Enhancing engagement of the app users with the respective mobile app and increasing user engagement. 
  • Connecting various industry influencers and ensuring an app presence for a much bigger audience. 

Garnering User Insights Through Social Media Analytics 

Social Media Analytics 

We all know that social media campaigns always demand to be highly personalized and individual-specific. Social media campaigns don’t come with a “one size fits all” approach. This is where social media analytics play an important role. Social analytics tool ensures carrying out a very targeted campaign specific to the user audience. 

Facebook Insights is a nice example of how social media analytics work. The tool as per the traction the page and post links receive, ranks them in order. This showcases the choices of the users and how they interact and engage with the posts and pages. 

Insights regarding the user interactions, likes, preferences, choices and on-screen behavior easily help us to understand the content and app features users most prefer and the things they detest or don’t consider as valuable. 

Any app having a user-validated approach to development finds social media analytics important and effective. By tracking social media insights and KPIs, you can embrace an incremental development approach with planned value additions over a period of time. 

Paid ads and sponsored posts  

Both Facebook and Twitter are great channels for paid ads, and Instagram Ads are also getting popular. As for the effectiveness of the ads, embrace precise audience specific targeting with ads to garner more traction and business conversion. 

Social media paid ads and sponsored posts present a tremendously effective audience outreach method that can quickly get traction and ensure quick business conversion. Since organic methods like SEO and App Store Optimization are increasingly getting competitive, social media paid ads are now getting more popular than ever before.  

Enhance User-Generated Content (UGC) 

UGC

These days, social media users often appear as brand ambassadors promoting the products and services of their favorite brands (or brands that have paid them to do so), which makes them more convincing than the traditional ads. His is where User-generated content (UGC) seems to be more effective in pushing the traction of a brand than ever before. 

Since customers and prospects become more influenced by the peer recommendations or the opinions of other users, UGC can drive more user acquisition and engagement for a mobile app than with other means. An app user posting images or video showcasing the real life moments of app usage can instantly convince many like minded users rather than the pompous tall talks of the hired celebrities in a traditional ad or the brands themselves. 

The best thing about the user generated content is that they represent the real life benefits of an app in the lives of the people and hence can be more influential for the target audience than so called commercial ads. Through your engaging social media presence you can easily inspire people to post user generated content (UGC). 

Micro-Influencer Marketing

We all know that brands pursue well known social influencers for promoting their brand to help with reaching out to the wider audience. Well, while pursuing industry influencers with big followings is perfectly fine, it can be quite challenging. This is exactly where the role of micro-influencers comes into play. 

Yes, instead of pursuing the known and acclaimed industry influencers, a business brand can simply engage social media users with solid, engaged followings and smaller circles of influence. As users these days get more influenced by people next door, these micro-influencers in various social circles can convince a lot of users to try your app. 

Conclusion

The quality and potential of your app is not tested until it is validated by the market. This is why reaching out to the social media audience early and often is very important to gather opinion and drive traction. Ideally, you need to start social media outreach campaign as soon as the app enters the development lab and continue building the community. 

Enjoyed reading the  blog? Sign up for our monthly newsletter to receive marketing news and advice.

Dhaval Sarvaiya
Follow Me
Latest posts by Dhaval Sarvaiya (see all)

Something to add? We welcome your comments below.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Connect

Subscribe

Join our email list to receive the latest updates.

Affiliate notice: Some of the links on this site are affiliate links. We only promote products we have tried and love. We may receive a small commission if you click and buy.

Skip to content
Share via
Copy link
Powered by Social Snap