How to Market your App or Game on Instagram

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One of the hardest things after developing a new app or game, is marketing it. How do you get to the users that will want to use your app? Many developers opt for the social media thing. As it is free, relatively, and posts can get viral pretty quickly and easily, if the right people see them. While a lot of social networks do allow you to boost posts, like Facebook, Pinterest, Google, and Twitter, Instagram is a bit of a tough one to market on. Why? Well the biggest reason is that links that you post on Instagram are not clickable. We’re going to share some tips to help market your app or game on Instagram, today.

Hashtags

If you follow Android Headlines, you’ll see that we utilize hashtags a lot. On Instagram, they are equally important, if not more important. Using Hashtags helps users find your post, which means more eyeballs will see the app you are trying to promote. For instance if you have a camera app you are looking to promote, a few good hashtags for that would be #Androidphotography, #Android, #AndroidPhoto, just to name a few. #AndroidPhotography is a really popular one. While it’s good to use a popular hashtag, it means there’s less time where users will see your post, unless they happen to scroll down a bit.

There’s a few apps out there that will help you out, like Tags4Likes on the Play Store, and will give you an idea of what kind of hashtags to use on your posts on Instagram. This actually works for other social networks too, especially Google+ and Twitter.

High-Quality, Eye Catching Images

This probably goes without saying, but posting high-quality images is a must. But also they need to be eye-catching images as well. You want something that’s going to catch the users attention. Say they are browsing through one of these hashtags, and happen to see an image that catches their eye, they are going to click on it and check it out. That’s exactly what you want them to do. We’ll go back to the camera app again here, you can get some pictures from the camera app and post them on Instagram. Maybe of some sunsets, sunrises, architecture, etc., another good one is screenshots of the UI of the app. Showing off the app on Instagram is always a good idea.

Links

This one is a bit tricky. As I mentioned earlier on, links are not clickable on Instagram. For instance if you put “androidheadlines.com” on Instagram, users will not be able to simply tap on it and be taken to the site. They will need to highlight it, copy it, then paste it in their browser. And let’s step into the users shoes for a minute, how many times would you do that? Probably not that many. So a good way to bypass this is to use a link shortener. Post a link like bit.ly/appname, as it’ll be something easier for the user to remember.

If you really want to take things up a notch, you can get your own link shortener, using Domainr.

The Audience

On Instagram, the audience there is a bit different from you’d find on Google+, Twitter, or even Facebook. These are mostly photographers. Or the younger crowd. Typically under 25 years of age. So you need to cater to them. It’s also important to remember that Instagram is mostly only accessible via mobile (there is a desktop website, but that is just for viewing your timeline, basically). So you need to play into that when promoting your app.

Final Thoughts

Those are just a few tips to get you going with marketing your app on Instagram. Hopefully that gives you a bit deeper knowledge as to how this social network works. As with most marketing, you’re learning more everyday, as things are changing everyday. Make sure to follow Android Headlines on Instagram as well! While Social Media Marketing is a good way to get started, getting a Paid App Review is also a good way to get a jump-start in marketing your brand new app.