Designing the right integration between your app
and social media is key to positiong your app for viral user growth. Here are 3
ideas to try with your app.
Look at any tech magazine or analyst report and you’ll probably read
that social media (in addition to ‘big data’ and the ‘cloud’) being the
panacea for all Internet business growing pains, but what the hell does that
mean for you as a app startup?! Today I want to go a bit past where the Gartner
vernacular stops and explore some of the ways you can design social media
integration into your app to fuel user growth. In the words ofH.G. Pennypacker, a beloved industrialist, botanist and bicyclist, I want to get to the
real gritty-gritty of the social media mess.
Social media
integration means more than blasting people’s wall’s with generic messages
informing their friends that “Tobias just started using Grindr!”, or by simply
enabling people to share app content on their Twitter or Facebook feed. No, you
want to go deeper than this and create social media integration points that are
designed to get people’s attention, lure them in and then BAM! Convert them
into users of your app.
1.) Use your social media landing page as a giant billboard for your app
Yelp prompts
iPhone users viewing a page in their browser to download their app.
It’s a no
brainer that people should be able to share interesting things they see on your
app to their social media feeds, but that’s just the first part of the
equation. Once someone clicks on a tweet or wall post from your app they are
going to land on a page on your website, this is your one chance to promote
your app and entice them to download it! Create a banner advertisement or
an other engaging display ad and make sure that whatever the user is viewing is
complemented by a tasteful pitch of your app.
What this ad looks like I leave to you and your creative juices, but
remember, you don’t want to annoy your user!With some simple javascript you can detect what browser the person is
using to view your page and then tailor the ad shown based on that. If someone
is on a desktop browser, you can try a subtle slide down affect with a banner
ad. On the other hand, if you detect a user is visiting from a iPhone, then you
can step up your game and do what Yelp does and throw up a pop-up which asks
the user if they want to view the content on the website, or download the app
and see it there. Either way, don’t let any social media referral to your app content
on the web go without some mention of your app and a call to action to download
it.
Bahndr uses a
slide down advertisement to inform desktop browser users of the iPhone app.
2.) Publish the things people do in your app to their Facebook Activity
Feed
The Facebook Activity Feed is another great outlet for you to promote
your app by publishing actions people take in your app to their Facebook. No I
am not talking about their wall, I am talking about that box in the upper-right
corner which keeps you up to date on what the last song your Uncle Fred
listened to on Spotify.
Facebook
Activity Feed keeps people up to date on the pointless minutiae of other
people’s lives.
Publishing to
the Facebook Activity Stream greatly increases the number of random impressions
of your app while limiting the social backlash that occurs when apps blast
someone’s wall with updates. Plus, it requires no action on the part of the
user besides their own use of the app. The beauty of the Facebook Activity Feed
is that you’re opening the proverbial kimono of your app and exposing all the
interesting, and fun things that are happening inside of it to the general
public. If someone sees an interesting thing popup on their activity feed they
click it and boom, they are on your website. Use 1.) to then get the user to
take the next step to download your app.
Remember
kids, privacy is the name of the game here. At the minimum you need to let your
users turn off Facebook activity stream sharing if they’d like. Whether you
enable Facebook activity stream sharing by default (ala Spotify) is a more
ethically gray question.
3.) Don’t invite people to download your app, invite them to join a
friend in a shared action
If you are creating a game, or an app that has some direct social
interaction (i.e. DrawSomething, Chess, etc…) then use social media as the invitation mechanism for people to invite their friends to join
them in an match/game/etc.. on the app. Note the last part, do not spam
someone’s friends list with “come play Farmville with me!” type of posts. No,
what I mean is give people the ability from within your to app to
challenge/invite/start a match with their Facebook/Twitter friends. When your
app user picks a Facebook friend to play against, your app invites the Facebook
friend to start playing with their friend with a Facebook invitation.
Facebook
invitations create powerful call-to-actions for random people to try out your
app.
Your job as
an appster doesn’t stop with the invitation. No my friends, in order to make
invitations generate real user growth you need to close the loop and enable a
frictionless journey from an invitation to a user of your app. So when an
invited user clicks on an invitation, they should be able to download your app,
sign in with their Facebook credentials and immediately begin playing against
their friend. If you can execute this loop and make it drop dead simple for
some random schmo on Facebook to begin interacting with their friend on your
app then you are creating a potentially explosive viral loop that can spread
your app right across the Facebook landscape.
There is a
subtle yet critical difference between an invitation to play versus a
invitation to download. A random Facebook user is more likely to click on
something that is targeted directly to them and invites them to engage with one
of their existing friends. Remember the first time someone invited you to play
DrawSomething with them on Facebook? On the other hand, an invitation to
download is impersonal and borderline spammy which is likely to result in a
bunch of people choosing to “ignore all posts by X”, which is the last thing
you want people to be doing with your app.
In conclusion
Phew, that
was a long one! I’ve only touched the surface of how to integrate social media
into your app’s functionality, there are many other avenues and strategies you
can employ to help drive user growth of your app, these are but some of the
ones I’ve used. Do you have other ways to leverage social media to fuel user
growth? Let us know and post your ideas below!
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