Social media is an excellent way to get new users for your app. Not only does it offer you unprecedented reach and opportunities for brand-building. It’s also free to use.
The above-mentioned benefits aside, success won’t happen overnight. Marketing an app on social media requires creativity, subtlety, and deliberateness.
Here’s how to promote an app on social media like the pros:
1. Create Compelling Content
Knowing how to promote an app on social media involves creating compelling content. Compelling content is content that puts your audience’s needs first and, therefore, is valuable to them. It can be everything from posts that educate potential customers about your app offers or just relevant entertaining app-related material.
Your content can take many forms. On social media, you can have promo videos, images, text, or a combination of two or all of those. These can stand alone as your social media content directly promoting your app. Alternatively, your social post could just serve as a teaser and direct users to your site where they can find the full version of your app’s promotional content. This is a strategy payments company, Wise, follows:
After clicking through, you’ll get to this linked blog post, with the “Create your Wise Business Account” CTA:
Since compelling content puts your audience’s needs first, it follows that you need to know your target audience to craft this type of content. Use surveys to ask your target audience directly about their content preferences. You can also look at your website and social media analytics to know their demographics and other key information. These will help you choose the type of content that’s likely to resonate with them.
If you’ve been running your social accounts for long by now, you can also check out your user engagement metrics to determine what type of content already works for your audience. Any content your audience shares or reposts is a winner, of course. If you create similar content, chances are, you’ll generate similar engagement.
As a final tip, don’t forget to craft compelling content consistently. This can help you gain even more Facebook, TikTok and Instagram followers, ultimately boosting your reach on social media platforms. That just means even more people will be exposed to your content, and will get to know about your app.
2. Choose the Right Social Platforms
To successfully market your app, you have to be on the same social platforms as your audience. That means, again, that you need to know your audience and where they prefer to hang out.
Let’s assume you’ve already sent out your getting-to-know surveys and checked your site and social media analytics. Then you should already have a pretty good idea of the demographics of your target audience. Now all you have to do is check general studies that specify the social networks different audiences frequent to determine where best to promote your app.
For example, if you find your audience is based in the US and aged between 30 and 64, you’d market your app on Facebook. According to Statista, 58% of Facebook users fall within the above age range.
If your target audience are Gen Zers, then TikTok should be the main platform for your social media marketing. A staggering 60% of TikTok users are from that demographic, making it essential to learn how to repost on TikTok to maximize engagement with this audience in the most effective way.
But of course, these are all general studies. If you want to be 100% right about your choice of social platform, ask your target audience directly about their preferences. You can include a question about this in the surveys you send to know their content preferences.
Once you determine which platforms they frequent, you’ll also need to understand how each can help you reach your goals. This knowledge will help you determine the platform that’s best suited for the types of content you have that aim to promote your app.
Platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, for instance, are excellent for building online communities. You can gather your app users in one group, like Mailchimp did below, then share comprehensive resources on how they can get the most of your app:
Meanwhile, Instagram and TikTok are excellent for short videos that primarily aim to capture users’ attention and entertain.
That’s why you’ll rarely find “serious” content on Semrush’s TikTok page.
3. Optimize Profiles
Optimizing your social media profiles can help your social media app promotion big-time. Social media users aren’t likely to browse through a profile that has no or is lacking key details. In their eyes, the profile just looks shady and is not worth their time. That means they’re also not likely to see your social posts promoting your app.
Besides, when you optimize your social profiles, you can also get your app promotional content in front of people outside the social media platform. A brand’s social media accounts are also likely to show up in search engine results pages. See what happens when I type in Slack on Google. Both Slack’s YouTube and Instagram accounts appear on the first page:
When your social profiles are optimized, Google search engine users are likely to conclude they’re your legitimate accounts and click through. And when they do, that means they’ll get to see that social media content promoting your app, too.
That said, here are some tips to follow to optimize your social media profile:
- Upload a high-quality profile picture (your logo)
- Specify what your business is about.
- Include important company details like your address and telephone number. You can also include a link back to your app’s Google Play Store, your app’s site page and/or your website. Note, though, that if you’re using Instagram, you’re only allowed one link in your Instagram bio. What you can do is create a landing page that houses your multiple links and post that link in your bio. See how JasperAI did it:
Click on that link in bio and you’ll get to this landing page:
When writing copy for your social media profiles, let your brand personality shine through. This brand personality should be consistent across all your social platforms. Remember to do keyword research and incorporate relevant keywords and hashtags. These will help further boost your visibility.
4. Run Paid Advertising Campaigns
Until now, the mobile app marketing strategies we’ve discussed focus on how to best leverage organic posts to generate organic traffic. In other words, free social media marketing.
This tip on how to promote an app on social media focuses on paid ads or paid marketing campaigns.
If you want to get your app in front of your audience as quickly as possible, sponsored ads like the one below are the way to go. While other app marketing efforts rely on platform algorithms for content exposure, this one doesn’t.
You simply set a budget, describe your target audience, and your ad will appear in front of them instantly. That’s why with the right content, paid ads can be an effective way to quickly amass Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram followers.
As with any marketing method, though, there are downsides to paid advertising that you should know.
For one, paid ads can be expensive.
Sponsored social media posts typically operate a pay-per-click or pay-per-impression model. The former means you pay every time a user clicks on your ad. The latter means you pay once the social platform loads your ad in the user’s feed (regardless of whether they scroll down long enough to see it).
In either case, high engagement rates won’t equal revenue.
Your audience can comment on your ad, repost it, like it, or follow you, but if they don’t convert you lose money.
Also, sponsored posts don’t have the same longevity as organic ones. Once you turn off your Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook ads, they stop appearing in your customer’s feeds. In comparison, an organic post can go viral and float around on the platform for months or even years.
Thus, temper your expectations when using paid ads to market your app. Instead, view this method as an effective tool for creating awareness and a companion to organic app promotion tactics.
In Closing
Promoting your app on social media is easy when you know how. You already learned some tips to follow.
Create compelling content that attracts engagement. Make sure you also choose the right social channels to market on. Don’t forget to optimize your social profiles once you’ve chosen your channels. As a final tip, if you have the budget for it, consider using paid advertising to generate awareness as quickly as possible.
Now that you know how to promote an app on social media, go forth and start spreading the word.
Author Bio:Eli is the Content Manager of Crunch Marketing. The company works with enterprise SaaS clients, helping them scale lead generation globally across EMEA, APAC, and other regions.