Social media marketing (SMM) has become an essential part of every business’s growth strategy, including mobile apps. The number of customers who prefer to interact with brands through social media platforms has increased exponentially over the years, and SMM helps companies build relationships with their target audience, generate leads, and increase brand awareness.
In this blog, we’ll explore the benefits of social media marketing for mobile apps and share some tips and insights to help you choose the right channels and content for your strategy.
How is Social Media Marketing Different?
Social Media Marketing is a digital marketing technique used to promote products and services by leveraging Internet users’ activities on social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
Through this approach, businesses can target their ideal audience through social channels, conduct direct communication with them, build relationships, and encourage customer loyalty. SMM makes use of social networks to connect with current and potential customers at any moment and from anywhere. The objective is to reach people where they spend most of their time reading, shopping, playing or working. This way, brands can increase visibility, engagement and reach through these platforms.
Popular Social Media Networks in 2022
You probably already have an idea of what social media you want to use for your business, but let’s go through some of the highlights that might help you understand them better.
Tiktok
TikTok is a place for fast-watching short videos and one of the leading social media platforms. According to their own blog, as of September 2021, TikTok has exceeded one billion users worldwide. As of early 2021, the average session length on TikTok was higher than that on Facebook. When it comes to demographics, a report by Datareportal suggest 43.7% of its users are aged 18-24 with the number decreasing for older age groups.
Instagram has been gaining popularity steadily over the years with new features appearing regularly. It is the number one social media platform for visual content. According to Datareportal, the majority of its advertising audience are aged 18-24 (30.1%) and 25-34 (31.5%) of a total of roughly 1.478 billion users worldwide.
Facebook is still the most popular social media with 2.912 billion active users as of January 2022, with the majority of its total ad audience in the age group 25-34 (30.9%).
In its early days, Facebook helped build connections between people. Today, it allows small companies, businesses, and celebrities to better understand and interact with their audience. It helps to communicate directly with the target audience and, more importantly, collect their feedback and opinions.
LinkedIn is a social network for finding and establishing business contacts. Using LinkedIn can be a good way to find corporate clients and new hires. In addition to LinkedIn, your company and employees’ profiles can help potential clients understand your business better.
The total of 808.4 million LinkedIn active users you could potentially reach on this platform is dominated by the 24-35 age group (59.1%).
Twitter is a good platform for brand building. Funny replies from various major brands went viral, creating free ads and building positive brand attitudes. According to datareportal.com, Twitter’s potential advertising reach is roughly 436.4 million active users.
YouTube
YouTube is the leading video-sharing social media platform in the world. It has become a second TV with its own shows, series, films, and other content for users all over the world. It covers all industries and genres from gaming to education, from psychology to martial arts, and many others.
Moreover, YouTube has a user base that includes all age groups, even the difficult-to-reach 55+. According to Search Engine Journal, 81% of US adults use the platform.
Snapchat
Using Snapchat as a marketing tool is good way to attract a younger audience. According to Evan Spiegel, Snapchat reaches 75% of 13-34-year-olds. Snapchat’s audience is not as big as Facebook’s or TikTok’s, yet, its potential advertising reach is more than 500 million.
Why You Should Include Social Media in Your App Marketing Strategy
Additional Marketing Channel
With a large number of people on social networks, social media marketing has become one of the most important ways of getting leads. A number of companies even go a step further and use their profiles instead of a website to conduct all business. For example, the Instagram commerce feature has provoked the growth of Insta stores that do not even have their own website.
However, in order to attract potential users to your account (hence, to your business) you need to provide them with engaging content through a well-planned social media marketing strategy.
A Convenient Way to Get Feedback from Users
It’s always nice to get a positive review. However, negative feedback is just as important. Objective criticism from your users can be very useful for fixing bugs, implementing improvements, and the like.
Hence, social media can be used for more than simple advertising. By communicating with your audience directly and responding to both positive and negative comments, you can leverage their feedback to improve your mobile app. After all, it’s the end users who can best tell you what your app does well and where it lacks.
An Easy Way to Interact With Your Audience
As we’ve mentioned, different social media channels appeal to different audiences – both in terms of demographics and their preferred content. Depending on your target group, you can use different types of content to reach and interact with them, building meaningful relationships.
The end result of these interactions and communication are brand awareness and brand loyalty.
In addition, social media allows for user-generated content and creating a community, which can help you spread the word about your brand while also serving as a testimonial. After all, people are more likely to trust a person than a brand.
Choosing the Social Media Platform
The choice of social media channels you are going to use for your mobile app marketing strategy ultimately comes down to your buyer personas.
Who are the people you’re trying to reach? What do they do? How does your app solve their problems?
These are just some of the questions you should ask yourself before choosing the type of content you are going to create and the platform(s) you are going to use.
In an ideal scenario, you’d want to be active on all social media your target audience uses and create appropriate content for each of them: visuals, videos, text posts, etc.
What to Post?
The type of content you post should be one of your main concerns when coming up with a social media strategy for your mobile app. Depending on your buyer personas and the social media channel, there are a lot of options. Below are some ideas to consider and get you thinking in the right direction:
- App demo videos, screenshots
- Clients reviews
- App onboarding
- FAQ in highlights
- Q&A
- Entertaining content
- How-to-use videos
- Influencer videos
- Feature videos
- Contest/Giveaways
- News (launch date, updates, etc.)
Granted, the outlined options are a bit general, however, it’s up to you and your social media manager to find the best format for each of them.
For example, client reviews and app demos can be posted in the form of images or videos, while entertaining content can be anything from a witty copy to a meme or a fun video. The key here is to test ideas and then make modifications based on how the content performs.
Social Media Marketing Strategy Tips
- Start by creating a buyer persona for your social media marketing efforts. This will ensure you always keep in mind who the end user is and how you should best approach them.
- Show your audience what they want to see. People don’t use social media to find a new app they want to download – they use them because they enjoy the content it offers. If you want to grab the attention of social media users, you need to post unique content that will stand out and spark interest.
- Plan your posts ahead. Posting consistently and at the right times is crucial for social media marketing. Instead of coming up with posts on-the-go, create a schedule or calendar and make sure you post at times when most users are active to ensure your content gets noticed.
- Leverage the reach of paid social media ads. They can be a great investment for a couple of reasons. First of all, they let you reach people who still haven’t heard of you. Secondly, they let you define exactly who you want to reach based on your target demographic. Hence, they can ensure your message reaches the right people, whether they follow you or not. And best of all, you are in full control of how much of your budget you end up spending.
- Analyze insights data to improve your posts. Social media analytics and insights tell you how users interact with your posts, as well as how many people have seen them. This information can help you identify what type of content receives the most attention and optimize your future posts.
Wrapping Up
Social media is a great channel for app pre-launch marketing. They allow you to gather an audience and create an interested community that will start downloading your application immediately after its launch.
Once your app is live, social media can still play a big role in gathering first-hand feedback on the features, user experience, and other aspects of your product.
Finally, it is a fairly versatile channel that allows both startups and large businesses to reach their potential users, interact with them, and build their brand on any budget.