Facebook as an important tool for promoting mobile applications
About promotion on Facebook'e Russian-speaking specialists on SMM (or just the people who are faced with this) have already written, perhaps, the whole Talmud. But is there any benefit from this? Hundreds of articles retell the same thing: invite friends, order advertising, buy a couple of thousand bots ... Many of the usual recommendations are completely ineffective in practice. And Russian companies very rarely boast an active social life in the Facebook community.
We want to talk about our experience of Facebook promotion. Pay attention to the fact that we produce mobile applications for children (and not applications for Facebook itself), and this leaves a certain imprint on our methods that we use.
')
Approximately immediately, as we made a rebranding and chose the name Little Beetle , we seriously thought about the presence of our company in social networks. We have accounts on Facebook , VKontakte and Twitter . Classmates we avoided for several reasons. Firstly, we are supporters of globalization, and we dream that our foreign audience will someday connect with the audience from Russia and the CIS countries in one place where our activity will be concentrated. Naturally, neither in Odnoklassniki, nor in VKontakte, you will not be able to attract an audience from other countries. So, if your products are intended for consumption by people from different countries, only Facebook has the ability to attract foreign users. Therefore, we focused on this social network.
On the example of the developer of children's applications Toca Boca, we can see how well the distribution network works within Facebook. Fans of applications of this company instantly picked up the news that Toca Boca puts in his chronicle. And sales of new applications are provided automatically. Facebook is the most important tool to rely on as an important sales channel for your applications. In addition, it is in the social network you can increase the loyalty of users to the company, popularize the brand and make it recognizable.
On our own experience, we have not yet found a more successful way of attracting a selective, delicious target audience than holding competitions in social networks . Contests refer to the "gray" methods of promotion. Holding contests on Facebook isn’t very much approved by its internal policies. In particular, we have to use like and share as tools for determining winners, and this is not welcomed by Facebook principles.
Why exactly contests? Of course, users are attracted by the magic word "freebie" , past which they can not pass indifferently. But to select and organize this very “freebie” you need with the mind.
Now on Facebook you can see dozens of contests like Win an iPad in one click . That is, the prize in this case is valuable, and you need to make a couple of trifles - to “like” the page of the organizers of the competition and share the news about the prize drawing. In fact, it can not even be called a contest, it is only a lottery, the winners of which are determined randomly. We do not advise you to arrange such drawings for several reasons. First, your recruited audience will simply be thousands of “freebie” lovers who don’t care for your page or your company’s activities. Secondly, there are those who are dissatisfied with whom you will have to prove the honesty of your random choice.
As a result, you can get a large number of new fans of your page, but in fact - it will only be a void. Anyway, what to buy ready "likes." This method will be equally inefficient, but much cheaper. And do not beckoned by promises that you will receive “likes” exclusively from “living people”. Even if these are not bots, then these are people who sit on exchanges where they earn 1 kopeck for like. And they will never go back to your page and certainly will not buy your products.
We try to keep a balance between the value of prizes and the final expected result from the competition. By adjusting these two parameters, you can come up with contests of any subject. The more similar the topics of your work and the topics of the competition, the more “clean” and high-quality target audience you can attract. We have a few examples.
Vkontakte contest brought us disappointment. At that time we still didn’t have enough experience in holding competitions and, moreover, did not know the specifics of the audience of this social network. It should be said that practically the entire way of promotion in social networks we went alone, without the involvement of specialists who would be engaged in social marketing. We should not blame us for this, it was interesting for us to find the path ourselves, especially since we had people who wanted to do this. And as you know, those who offer services in SMM often give out completely banal knowledge for imaginary professionalism.
We offered people prizes such as iPod Nano , and the way to get them is to upload any of your photos to the album and collect more “I like” marks. For greater efficiency, we agreed with the administrators of the promoted Apple-theme groups to tell about the ongoing competition on their pages.
The effect was immediate - people began to join the group, and the competition folder with photos began to fill up. Immediately began a rapid increase in likes under the photos - the winners stood out, gaining 8-9 thousand likes in a few hours. As it turned out, basically, these were people who had for this either some unknown forces of “black magic” (scripts), or huge groups of millionaires, where it is enough to write “Like this photo here, let you be happy” and likes fall down like a bucket.
We decided to tighten the conditions of the competition. The essence of the changes was that the likes began to be counted only if they were received from the group members. Our programmers had to work hard to eventually get a beautiful and spectacular table on our site, where they displayed accurate data about the 30 leaders of the competition. True, the data was updated for a long time, and we constantly received frightened letters from the leaders, who disappeared from the table while the script was running and counting likes.
Of course, there was a mass of disturbances, and our employees spent a lot of nerves. The fight was serious, but the prizes finally found their owners. The winners were the same leaders who came to light before making changes to the rules. They just found ways to get around our changed conditions.
And what did we get? The audience has increased almost 100 times: from 40 people to 4,000 in a matter of days. But what was this audience? She was completely passive and disinterested. The average age of our subscribers was below 18 years of age (note that it is this kind of audience that now fills VKontakte). As a result, people began to unsubscribe, and no experiments with content could reverse this process. There was no reaction to any useful or entertaining, or to unique information. We even tried to take the subject away from the children (it was so difficult, because we are engaged in children's products). However, nothing helped, and in the end we received only unsubscribing participants. So much so that each publication caused a subscription of 10-12 people. It was bitter to admit defeat.
On Facebook, things went a little better - we were engaged in attracting a foreign audience, but also did not have much success in this. We wrote good and high-quality English-language content, but it looked dry, official and lifeless. Still, keeping the page in such a way that it is interesting for users from other countries is rather difficult.
We decided not to despair and try (not for the first time) to hold a thoughtful contest on Facebook. It cannot be said that we received a very large number of new “likes”, but what they were! It was the cream - the real concentrate of the target audience. The competition was called “Little Genius” and it was that we were playing prizes between those who sent us photos of their children with Apple devices. The competition went smoothly and well, we only had 22 photos, and the “likes” received from the competition were 10 times more. We were pleased with the results and want to give you some tips from the experience. We draw your attention to the details: we decided not to use the writing of special Facebook applications for the contest and not to use any scripts for counting likes and other needs. This is a pure strategy for the promotion of mobile applications on Facebook without attracting additional methods .
Tip 1: Establish a balance between the price of the prize and the amount of time and effort required by the user to take part in the competition. For example, “iPad for one click” is the right step to recruit a large number of completely inactive audience. It is better to make the prize more modest, and the task a little more difficult. Since we sell software products for preschoolers, prizes like iPod Nano and other types of media players have become ideal for us. First, they are suitable for us because we are developers for iOS, which means that we unite the Yabloko social networks. Secondly, the players are quite inexpensive and are great as a gift for a child. That is, a person can pamper his child by taking part in a contest and winning an iPod, which then will pleasantly and not shamefully give a child.
Tip 2: Carefully list the conditions of the competition. It is necessary to prescribe KTO is the organizer of the competition (your company, and not the social network Facebook). “Like” page - should not be a condition of competition. It is better to write "to participate, you must be a subscriber of our page." Register all the conditions for receiving and moderating photos and other works sent to the competition. Reserve the right to continue to use the photos and publish them online. Facebook requires that the terms of the contest you have written IN NOTES, and not in a post on the wall. Clearly state the conditions for determining the winners. ALWAYS reserve the clause that gives you the opportunity to make changes to the conditions of the competition!
Tip 3: Advertise your competition where people are not interested in prizes, but in your products. That is, we made a mistake when we advertised the competition in Apple lovers' groups - people who are not old enough to have their children, but not young enough to be users of our applications, came to us. In the case of a successful competition, we simply talked about it in groups that united parents, where activities for preschoolers and younger schoolchildren were held. Moreover, we did not order advertising for money, but simply added to the chronicle of other pages a message about our competition. Very rarely such messages were deleted, most often we received either very friendly offers of cooperation, or even mutual friendship and free advertising. Remember that adding messages to the chronicles of other groups can not be too often - otherwise you may be banned for 3 days for spreading spam. Allowed one message in 5-10 minutes, but not more. Do not neglect the forums and other places on the web where representatives of your target audience live. We, for example, invite mummies from various female forums and numerous communities from children. You can use both direct advertising, having agreed with the administration, and viral marketing.
Tip 4: Think about the conditions for identifying winners. They all have their pros and cons. In the case of a random number generator or a jury decision, make sure that you can prove the objectivity of your choice. If the voting tools are selected like and share, this means that, most likely, the winners will simply pay for the cheat. But, what can you do - everyone has this right. Remember that the most effective tool is not like, but share, so offer a more valuable prize for more share.
Tip 5: Remember that contests will only allow you to attract a new audience, and you will be able to hold it with interesting content. If you are a company that has only one application, or you rarely release updates, it will be difficult for you to ensure a steady interest in your products. An excessive enthusiasm for entertainment content, pictures with cats, attributes and demotivators will lead to the fact that no one will remember your company, even if there is interest directly in the published content. Do not fall into another extreme, advertising your products day and night. Alternate useful, entertaining and promotional content. Remember that 3-4 publications per day is a limit. It is better to reduce this amount to the maximum possible.
Tip 6: Plan your publication. Make a detailed publication plan for several months ahead. Keep in mind that for large advertising campaigns it is best to “prepare the ground” . That is, before the release of our new applications or updates, we post pictures of characters, photos from testing, create contests that will somehow be associated with a new or updated application.
Tip 7: Highlight the person who will only deal with social networking and contests. It takes much more time and requires more return than you might think from the outside. To entrust the maintenance of a page on Facebook as an additional burden to an employee who does something else as a main job is not the best option.
Tip 8: Let your face be friendly. Have you ever thought that through the articles and publications on social networks and blogs lurks the face of the person who writes this content? Your face should be smiling, simple and understanding, especially if you are talking to parents like us. Even if your posts are spelling and stylistic errors, emoticons and typos - these pages look much more “alive” than the pages where all the content is represented by official and dry phrases.
Now we are holding another contest - “I love Little Beetle” . Its conditions are simpler than in the previous competition - you do not need to have a child or an Apple device. It is only necessary to express the sympathy of our company. We were inspired to this contest after we learned that many people on the net accept us very loyally. To such an extent loyal that they even do fan art with their own hands (thank you so much for your support!). We will be happy if the residents of Habra join the competition .
Facebook to help!
We want to talk about our experience of Facebook promotion. Pay attention to the fact that we produce mobile applications for children (and not applications for Facebook itself), and this leaves a certain imprint on our methods that we use.
')
Approximately immediately, as we made a rebranding and chose the name Little Beetle , we seriously thought about the presence of our company in social networks. We have accounts on Facebook , VKontakte and Twitter . Classmates we avoided for several reasons. Firstly, we are supporters of globalization, and we dream that our foreign audience will someday connect with the audience from Russia and the CIS countries in one place where our activity will be concentrated. Naturally, neither in Odnoklassniki, nor in VKontakte, you will not be able to attract an audience from other countries. So, if your products are intended for consumption by people from different countries, only Facebook has the ability to attract foreign users. Therefore, we focused on this social network.
On the example of the developer of children's applications Toca Boca, we can see how well the distribution network works within Facebook. Fans of applications of this company instantly picked up the news that Toca Boca puts in his chronicle. And sales of new applications are provided automatically. Facebook is the most important tool to rely on as an important sales channel for your applications. In addition, it is in the social network you can increase the loyalty of users to the company, popularize the brand and make it recognizable.
On our own experience, we have not yet found a more successful way of attracting a selective, delicious target audience than holding competitions in social networks . Contests refer to the "gray" methods of promotion. Holding contests on Facebook isn’t very much approved by its internal policies. In particular, we have to use like and share as tools for determining winners, and this is not welcomed by Facebook principles.
Why exactly contests? Of course, users are attracted by the magic word "freebie" , past which they can not pass indifferently. But to select and organize this very “freebie” you need with the mind.
Now on Facebook you can see dozens of contests like Win an iPad in one click . That is, the prize in this case is valuable, and you need to make a couple of trifles - to “like” the page of the organizers of the competition and share the news about the prize drawing. In fact, it can not even be called a contest, it is only a lottery, the winners of which are determined randomly. We do not advise you to arrange such drawings for several reasons. First, your recruited audience will simply be thousands of “freebie” lovers who don’t care for your page or your company’s activities. Secondly, there are those who are dissatisfied with whom you will have to prove the honesty of your random choice.
As a result, you can get a large number of new fans of your page, but in fact - it will only be a void. Anyway, what to buy ready "likes." This method will be equally inefficient, but much cheaper. And do not beckoned by promises that you will receive “likes” exclusively from “living people”. Even if these are not bots, then these are people who sit on exchanges where they earn 1 kopeck for like. And they will never go back to your page and certainly will not buy your products.
We try to keep a balance between the value of prizes and the final expected result from the competition. By adjusting these two parameters, you can come up with contests of any subject. The more similar the topics of your work and the topics of the competition, the more “clean” and high-quality target audience you can attract. We have a few examples.
Vkontakte contest brought us disappointment. At that time we still didn’t have enough experience in holding competitions and, moreover, did not know the specifics of the audience of this social network. It should be said that practically the entire way of promotion in social networks we went alone, without the involvement of specialists who would be engaged in social marketing. We should not blame us for this, it was interesting for us to find the path ourselves, especially since we had people who wanted to do this. And as you know, those who offer services in SMM often give out completely banal knowledge for imaginary professionalism.
We offered people prizes such as iPod Nano , and the way to get them is to upload any of your photos to the album and collect more “I like” marks. For greater efficiency, we agreed with the administrators of the promoted Apple-theme groups to tell about the ongoing competition on their pages.
The effect was immediate - people began to join the group, and the competition folder with photos began to fill up. Immediately began a rapid increase in likes under the photos - the winners stood out, gaining 8-9 thousand likes in a few hours. As it turned out, basically, these were people who had for this either some unknown forces of “black magic” (scripts), or huge groups of millionaires, where it is enough to write “Like this photo here, let you be happy” and likes fall down like a bucket.
We decided to tighten the conditions of the competition. The essence of the changes was that the likes began to be counted only if they were received from the group members. Our programmers had to work hard to eventually get a beautiful and spectacular table on our site, where they displayed accurate data about the 30 leaders of the competition. True, the data was updated for a long time, and we constantly received frightened letters from the leaders, who disappeared from the table while the script was running and counting likes.
Of course, there was a mass of disturbances, and our employees spent a lot of nerves. The fight was serious, but the prizes finally found their owners. The winners were the same leaders who came to light before making changes to the rules. They just found ways to get around our changed conditions.
And what did we get? The audience has increased almost 100 times: from 40 people to 4,000 in a matter of days. But what was this audience? She was completely passive and disinterested. The average age of our subscribers was below 18 years of age (note that it is this kind of audience that now fills VKontakte). As a result, people began to unsubscribe, and no experiments with content could reverse this process. There was no reaction to any useful or entertaining, or to unique information. We even tried to take the subject away from the children (it was so difficult, because we are engaged in children's products). However, nothing helped, and in the end we received only unsubscribing participants. So much so that each publication caused a subscription of 10-12 people. It was bitter to admit defeat.
On Facebook, things went a little better - we were engaged in attracting a foreign audience, but also did not have much success in this. We wrote good and high-quality English-language content, but it looked dry, official and lifeless. Still, keeping the page in such a way that it is interesting for users from other countries is rather difficult.
We decided not to despair and try (not for the first time) to hold a thoughtful contest on Facebook. It cannot be said that we received a very large number of new “likes”, but what they were! It was the cream - the real concentrate of the target audience. The competition was called “Little Genius” and it was that we were playing prizes between those who sent us photos of their children with Apple devices. The competition went smoothly and well, we only had 22 photos, and the “likes” received from the competition were 10 times more. We were pleased with the results and want to give you some tips from the experience. We draw your attention to the details: we decided not to use the writing of special Facebook applications for the contest and not to use any scripts for counting likes and other needs. This is a pure strategy for the promotion of mobile applications on Facebook without attracting additional methods .
Tip 1: Establish a balance between the price of the prize and the amount of time and effort required by the user to take part in the competition. For example, “iPad for one click” is the right step to recruit a large number of completely inactive audience. It is better to make the prize more modest, and the task a little more difficult. Since we sell software products for preschoolers, prizes like iPod Nano and other types of media players have become ideal for us. First, they are suitable for us because we are developers for iOS, which means that we unite the Yabloko social networks. Secondly, the players are quite inexpensive and are great as a gift for a child. That is, a person can pamper his child by taking part in a contest and winning an iPod, which then will pleasantly and not shamefully give a child.
Tip 2: Carefully list the conditions of the competition. It is necessary to prescribe KTO is the organizer of the competition (your company, and not the social network Facebook). “Like” page - should not be a condition of competition. It is better to write "to participate, you must be a subscriber of our page." Register all the conditions for receiving and moderating photos and other works sent to the competition. Reserve the right to continue to use the photos and publish them online. Facebook requires that the terms of the contest you have written IN NOTES, and not in a post on the wall. Clearly state the conditions for determining the winners. ALWAYS reserve the clause that gives you the opportunity to make changes to the conditions of the competition!
Tip 3: Advertise your competition where people are not interested in prizes, but in your products. That is, we made a mistake when we advertised the competition in Apple lovers' groups - people who are not old enough to have their children, but not young enough to be users of our applications, came to us. In the case of a successful competition, we simply talked about it in groups that united parents, where activities for preschoolers and younger schoolchildren were held. Moreover, we did not order advertising for money, but simply added to the chronicle of other pages a message about our competition. Very rarely such messages were deleted, most often we received either very friendly offers of cooperation, or even mutual friendship and free advertising. Remember that adding messages to the chronicles of other groups can not be too often - otherwise you may be banned for 3 days for spreading spam. Allowed one message in 5-10 minutes, but not more. Do not neglect the forums and other places on the web where representatives of your target audience live. We, for example, invite mummies from various female forums and numerous communities from children. You can use both direct advertising, having agreed with the administration, and viral marketing.
Tip 4: Think about the conditions for identifying winners. They all have their pros and cons. In the case of a random number generator or a jury decision, make sure that you can prove the objectivity of your choice. If the voting tools are selected like and share, this means that, most likely, the winners will simply pay for the cheat. But, what can you do - everyone has this right. Remember that the most effective tool is not like, but share, so offer a more valuable prize for more share.
Tip 5: Remember that contests will only allow you to attract a new audience, and you will be able to hold it with interesting content. If you are a company that has only one application, or you rarely release updates, it will be difficult for you to ensure a steady interest in your products. An excessive enthusiasm for entertainment content, pictures with cats, attributes and demotivators will lead to the fact that no one will remember your company, even if there is interest directly in the published content. Do not fall into another extreme, advertising your products day and night. Alternate useful, entertaining and promotional content. Remember that 3-4 publications per day is a limit. It is better to reduce this amount to the maximum possible.
Tip 6: Plan your publication. Make a detailed publication plan for several months ahead. Keep in mind that for large advertising campaigns it is best to “prepare the ground” . That is, before the release of our new applications or updates, we post pictures of characters, photos from testing, create contests that will somehow be associated with a new or updated application.
Tip 7: Highlight the person who will only deal with social networking and contests. It takes much more time and requires more return than you might think from the outside. To entrust the maintenance of a page on Facebook as an additional burden to an employee who does something else as a main job is not the best option.
Tip 8: Let your face be friendly. Have you ever thought that through the articles and publications on social networks and blogs lurks the face of the person who writes this content? Your face should be smiling, simple and understanding, especially if you are talking to parents like us. Even if your posts are spelling and stylistic errors, emoticons and typos - these pages look much more “alive” than the pages where all the content is represented by official and dry phrases.
Now we are holding another contest - “I love Little Beetle” . Its conditions are simpler than in the previous competition - you do not need to have a child or an Apple device. It is only necessary to express the sympathy of our company. We were inspired to this contest after we learned that many people on the net accept us very loyally. To such an extent loyal that they even do fan art with their own hands (thank you so much for your support!). We will be happy if the residents of Habra join the competition .
Facebook to help!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/169969/
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