Customer Retention Part Two – Social Media Engagement

Last month, we wrote our first article in a series about retaining your mobile app customers. It was a good overview of things to keep in mind as you build, market and update your app, and now we’re ready to dig in a bit deeper on just how to go about accomplishing this.

Social Media Engagement Means You Should Engage

Today’s focus is on social media, one of the points covered in our first article. This doesn’t mean that you want to overwhelm Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and every other social media site with promotions and pleas to share promotions for your app. On the contrary, this is probably the quickest way to kill interest in your app among your friends, family and followers. You have to engage your followers and friends; after all, one of the primary purposes of social media is engagement. This means you need to take part in the conversation. Did someone share your Facebook post on their page? Great! Comment on their post, or give them a shootout on your own page. Is there a tweet out there with your name on it? Tweet ’em back! I shared a recipe with a friend via Twitter a few weeks back; the author of the blog saw it, tweeted me back and we started following each other. I’m now happy to say that I love reading their feed, and my diet has significantly suffered due to the other amazing food they’ve convinced me to make. With one simple tweet to me, they gained a follower and friend who is now a regular reader of their blog. It isn’t directly app related, but it’s not much different. So jump in, talk to people, become a part of the conversation. I promise you it will pay off.

Choose the right social media channels

Not every social media channel works well for every business or every app. Is your demographic primarily women in their early 20’s to mid 30’s? You’ll probably want to focus more on Facebook, whereas Twitter is where you’ll want to concentrate your attention if your app’s demographic is adults living in the city who are in their 20’s and 30’s. Know your app’s demographic, then learn the demographic of the social media sites so you can make the most of your efforts.

Make it fun!

You want to make sure that the things you share via social media is entertaining as well as informative. If you’re putting things out there (in addition to your app, of course) that are funny, interesting, and eye-catching WHILE being informative about your app, the odds of your marketing going viral are much higher. Make a fun YouTube clip, or even a Vine video series that makes your viewers laugh and while enticing them to download your app. Acting Out! paired up with Supercool Creative to come up with this cute little video:

Just make sure that you don’t oversell your app–yes, the point is to advertise and share your app to get more downloads and more support from your existing users, but if people feel like your shoving your ad down their throats the last thing they’re going to do is show you loyalty and pass it along.

Simple = successful

Let’s be honest, people are lazy. And if you make them work too hard to share your promotion or download your app, they just won’t do it. So don’t forget to add a link to your site or to the App Store. Add buttons for easy sharing on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Make sure that they’re never more than one click away from where you want them to be.

Up next in the series: Keeping Your Users Engaged.

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