FOR MOBILE SOCIALIZATION PLATFORM STARTUPS

NINE SECRET GROWTH TACTICS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction .. 3

Audience attraction tactics .. 4

1. Recruit users manually .. 4

2. Find your users by their pains and interests .. 5

3. Do more to stand out in the app stores .. 6

Audience engagement tactics .. 8

4. Provide your users with a reason to sign up .. 8

5. Motivate registered users to ask their friends to sign up .. 9

6. Gamify registration .. 10

Audience retention tactics .. 11

7. Make free gifts! .. 12

8. Help users on their first sign-ins .. 13

9. See how using your platform can become a habit for your users .. 14

Wrap-up .. 14

Have a Growth Tactic to Implement? .. 15

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INTRODUCTIONWhile you may invest huge efforts into releasing, updating and maintaining your perfectly polished and thought-through mobile socialization platform, just like with any other app, that alone won’t help you succeed. To drive lots of users and monetize your solution, you need to take advantage of the growth tactics that are up-to-date and indeed effective.  

As a mobile development team, in this PDF we’ll uncover 9 various growth tactics our clients and partners consider every now and then to get more attention and boost the user base. They all can be split into three categories according to the stages each person goes through with any mobile app:

Audience attraction tactics. These ones will help your potential users discover and notice your mobile socialization app.Audience engagement tactics. These ones will stimulate potential users to sign up and try your application after they have already found out about it. Audience retention tactics. These ones are aimed to motivate your audience to continue using your app and help it grow.  

Having tactics on every stage of the user journey will help you ensure they will always have the reason and incentive to remain interested in your offering, so let’s start!

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AUDIENCE ATTRACTION TACTICSApp promotion always starts with directing your potential users’ attention to your app. You can either reach out to your customers, or help them find you.

Reaching users usually implies classic approaches like sending emails, showing ads and shouting out through paid content, but one growth hacking technique is rarely considered, which is:

1.Recruit users manually.Think of your audience.

They most probably use social networks and Google, so you can find them on the Internet, but how you can find and reach out to them offline? In most cases, approaching your potential users personally will do a much better job than any paid Internet ads (which only interrupt people’s online experience).

In 2009, guys at AirBnb spent the $20,000 investments to fly to New York, where they went door-to-door to take photos of listed houses. This tactic finally helped them start growing.

After finishing the first version of Facebook, which was aimed to connect people around a single university, Mark Zuckerberg told about to his friends and thanks to word-of-mouth they had the first 300 sign-ups.

So go approach your audience offline and tell them about your product personally.

Once you go online, the problem turns to reaching the right audience with your message. Many companies look for people with blurry characteristics, like ’25-35 year old busy professionals", which may be a possible portrait of your user, but rarely helps you achieve results. Instead:

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2. Find your users by their pains and interests. This tip originally comes from Austen Allred, a co-founder of the crowdsourced newsroom Grasswire.

While this is a great tactic for gaining and working with Twitter followers, you can easily use it for finding potential users of your socialized startup all over the Internet.

Want to unite musicians and help them get heard? Search messages with words “help indie musician”, “support an artist”, and so on. Making a service for young moms? Look for Instagram posts with hashtags like #motherhood, #momproblems and others.

Just interacting with these people by following them, liking their content and commenting on it will help your service get noticed in an unobtrusive way.

Finally, unlike with web services, your mobile app has a home, and that is an app store page, and the last tip about audience attraction is…

In his Twitter growth hacks Austen gives an example of an iPhone screen protector manufacturer and suggests them to look for potential users by

searching messages like "need screen protector".

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3. Do more to stand out in the app stores.

You’ll surely already know how important it is to optimize your app store presence by inserting proper keywords, making compelling descriptions, naming your app, providing users with screenshots, videos and a catchy icon. Here’s a couple of additional tips that might additionally help you stand out and increase downloads:

For social apps aimed at a global market, it gets critically important to be localized. Often, such services skyrocket in regions you couldn’t expect and, on the contrary, fail in the countries you were focused on.

ICQ, a messenger once owned by AOL, has unexpectedly seen a major lift in the countries of Near East in 2016. And remember Orkut? Launched in

2004 as a global social network, it became mostly popular in India and Brazil.

Stats: Only 31% of all app revenue is generated by North American customers. 72% customers who speak English fluently but live outside the English-speaking world prefer using their native language.

While app store optimization helps users find your app, it still might be unnoticeable and burdened in the lists of similar offers. To stand out again and get noticed even after a great launch, think of how people generally surf the App Store and find apps.

Often, award-winning apps get a lot of attention, so consider winning an award. It should not necessarily be an Apple design award; there’s lots of others in the wild, like Best App Ever Award by 148apps.co, Appster Award, AppCircus Award and more. With any of it, your app will get more mentions in the media, and you’ll claim that your socializing service is now award-winning.

Another way to get to the app store’s main page is to get featured. In case of an iOS app, pitching an Apple’s App Store manager is a known way to go. You can also increase your chances each year when another iPhone or iOS version is released and Apple highlights the apps that are first to support the new hardware and software.

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Once you drove more people to your socialization platform, consider measuring the number of people who don’t sign up eventually and analyzing how to minimize your drop-off rate. While you can make use of specialized analytics tools here, we’ll uncover the top 3 additional tactics that you also might want to consider.

The simplest way to increase registrations is to…

4. Provide your users with a reason to sign up.In addition to all the benefits your platform provides, what else can you offer to your users to want them to sign up right here and now?

One of the most effective solutions here is exclusivity. In the world of 21st century, where most of the services are now free and easily accessible, exclusivity gains popularity again.

Alternatively, you can unlock some of your features for unregistered users to help them see the actual value of your platform. Once they get used to it, they will better understand the advantages of signing up.

AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT TACTICS

CargoCollective, for instance, allows visual artists wanting to have a portfolio online to apply for access instead of signing up. So here you’re intrigued whether you’ll get a pass into this club. Quibb, which sports a similar approach, tells it only accepts 41% of applicants.

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Ello, a social network without ads, required you to have an invite from your friend. Obviously, this is a more risky strategy (which is why Ello has eventually turned into a Pinterest-like site) and you should have a reason to have your service member-only, but if you have it, it is worth it.

Ways to gaining more registrations are often based on questions like "What can I do to drive more people to the app and let them sign up?" Numerous marketing practices provide numerous answers, but often we drop one of the obvious ways, which is to…

5. Motivate registered users to ask their friends to sign up.

Think of the similar bonuses you can provide to your users for shouting out to friends. In case of social platforms it should not necessarily be an almost useless set of stickers, but also an important feature like an ability to post videos or ask for donations (if applicable).  

That will get users excited and give them a worthy reason to call and convince friends to join the platform.

A more advanced approach is giving bonuses after a specific number of friends had signed up. Alternatively, if it requires too much efforts from a user, ask them to share a link for a reward.

Additional tip: if you’re asking your users to simply share the info about your service, be honest in your message. Instead of putting hard-selling call-to-actions, focus on your platform’s mission and motivating people to help it grow.

The most straightforward example here is Dropbox that offers extra space for every new friend signed up in the service. Such a tactic helped them increase signups by 60%.

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An example here is, of course, Facebook and Twitter, which allow you to see public posts without signing up, but following people and commenting the content is only available for registered users.

6. Gamify registration.No one likes filling up forms, that’s a true fact. That’s why one-button social logins are so effective.

However, in cases with socialization platforms, you often want to get additional info about your users and either avoid social logins, or ask to fill up additional fields.

In this case, think about gamifying this experience.

Thus, during the registration, show people the progress bar, split it into a few easy steps and consider removing all fields users can fill up later to shorten up the procedure. Once the user has registered, you can motivate them to complete their profiles through gamification features.

Also, games are often fun to play when you have somebody to play with. So how about introducing a registration chatbot that will praise the user for each answer and spur them to continue entering data?

In 2016, a registration bot HelloVote helped millions of millennials to get involved into a political process and vote in 2016 President Election. The registration process took around a minute in average and was accessible through the Facebook messenger, the website and via SMS conversation.

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Gamification is a tactic actively used by most social networks including professional-oriented Linkedin, which shows the percentage of your

profile completion and tells you "Users with complete profiles are 40 times more likely to receive opportunities through Linkedin".

Increasing registrations is a straightforward way for growth, but if people sign up and never come back to your platform, you’re doomed to fail. So how can you additionally retain your existing users? The obvious answer is to conduct user surveys, go into your analytics, make hypotheses and check them by A/B testing various features, messages, experiments with user interfaces, etc.

In the meanwhile, here’s three additional tactics you can use at any stage of your business.

AUDIENCE RETENTION TACTICS

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7. Make free gifts!Many marketers send email reminders and notifications to users who haven’t opened your app for some time, but if they are not personalized and far from user interests and actions, they won’t provide any persuasive incentive.

To help your users get back, think about free gifts you can offer them.

In cases with social platforms, you can either send content digests to show users what they’re missing, or offer them temporary premium membership, or unlock some secret features.

Alternatively, consider giving them free gift cards so that they would want to return to your app to make in-app purchases. Apart from being an incentive to remember about your app, free gift cards are shareable, memorable, create more excitement and increase brand loyalty.

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Whatever you do, sending a shitload of spammy email notifications with the subject line “We Miss You” is unlikely to

bend the [retention] curve significantly.

Andrew Chen, tech advisor for startups

Squarespace prolongs free trial. Dropbox gives more free space.

8. Help users on their first sign-ins.Up to 80% of users abandon newly installed apps within 3-7 days. Why this happens?

Since you also have a socialization platform, your key advantage is your users. Thus, help them start interacting with each other on the very first app opening. Think how you can learn about their interests to start suggesting relevant content or features.

Alternatively, motivate them to publish their first piece of content to help them get invested.

In other words, start personalizing user experience immediately after registration.

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Guys at Twitter once experimented and noticed that the people are more likely to return to the site after signing up if they have stated

following at least 10 users.

9. See how using your platform can become a habit for your users.Think of the specific regular life events when you app can be used.

If, say, you’re making a platform for schoolmates, then they can use it as the number one source for storing info on home assignments. Thus, they’ll open your app each time they start doing their homework.

In case of a social network for flight attendants, see if you can make the smartphone learn when the user is most probably flying in the plane, and them remind them to get advantage of your app.

Once you’ve found a way how using your app can become a habit for users, you can help them form it through personalized notifications and interface tips.

WRAP-UPWhile every startup has its own story of success, there’s still a lot of small yet proved tactics you can take advantage of and combine to achieve your intermediate goals.

Often, straightforward approaches to promoting your platform may turn out to be outdated, too expensive and ineffective. Finding your own path is more risky but more regarding in the end.  

We hope the above-mentioned tactics will help you take a fresh look at your business strategy and see additional ways of further growth.

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People open Swarm every time they enter a cafe or a restaurant. Twitter has become a way to express short thoughts that visit your

mind throughout the day.

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HAVE A GROWTH TACTIC TO IMPLEMENT?Whether you want to gamify user registration

make your mobile app localizable

extend it with any additional functionality

or do anything else related to mobile development

REACH OUT TO US!We’re a small team of mobile developers helping IoT startups and socialization platforms like yours one to develop cutting-edge Android/iOS apps and do them outstanding, engaging and profit-generating.