Using Facebook to Help Sell Your iPhone and Android Apps
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A Facebook fan page can help you generate interest and sales in your apps. Just like all types of marketing, you need to go where the people are if you want them to hear your message. And that means Facebook. Facebook is where many of your buyers are, and allows you to establish a community where you can talk about your app and receive comments from users of your apps. You can post unlimited graphics of your apps, and you can also post videos of your apps. So, it's a great platform share your apps with an audience that cares about your app.
Some popular iPhone and Android apps have thousands of fans who have "liked" their page and follow the activities of their favorite apps.
Your Facebook Marketing Objectives
Your goals for using Facebook should accomplish several things:
- First, you want to be found by people who may be interested in buying your iPhone, Android, or iPad apps.
- Second, you want to connect with these potential customers and establish a relationship with them. You can use Facebook to create a fan page for your app within a few minutes. You can start to build your page by going to www.facebook.com/pages/create.php and filling in the details for your app. Setting up the initial page will only take you a few minutes.
Building out the page can be done in less than one hour, but it depends on how much content you want to add to the fan page. You can start by filling in a description of your app, and then add videos and photos of your app. Of course, one of the links you want to add to your site is a link to app on the App Store. This is critical! You can get the URL to your app on the App Store by going directly to your app within the App Store, highlighting your icon, and right-clicking with your mouse. You will see two options: Copy Link and Open Link. You can copy the link and then paste it into your fan page. If you are posting an Android app, you can get your link to the Android Market by simply going to your app in the Android Market and copying the link URL to your page. You may also be using other Android stores such as the newly released Amazon Appstore or GetJar. Simply post the link to your site in the same way.
Videos are also a very good way to get exposure for your app. People would rather watch a video than read about it. It's so much faster and easier for visitors to get a feel for your app if they can experience it with a video. At a minimum, be sure to provide lots of screen shots of your app so you can show it off to the world.
Getting the Word Out
Once you have completed all the details for your page, you can then work to get the word out about your app. The first step is to invite your friends to become fans of your app page and "like" it. The more people you can get to like your page, the more interest you will gain. This will help you to initiate a viral marketing process for your app. When people like your page, it's published in their news feed for all their friends to read, further helping to get the word out about your app. You never know how far this will take you, but the more friends you have on Facebook, the more success you will see.
Facebook also offers advertising based on click-through activity. You can create an ad for your app's page and target the ad to a very specific subset of people generating huge amounts of traffic to your page. Be careful, though. Just like Google AdWords, you can set your own budget and spend lots of money on people clicking through. So, go slowly and see if the results generate sales of your app. It's one thing to get traffic to your site, but you need to convert them to buying customers, too.
Final Thoughts
Don't overlook the opportunity to get the word out about your apps by using Facebook to your advantage. Social media is an important avenue to help you get exposure for your app. It's tough to predict why one well-written app goes viral and another well written app doesn't, but getting your app maximum exposure can only help.