How Not To Advertise Your App
I know I have not released the updates that I have promised; this is probably one reason why I have neglected this blog. I apologize on multiple levels, but I can assure you that this will be sorted out in a months time… At least I hope.
At any rate, I thought I would make a post on How Not To Advertise Your App. It seems like so many people are looking for solutions to the problem of how to get their app to market. Well, I want to tell you of one way NOT to do it.
There is a service called TwitHawk; I had read some reviews about it and thought that it might be helpful to promote BarCards. Essentially what you do is put together a search criteria to look at all the Tweets on the Twittersphere and add the responses that you want to send out to users whose tweets match that search criteria.
The founder of TwitHawk goes to great length in explaining how his service is not spam and the restrictions he has in place to prevent users from malicious intent. Some of these restrictions include: (1) only a limited number of tweets sent out per hour, (2) a user only will get ONE message ever from the Twitter account using TwitHawk, and (3) common words are not allowed to be the only things in the search criteria. I think that while his reasoning why it’s not spam may be compelling, there are certainly differences of opinion on this topic.
I will say that it is cheap ($0.05/tweet) and I thought I would take a chance on it for just $5 and get 110 responses (you start out with 10 for free). Since my game is a bar game I searched bar drinkin’ -quit as one of my terms and bar drinking -quit as my other term; I thought to put in the “-quit” to avoid those people who were giving up alcohol.
I created 5 responses and I designed them to be catchy to entice people to click the link to be taken to the App Store:
- while you’re at the bar tonight, check out @BarCards the hot new iPhone scavenger hunt game! http://bit.ly/agGhst
- if you’re out and about, you gotta check out @BarCards the new bar game! http://bit.ly/agGhst
- if you’re drinkin’ you might as well get your buddy to pay; check out @BarCards the new bar game http://bit.ly/agGhst
- did you hear?!? Free beer?!?!?! http://bit.ly/agGhst
- while you’re out, here’s an easy way to break the ice with the person you have you’re eye on: http://bit.ly/agGhst
Of the 110 tweets, I ended up getting 41 clicks for a CTR of 37%; pretty impressive for a CTR! However, this did not translate to sales. My hypothesis mainly lies in the fact that probably only a handful of those who clicked own an iPhone. I think that if TwitHawk expanded the criteria to include the Twitter Client (e.g. Echofon or others that are just on the iPhone) I would have had a higher rate.
Finally, there is the issues with users wondering why they got this @-reply mentioning their name, and other users being downright upset that they had been spammed.
I had three users who were kind of confused by my automatic replies asking them to purchase the app. Here were their responses:
- @BarCards Oh cool! I’ll get that as soon as I get an iphone…
- @BarCards free beer!!!! Lmao…u must don’t kno me!!!! Lol
- @BarCards I rather treat someone if drinking w. someone
prefer alone.
You could tell these users weren’t particularly “mad” but more curious why I would tweet them. I did have one user who was really pissed that I sent him an @-reply:
- @BarCards That is the kind of SHIT MARKETING that I HATE on Twitter. Thats like spamming my Gmail.
Wow, I didn’t really think I would get that sort of response, but I guess that is the risk you take when signing up for an automatic service to spread your message. The user then went on to send out another tweet so that his 350 followers would know how crappy BarCards was and one of those retweeted the message to his group of followers (hitting another 200-300!)! Ouch!
Overall, I think that TwitHawk is an ineffective way to advertise an iPhone App on Twitter. This is primarily because of the fact that you can’t search of the Twitter Client which would allow you to restrict your messages to only being sent to iPhone users. However, even if that feature was enabled, I think I would still refrain from using the service again.
Old school marketing would think that having only 1 person out of 110 getting upset about a message would be a pretty good rate. However, we live in a day and time where the customer’s voice is amplified and that one person can convey his dissatisfaction to a WIDE audience. In this sample case, 550 people now have a bad impression of my product and that is something I DEFINITELY don’t want to have. This reason alone should make you shy away from this service.
There’s a couple of things you can do to prevent the bad feedback, the first of which is to set your account up as ‘confirm first’ rather than ‘auto send’ until you are confident your search only brings back spot on results.
That way you can check the matches are what you are after, and avoid sending replies to people that potentially will get upset.
Regarding ‘spam’, the tool is not a spam tool, that’s pretty well branded all over the place, it has the potential if used poorly to come across as spam, but it’s the user not the tool.
I like the idea about also filtering searches by the app the tweet was sent via, however there’s a LOT of apps that need to be covered, so a single search would only be able to cover a single app i.e., Twitter for iPhone, not all mobile apps. Tricky to explain, but that’s all Twitter will allow.
Thanks for the insight and response Chris. I appreciate you taking the time to address this article.
For me, if I am going to do the “Confirm First,” I might as well just do searches on my topic on http://search.twitter.com. I was looking for more of an automatic way of promoting my app; while I agree that you are not spam, I am a little sheepish of using the service again because that one response to a person who flame negates the benefits.
Again, thank you for taking time to provide insight to your product to all my readers.