Every single Iphone app developer needs a twitter. Make sure your consumers know how to get to your twitter and subscribe to it. This way when you release a new app, everybody who has subscribed to your twitter will see it. This could mean THOUSANDS of people buying your app just from your twitter.
An app review and a bunch of subsequent tweets in Japan pushed a previously dormant app of mine into the top-100 there (for a day). That was a bigger effect than I expected.
An app review and a bunch of subsequent tweets in Japan pushed a previously dormant app of mine into the top-100 there (for a day). That was a bigger effect than I expected.
What's the website that published the review, if that's not asking too much?
My followers fluctuate basically daily - going from 10 to 20, and back down/up. I've had some mentions of my apps by other twitter accounts, and that has had a very minimal impact.
Overall, blog mentions have been the bigger draw, as well as maintaining top 50 and top 100 rankings for a while. As far as I can tell, Twitter hasn't don't more than gain me the occasional sale here and there. For someone with thousands of followers, it's one thing. But without a large following, it's not worth much.
We currently have 81 followers and it seems to go up by 1 or 2 every day without it ever really going down. Although that's not a lot, it will be eventually if our pace keeps up. We still have many products to release so I expect it to continue to climb. We are only following 2 people.
I find Twitter to be good at three things:
1 - Customer service. We get a lot of questions about our products and future products via Twitter.
2 - Notices. When we had a windstorm the other week and power was knocked out to our servers, we were able to notify customers who follow us on Twitter quickly.
3 - Upsale and cross promotion. Got a new app coming out that is similar to the one they just bought? Cross promote it.
The easiest ways to get people to follow you are:
1 - Put the line "Follow us on Twitter @mycompany" as your first line in your app description. Release a free app with that in the description and your followers may increase because you get more visibility.
2 - Always ask users to follow you on Twitter within your app (using Twitter API is best), in tutorial videos, and in YouTube videos. Include a Twitter plugin with your blog/website. Very easy if you use something like WordPress.
I just gave WAY too much information away for free to my competition, but I'm feeling like a generous guy today.
There are also some great tools that can help here. We use SocialOomph to both grow our following, and to manage content.
The main way to grow a following - find people interested in your content. You can set up SO to look for people tweeting certain key phrases like "my iPHone" or "app review". You know these people will either have an iPhone, or be an app reviewer. If you have a more specific target, adjust these keywords accordingly (an app for kids? Try "kid iphone" youll get anyone who mentions something like "my kid was on my iPhone today and..")
Follow people in the hope that they will follow you back, see your content, and potentially re-tweet it or purchase your app.
Occasionally clean out the people you are following however, there are ratio limits that Twitter uses and many of the people you follow wont follow back and/or you really have no interest in what they are tweeting about.
Ethans tips are great too! To add to that - put it everywhere (and as an active link when possible). Add it to your facebook profile, your email signature, your forum signature... etc.
Twiter is a great idea. Even if you have very few followers like myself, persevere, tweet to them, even if you only have a few. Eventually your followers should build up.
It really depends on your target demographic. Make sure you have non-sales related news, information or even humor.
My favorite clients twitter to manage is @ThePocketDevil - we populate it with a number of #Devilisms that have a humorous but evil twist to them, as well as information about the app, re-tweets from "evil" tweeters and a twitter list called "Axis of Evil" where we follow people like @Satan, @HitlerInHell and more. Basically, we have created a "voice" for the page, and are now populating content and slowly growing a following.
Twitter is good for updates that you are going to do regularly, but if you really want to promote a new product to your client base, you really want to be collecting their email addresses instead. Most users aren't checking their Twitter feeds often enough that most will probably miss your tweet, or it may be lost in all the others they received, that's not going to happen with email. Facebook is also good, if not better than Twitter IMHO. I believe most people check their Facebook accounts more often and there is usually less news feeds each day to get lost in, and you can include a lot more details in your posts than you can in a Tweet.
Quote:
Originally Posted by paluter
Every single Iphone app developer needs a twitter. Make sure your consumers know how to get to your twitter and subscribe to it. This way when you release a new app, everybody who has subscribed to your twitter will see it. This could mean THOUSANDS of people buying your app just from your twitter.
Twitter is a good way to get promotion but I didn't get much followers through this, just 20 to 30 and it keeps on fluctuating between this. I think it would be better to go with facebook rather than twitter.
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