Building a community for your app

Every now and then, you come across some apps being mentioned on Social Media. It might be a tweet about Slack by one of your friends, or a tweet about a social analytics tool by your favourite growth hacker. Looking at all these tweets, you wonder, what is it that these apps have done that they have this loyal army of users talking about them, without any compensation?

In this article we will share with you tips on building and maintaining a community for your app.

Choose a Social Media Platform

You have to be where your users are. Create a Twitter account or Instagram account, and start following your target users. When any of your users mention a praise for you, thank them. If any of them complains about it, assure them that you will fix it. It irritates users that their complaints go into a void.

Users like to know that they are being heard and end up following you. What helps in some cases is a bit of humour, but try not to overdo it.

Create and share quality content, like images or relevant quotes that might strike a chord with your users. This makes them follow you, and often share it with others.

Highlight Superusers

When your users use the app, reach out to them and ask if they would like to be highlighted as “Superuser” of the week on their social media channel. Genuinely interview them and ask them how your app supports them in their daily lives.

And then post the content to your social channels. Users like to share content that is about them, and they will share it with their followers. This also gets other users aiming to be your superuser. Your users get more social validation and you get more followers. It is a win-win game

Run Giveaways and contests

While the aim of this tip is to solely get your audience to share your content or interact with you more – giveaways can actually be lucrative and can bring in a lot of business for you. Organise a giveaway with the concept central to your app.

For ex : If you are a fitness app, ask your users to share pictures of their morning run, and then gift premium membership to your app along with something that might be useful for your users, say a pair of shoes.

These tips get users attention and more often than not, gets them hooked onto your app. Once they see your app being mentioned, your name is imprinted in their thoughts and brings them back to your app. So a good social media strategy would not only improve your community but increase your engagement.