By Alex Genadinik
For the past six months, my company Problemio has tried to establish our presence on social media. We experimented with Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, and StumbleUpon. The products we promote are free and paid mobile apps that help people plan and start their businesses. What we found was that it is nearly impossible to increase downloads in any substantial way (even free downloads) using social media, but that we were able to re-engage our users with a reasonable degree of success.
How we got social media attention
Originally, in hopes of some sorts of viral effects, we placed calls to action in our high-volume free business plan app for people to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. We also placed social media buttons on our website, but the website does not get too much traffic compared to our apps.
Facebook
Thus far we have attained just under 400 likes to our Facebook page, but no viral spread or downloads that we could track back to Facebook happened. Instead, we have at times been able to re-engage our existing users with our content and get them to check out our app updates or some links we post.
Twitter
In the few months of activity, we grew our Twitter following to @problemio from 300 to about 500 people. About 50-100 of those people were users of our apps that responded to our call to action to follow us. They almost never engage with us directly, but when we post various links about our updates or articles we write, we do notice that some people click on them.
StumbleUpon
We do not have a call to action for people to stumble us on the apps which is where most people engage with our brand. We only have StumbleUpon buttons on our website. We get almost no stumbles daily and that button has not been too useful for us.
Pinterest
We have a small but active presence on Pinterest. People engage there a little bit, but the actual traffic that comes to our website is minimal.
Google+
We found Google+ to be mostly useful to improve our website’s SEO, but not effective for re-engagement or marketing to new users directly.
Alex Genadinik is a mobile developer and founder of Problemio mobile business apps. Alex holds a B.S in Computer Science from San Jose State University. Please say hello on Twitter @genadinik and let Alex know what you thought of the article.
