13 ways to promote your Facebook app

How to get traction even with a shoestring budget

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, Facebook administrators.

Guest post by Jim Belosic
CEO, ShortStack

You’ve just created an app for your organization’s Facebook page. Now what? How do you effectively promote it? And more important, how do you get users to visit your app and share it with their Facebook friends? These two tasks can seem daunting to someone working on a shoestring budget — but neither one is as hard as you might think.

Once you’ve built an app that resonates with your fan base, you’re already halfway there! The next step is to come up with a game plan to promote it. In my experience, both from promoting my business’s apps and from hearing what other small business owners and nonprofits do to promote theirs, I’ve learned that you don’t need to spend a lot of money — or any money at all — to get the word out about your cool new app.

Here are 13 tips for promoting your Facebook app on a shoestring budget:

Enable app sharing features

1In the design of your app, include a “share” button. Enabling sharing allows users to share their app activity on their Timeline for their Facebook friends to see. For voting contest apps in particular, this is a great way for users to promote their own contest entries and get their friends to help them win.

Incentivize users to share

2Create an incentive for users to share your app with their friends. Do this with a refer-a-friend feature. When a user shares your app or their contest entry with their friends, they get extra votes or points. This allows for your app to be promoted to a broader group of people and it helps the users sharing your app come closer to winning the promotion or contest they entered into.

Post multiple status updates

3Don’t be afraid to remind your fans about your app. Post multiple Facebook announcements during different times of the day and throughout the week. For example, if you just launched a contest app, make multiple status updates to let fans know much time is left until the contest ends and to ask them to share the app with their friends.

Alert your email list

4Whether your list includes 50 or 50,000 subscribers, send an email to your list asking them to check out your new Facebook app. If you’ve created an app for a giveaway, make sure to let everyone on your email list know to check it out for a chance to win! Sending out an email helps notify all your fans that don’t see your content on Facebook because of EdgeRank.

Use Twitter for personal outreach

5Rather than tweeting out generic updates like, “Check out our new app for a chance to win!” it’s more effective to tweet at individuals who you think would most likely share news about your app with their communities. You can also test using a specific hashtag in the tweets in which you’re promoting your app — this will help your company keep track of what users are saying.

Update your Facebook cover photo

6According to Facebook’s updated promotion guidelines, calls to actions are now allowed in the copy and design of cover photo images. This is a total game-changer! Draw attention to your apps by using arrows or other illustrations that point to your Timeline’s apps.

Design and arrange app thumbnails

7Design your app thumbnails to coordinate with the look of your app and include text that includes a call to action such as, “Enter Now!” Also, arrange your app thumbnails so that your most important apps are featured on your Timeline.

Make an announcement on your website

8If your company receives a lot of traffic to your website, make updates to your site to promote your app. You can change the design of your website header to promote your app, or even install a Hello bar at the top that links to your app.

Blog about it

9If you have a nonprofit or company blog, use it as a platform to talk about your newly launched custom app. Within the blog post, be sure to link back to your app. This will increase awareness for your app and drive traffic back to your app.

Issue a press release

10When your organization launches an awesome new app, it’s news — so write a press release about it. Most apps, especially contest and promotion apps, anchor an organization’s overarching campaign. Use the press release to talk about the campaign, then provide a call to action and a link to your app.

Make in-store announcements

11If you own a brick-and-mortar business, create signs and add a line to receipts reminding customers to visit your Facebook page to check out your new app. You can also print a reminder on the bottom of receipts.

Ask employees to spread the word

12Even if you have only a handful of employees, ask them to Like your page and share your Facebook app with their community of friends. A simple, “I’d love if you’d help get the word out about this” can go a long way.

Invest in ads

13The tips above will cost you next to nothing. If you do want to invest some money in promoting your Facebook app, put it toward Facebook advertising. Facebook advertising is an easy and inexpensive way to target ideal users and drive them back to your app.

To learn more about Facebook advertising, you can download this great free resource: How the Pros Use Facebook Advertising: The Most and Up-to-Date Comprehensive Guide.

Think outside the bucks

A limited budget should not limit your business’s ability to promote your Facebook app. Use resources and features that are already available to your business for free and leverage traditional PR and marketing efforts to give new exposure to your app.

What else would you add?