Myths of Russian and AppStore in general

Hi, exactly a week ago, the Bnet team, to which I was lucky enough to have a certain relationship, released the Dialogues application for iPhone.On the basis of this application, several hypotheses related to the promotion of applications were tested, to a greater extent in the Russian segment of the AppStore. Actually, the conclusions that were made will be discussed.

So, the application consists of two functional modules:

– to work with chats inside the VKontakte social network (all interface solutions are connected with this);

– to work with the photo stream of the social network, work with filters and gallery.

Facebook Instagram was the main inspiration for the application, the first one is of course the Facebook Chat, which was later bought by the giant, and the second one, which no longer needs to be introduced, Instagram, which has never learned how to work with vk.com . According to the application itself, its pros and cons, quite a lot of reviews were written last week, so there is no point in stopping here, let’s move on to the myths. Oh, yes, everything that is set out below is only conclusions made on the basis of the release of a specific application, and does not pretend to be true for everyone, a discus is requested in the comments.

Myth 1. The category should reflect the focus of your application, no more. Everything turned out to be not so simple, and I think that the importance of the visibility of the application, depending on being in the top of its category, does not need to be explained. But the traffic in different categories is completely different, for example, in social networks in Russia it is very hot right now. Of course, it makes no sense to put your category completely irrelevant to your topic, but if there is an opportunity to choose a more “free” one, I would advise you to do exactly that, for Slow start, at least for sure.

Myth 2. Being in the top overall is good for any application. I’ll make a reservation right away that for an application “for everyone” this is good, and even very good. It would seem that there is nothing wrong with narrower players? Well, actually two things, firstly, garbage traffic, which will never become loyal to your application, and will never be monetized – but if you don’t have your own server capacities, this is still half the trouble, secondly, bad user reviews related to misunderstanding of your niche, and in general, “Why?!” your application is there. And that’s worse. For us personally, being in the top 40 overall has always increased the daily active audience by 15%, while downloads have increased by 300-400%.

Myth 3. In the mechanism of virality, the main thing is to post. We generally have this application, not an application – but a viral tool. All in the social network, all in the people. And there is not much traffic from there, and then it becomes quite clear that the quality of the form and content that users post on the social network has a much greater impact than its quantity. Although, of course, one does not interfere with the other. Make the sharing material as clickable as possible – it may sound corny, but spend more time on it.

Myth 4. SMM is cool when you’re Coca-Cola. Of course, when you are a giant, any of your online activity causes a much greater reaction than a small application, but nevertheless, there is no end to the joy of the user – when developers respond to public comments in TVI, posts in VKontakte and Facebook, when they were not particularly asked. When a solution to a problem is being sought together, and even more so when people who just wrote to support then appear on the screenshots of the application in the storr. Communicate with your audience, now it costs almost nothing.

Myth 5. The whole marketing blow is in one day. This can be very cool when your traffic channels are discrete enough, and you essentially just reach a large audience in a shorter period of time, but most often the user bases are communicating, and then your reviews and banners will have less weight than they appear on a larger number of resources at the same time. Of course, we are now talking more about indies, who have every $ 100 in their account, and about Russia. Therefore, I would advise you to stretch such events by time for a week or two, but no more.

These 5 myths are what we wanted to check during the launch of the application, of course, things that are worth paying attention to a lot more, but we focused on the small. I hope at least one of them turned out to be useful for you.

Successful launches!