mobile-apps, growth, distributionMost popular mobile app growth engines are from apps where the users create content, like instagram, snapchat, twitter. Their engines are mostly about integrating with other social medias.
Not much is known about apps that are focused on consuming content. What are viable growth engines for these types of apps? Like Flipboard, Inoreader?
The bulk of Flipboard’s growth is the result of unusual factors:
They were first to market for all practical purposes. With a good app. And $10M+ of funding.
They were heavily pushed by Apple when iPad got released. They got named App of the year a bit later.
They integrated with Twitter, and piggybacked the latter’s major growth period as they became the de-facto social magazine app.
They pushed RSS when Google Reader got shut down. This got them mentioned in gazillions of how to migrate from Google Reader posts and articles.
There isn’t much you can readily reproduce in the above… Particularly the last one.
An aspect that is somewhat reproducible is their blog. For instance, they got a lot of geek attention when they wrote about how they got 60fps on the mobile web – it got fireballed, slashdotted, hackernewsed, redditted, you name it. And as you certainly know, geeks are the ones who recommend apps to family and friends.
Inoreader doesn’t look like it’s growing much. They’ve 5k FB Likes and 2k Twitter followers, vs ~140k and ~250k for Flipboard, and ~40k and ~95k for Feedly (which also grew because of Google Reader). If I were to make a guess, it’s probably the result of the usual suspects: a combination of content marketing, SEO, PR, social media, forums, word of mouth, etc. – the only difference being that they didn’t get to piggyback Apple, Twitter, or Google.
Little bit of Googling for growth hacking mobile news aggregators resulted in my finding this panel on Mobile Growth Hacking - which included Deema Tamimi, Head of Product Marketing, for Flipboard; notes on the talk & a recording of it are posted here.
Number of nuggets present, which you can digout, but personally thought this one was nice:
Flipboard found that the number one reason people hadn’t been to the app in over 28 days, was that they basically forgot about it. With so many apps on a user’s phone, simple email reminders can be an effective tool for bringing back old users.
After reviewing the information, if you're still looking for more, you might try contacting Deema Tamimi (@deemanator) directly.
UPDATE: Forgot to mention that with tools like this, being able import feeds from other readers is a huge boost. For example, when Google Reader was shut down, number of the readers created "how to" pages just for a given reader, added import functionality, and promoted them with the press too.
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