Our guest post this week is written by Maggie Sheldon of Learning Touch, with a summary of social media tools app developers can use to promote their apps. As we gear up for Back To School app promotions, now would be an excellent time to ensure your marketing profiles are in order. Thank you Maggie!
Pinterest can help you make sure your marketing plan fits the 80/20 ratio by allowing you to quickly and easily create and share visually appealing content. With Pinterest, you can tell a story about who you are, not just what you’re selling. Create a Pinterest account here: http://pinterest.com/ 
Twitter is an interactive way to get in touch with busy moms who love freebies. There are also lots of discussions on Twitter hosted by educators, SLPs and so on. Create an account here: twitter.com and here: hootsuite.com (hootsuite helps you schedule tweets and keep track of your links). 
Facebook is a helpful tool to engage with your users and have more lengthy conversations than you can have on Twitter. When using Facebook, try to give your user a way to engage with you – that can mean answering a question, voting on future product features, getting a freebie, sharing with you. If you’re asking a question, prompt a friend or family member to be the first responder. Facebook users can be a little gun shy.
Create a Facebook page here: facebook.com
You can tag other pages that you’ve liked by using the @ symbol and then typing their name such as @Learning Touch
If you have 400 Facebook likes or more, Facebook allows you to promote your posts. I have found promoted posts to be much more cost effective than a sponsored story. Paying $5 to $10 bucks (the price depends on your followers) gets your post in the feeds of your Facebook likers who may not have recently interacted with your Facebook page. Promote posts where there’s something in it for your fan do better than just sales pitches. Make sure that you have some type of image in your promoted post. Posts with images tend to do better than ones without. 
This is a professional network, but it’s also a tool for distributing news about your app to interested colleagues in your field. Create an account: linkedin.com 
Blog
A blog is useful for posting your email campaign content, hosting giveaways, and providing information about your brand. Consider making a blog with http://www.tumblr.com/, http://wordpress.org/ or http://www.blogger.com/.
Sending out periodic emails is a another way to reengage with existing customers. For smaller lists (under 10,000), I recommend using MailChimp. There are some great widgets that you can use on your Facebook page and in your app for getting users to sign up. MailChimp also has lots of tips and tricks for getting your emails open and read. Check it out: mailchimp.com.
Email Signature
Not having an email signature is a missed opportunity to gain more social media followers. I use wisestamp.com and include links to my Facebook Page, Twitter and Pinterest account.
Very interesting, Maggie !
Couple of additions:
For Twitter, you can use this startup’s mega tool. It easy to manage it & super effective for any community manager.
– https://itweetlive.com/
– A proper LinkedIn profile is important for both of your brands prominence & your website’s authority
– Another good way to influence both your online & local community is sites like this one: http://www.donorschoose.org/
Doing good never hurt nobody 🙂
My 2 cents..
Yam Regev
Nice overview on social media techniques needed to help market an app.
Thanks!
What about Google+? Do you recommend it for marketing purposes?
Hi Saba, these days, I would actually recommend G+. Your G+ posts are integrated into Google’s services which is always good for exposure and rankings.