How to Find Influencers to Help You Market Your App to Millions of Potential Users

About the Author: Puneet Yamparala is the founder of the App Entrepreneurs Association and is located in the San Francisco Bay Area.

He has been involved in building app businesses for the last 5 years and helps people build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) from their ideas.

Puneet has also built one of the largest app related communities on Facebook. Find out more about how he did it at the end of this post. He can be reached on Twitter.

***

When I started marketing apps 5 years ago, just like most app entrepreneurs I had absolutely no clue what was the right way to market apps. I tried many different strategies and learned a lot from all these strategies.

What I realized is that not all marketing strategies are created equal and to really succeed on the app store you need to implement High Impact strategies. When you are aiming to get extraordinary results, there are basically two types of High Impact strategies.

Low Cost, Low Downloads, Long Term Strategies

The first type of strategies involves finding marketing channels which will give you a consistent stream of downloads for a very long time, for a really low cost. In fact, if you are able to successfully implement these strategies then you can just focus on improving your app, reducing your costs and be rest assured that people are going to continue to download your app.

They will also provide you feedback so that you can continuously improve your app over the long run. A few strategies, which fall under this category, are Facebook paid campaigns, App Store Optimization and building a community for your target audience.

Figure 1 - A consistent stream of downloads.

High Downloads, Quick Results Strategies

The second type of strategies are the ones which give you results by getting you immense amount of exposure for a short period of time. These strategies basically give you a huge spike of downloads and help you move up the top charts on the app store really quickly.

Getting covered by major blogs or publications, or being promoted by a really popular influencer can get you these kinds of results. A lot has been written about reaching out to bloggers and how to get press coverage for you app, so we will not be discussing about that in this post.

But very few people have shared the strategies on effectively working with popular influencers to get extraordinary amounts of exposure to your app in a very short period of time. So we will take a look at how to work with influencers to get a huge number of downloads in a very short period of time.

Figure 2 - Influencers help get huge spikes of downloads.

A few strategies which DO NOT fall under this category are buying burst download campaigns or running incentivized download campaigns. These are extremely poor ways to get downloads and cause more harm than good in the long run. Both these strategies result in a temporary boost in your download numbers but other important metrics like user engagement and retention are ruined.

Working with Influencers to Expose Your Apps to Millions

When you want to work with influencers there are two stages to this process. The first stage is finding influencers who are open to working with you.

The second stage is creating content, which will give you the best results.

Both these stages are extremely important, but in this post we will be focusing on how to find influencers to help promote your app.

Finding Influencers

The biggest problem app entrepreneurs face when trying to work with influencers is first finding the ones who are going to be willing to help them. With the process given below you can now quickly find influencers who are guaranteed to work with you.

There is no trial and error involved, you just reach out to these influencers and create content based on the format given in the guide mentioned in the previous section and you should be all set.

Which Influencers Should You Contact?

Once you go through the strategies given below to find influencers, keep in mind that not all influencers are created equal. You want to work with somebody who has access to your target audience.

For example if you have a fitness app, you obviously do not want to work with an influencer who is popular for her dessert recipes. Similarly if your target audience consists of women then a blogger for a men’s magazine might not be very helpful.

Finding Influencers on Instagram

On Instagram, go to search screen and do a search for keyword “SFS” which stands for “share for share.” All these accounts will usually have a huge number of followers. You can look at each account and make sure that the photos, which are being shared, get good engagement in the form of likes or comments before you contact them.

You can now contact each account, which looks suitable, and decide who you want to work with.

Finding Influencers on Twitter

For Twitter, you can use a tool called FollowerWonk.com and search for the keywords related to your niche. For example: if you want to target people interested in fast cars, search for “fast cars” or “automobile enthusiast” or something similar to find people who are popular and active on the topic your target audience is interested in.

If you want to do a broader search, search for the keyword “business” and you will find a list of accounts, which have a contact address for business enquiries. These people are willing to work with you for a small fee and usually have a couple of hundred thousand followers each.

Finding Influencers on Facebook

Finding influencers on Facebook is slightly different compared to other social networks. On Facebook you are not looking for individuals but rather looking for Facebook pages with a huge fan following.

To find such groups, go to the search bar and search for “admin.” In the search results, look for groups and you should see groups where admins of popular pages hang out. You can also find groups for admins of specific type of pages.

Finding Influencers on YouTube

On YouTube, just do a regular search for keyword “business enquiries ” and then filter the results to show only channels. You should get a good list of channels, which are open to working with you.

Again make sure that you pick the right channels based on their niche and the number of subscribers.

Conclusion

I hope this was helpful. In case you have any questions or if you know of any other strategies to find influencers to help you promote your app, just drop in a comment below.

***

To find out more about how Puneet put this information to use and built one of the largest Facebook app groups, you can hear his interview here.