Okay. 1
So the last thing I'm going to talk about is using social media to your advantage. 2
So the thing about social media is that it basically can suck up as much time as you have. Now unless 3
you have a dedicated social media person, then you're really going to have to focus on where are your 4
audience at. 5
So say if you have a product that's related to food, you want to be all over Instagram because it's such 6
a visual thing. 7
Instagram is so geared towards that. 8
Now if you have a news app on the other hand then Twitter is going to be your platform. 9
But basically the idea is that you only have so much time that you can dedicate to this activity of 10
building social media following. 11
If you try to spread yourself too thin or get all of your team to be on all of the social's, you will 12
never win. 13
So figure out who your users are. 14
Figure out where they are at and then go and target that one platform and do it really really well. 15
But on the other hand, make sure that you grab the handles for your app or for your product 16
on the big four. 17
So that's Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. 18
Because if you've ever tried to buy back a handle, it is so expensive and so tedious that you will kick 19
yourself for not thinking of getting it 20
when you first launched. And in fact there's professional squatters who basically to sign up all these random 21
words and hope that some poor company is going to need it someday and they'll sell it for a couple of 22
thousands. 23
So grab your handles and focus on one platform. 24
Now the other thing you want to do especially if you're making an app is to make your app do your social 25
media for you. 26
What do I mean by this? 27
So here's a story. I think about a year and a half ago, there was this article on The New York Times about 28
36 questions to accelerate intimacy between strangers. 29
And it was quite a fascinating read. It was based on the research of a sociologist who discovered that 30
if you get two strangers to ask each other really intimate questions like "If you have to save your mom 31
or dad who would you pick and why?" 32
So not your usual Tinder date kind of conversations. But if you got two strangers to reveal themselves 33
and expose themselves in this way and then at the end there was this like super creepy four minute stare 34
into each other's eyes, until it hurts. 35
Kind of is. 36
Then apparently it will accelerate intimacy between two parties. 37
So this article really made the rounds on all of my social media feeds. I saw it on Twitter come up again 38
again. 39
People were discussing it, 40
people were sharing it. 41
It was all over Facebook. 42
And clearly there was a huge amount of interest in this idea. And I ended up spending about two hours 43
creating this really really simple app that basically made it really easy to try it out. 44
So instead of having to zoom in and swipe around on a blog post, you had an app that basically split 45
the screen into two so that you can lay the phone down on the table 46
and both parties can see the questions the right way up and the app would indicate whose turn it was 47
to go when and then at the end of course there's the four minute timer for the creepy staring. 48
But finally once you're done, you get given a compatibility score. 49
Now this is where I reveal to you my secret sauce. 50
For those guys who've done the iOS and Android programming courses, then you'll know what a random function 51
is and this is all it is. 52
It's a random function that pulls up a random number between 0 and 100 percent. 53
The numbers are skewed to show up more between 0 and 10 percent and 90 to 100 percent. 54
And that's by design because through data, we found that if that compatibility score was very low or 55
very high, people were incensed to share and shout about it. And to facilitate that action there's a button 56
called share on Facebook or share on Twitter. And then when they click one of those buttons the pop up 57
the shared dialogue is pre-populated with the URL of the app and their compatibility score. 58
So you see a lot of people posting on Facebook or Twitter saying "Oh you know me and my Tinder date we 59
have 99% compatibility or me and my husband we have 0% compatibility." 60
For some reason people are really interested in sharing this. And I hope that this is never a contribution 61
to the breakdown of a relationship. But essentially the idea is get your app to do your social media 62
for you try. Try and leverage the network effect. 63
You can only reach so many people. But if all of your users reached all of their friends who then reached 64
their friends, then those numbers are massive. 65
So try and see if you can get your social media to be automated.