With the number of apps increasing every day, marketers keep devising different strategies and finding hacks to increase app installs. Most marketers focus on optimizing app store pages, building a community, tracking advertising campaigns, being active on social media and so on.
What they miss, however, are some of the more underrated and ignored tactics to generate users for their app. Two such channels are Quora and Reddit.
In this post we are going to talk about how to leverage these channels to increase app installs.
Why Quora
Quora has about 1.5 million monthly visitors worldwide, which is a significant audience. You can use Quora to build authority on your chosen topic, learn from others, answer questions about your product directly and find out the questions people are asking about your product or industry.
Some of the best practices to use Quora effectively are:
Create A Good Quora Profile
Once you’ve logged in to Quora, create an optimal profile to show off your expertise. If it’s not evident from your profile, people might not be interested in your answers as well. Be sure to include links in your profile to your main website/app or main social accounts. This should help to lead traffic from Quora back to your app.
Here is how a good profile looks on Quora.
Follow Relevant Topics
You can have Quora questions and answers sent to your inbox every day. To get started, simply type into Quora’s search box the topic you’d like to follow. Quora will give you a list of suggestions, and when you click through to a topic page, you’ll even see an extra list of related topics to follow along the side.
In this case, one good topic to follow can be your app type and your industry. For example, “Best apps for Android” could be the topic to follow if you want to promote your app.
Answer Top Questions
Every category has a list of most answered questions. Here our aim is not to advertise but to reach as many people as you can. Make sure you answer questions that have high visibility and search volume in that category.
When searched for “best android apps” and applied the Answers filter, Quora shows the most answered questions. Below is the screenshot:
Start A Quora Blog
One non promotional way to get involved on Quora besides the standard question-and-answer format is to start blogging. Posts get circulated around the network and you can share your posts on social media to attract readers and followers.
Let’s take examples to understand Quora marketing better.
Lifestyle Apps
If you are trying to market lifestyle apps, Quora has a lot to offer. Since, the idea is to spread knowledge and not to do promotion, you can answer questions like, “Which recent products or services have affected lifestyle in profound way?” with a reference to your app. Or you can also leverage the direct questions that people ask in search for good alternatives.
One such example is:
Educational Apps
For educational apps, the language needs to be more subtle and friendly. When answering questions about educational technology, you need to list the benefits of your product.
You can not directly promote your product but instead look for the right opportunities where you can interact with users, solve their problems using your app. Here is an example of such a question:
Apart from these, with the recently launched Quora ads, you can make use of this network to the fullest as Quora ads are pretty targeted and mostly need based.
Unlike other social platforms, your ads will appear only to the audience who is actually looking for answers to their various queries. These ads aren’t usual banner ads and are not at all irritating.
Why Reddit
With traffic of about 2 million unique visitors, Reddit is another great source of traffic. Most Reddit users are male, between the ages of 25-44 and belong to U.S. and Canada.
The best way to get the most out of reddit is to interact on relevant threads. Post incredible photos, videos, ask for help or suggestions.
Upvote relevant comments and leave your own comments. So if your app has a good blog, make the most out of it on Reddit. Upvoting helps your content getting to the top. The more upvotes you have, the higher your post will go and possibly make it to the front page.
Use Subreddits Effectively
Learn to use subreddits efficiently as some subreddits might be too broad and some might be too narrow. Find generic subreddits where it’s easy to talk about almost anything such as /r/todayilearned - These submissions start with TIL for “Today I Learned”. If you have some interesting information or news that would appeal to a large group of people, this is the best place for it.
How To Use Reddit For App Promotion
There are 3 ways to use Reddit for your app’s marketing, namely: comments on already asked questions, following subreddits related to your industry and submitting valuable content like a blog post or a tip.
Below is an example of how you can easily talk about your app directly while providing the user with genuine answer to his query.
These types of threads are hard to find but really useful to increase app visibility.
Or you could just follow subreddits like r/androidapps and look for the right opportunity to promote your app while sharing valuable content.
Tracking Your Installs
So we’ve discussed how to use platforms like Quora and Reddit to increase app installs and promotion. Now another important factor is the tracking. How do we track if our efforts are causing any change?
To make sure your installs are being tracked properly, use UTM links for Quora engagements.
The main use of UTM links is tracking. Let’s take an example. If your URL reads: https://example.com/landing-page/
After applying UTM it will be something like this: https://example.com/landing-page/?utm_source=question_name&utm_medium=Quora&utm_campaign=Quora_referral
When someone clicks on this link, your app installs via Quora can be easily tracked in analytics and are available in the usual reports.
Using Google Analytics’ segmentation features, you can segment the data of app install channels and app retention channels in order to make better decisions about which acquisition channels to use in the future. Since we are using UTM for social engagements here, when you’ll look in the Analytics report, you can segment the data based on the fact that which question got most installs.
Long story short, with a solid content marketing approach using unconventional channels, you should be able to generate awareness, anticipation, and healthy downloads for your app.
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* Adapted lead image: 
