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Acquisition Channel Opportunities: Facebook, the App Store, Reddit Ads

Hey guys, this week I've analyzed over 4200 marketing/tech articles (my RSS feed is growing rapidly :)) ) to identify relevant news you can act on and get more (hopefully paying) users. Here there are:

1. Facebook has a bunch of marketing updates relevant for indie founders

Facebook is a popular acquisition channel for indie hackers, so it's worth noting when they release major marketing updates. Last week, they released not one, but **over five of them. **

To start with, Facebook introduced version 12 of their Marketing and Graph APIs. There's one paragraph inside the article worth paying attention:

To help advertisers find additional opportunities that weren’t originally available to them, when advertisers leverage Detailed Targeting and optimize for conversions, value or app events using the conversions objective they will be automatically included into Targeting Expansion.

What it means: Facebook will automatically expand your audience targeting if it determines it that could bring you higher conversions. To use this feature, you just need to create conversion or app installs campaigns.

Another update: Facebook now allows you to contact your users more often on Messenger (if they opt-in). Facebook has expanded its "Login Connect with Messenger" feature to all businesses that have completed business verification.

Facebook also published a blog post last Thursday with a few more interesting updates. The most relevant for indie founders is the fact that, when creating messaging ads, Facebook will now show users a dynamic call-to-action button that leads to the chat app (Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger) they're most likely to engage with. So make sure you have all 3 connected for your business so you could potentially increase your conversion rate.

The opportunities: There are several things you can do right now to improve your business/marketing, and I've bolded all the action points above.

Notice a pattern among all of these updates - Facebook's goal is to keep users inside its ecosystem as much as possible. These moves makes sense, especially after Apple announced ATT, which significantly hurt Facebooks targeting capabilities. Facebook wants to keep users within its ecosystem as much as possible to get more data and improve your conversion rate.

How to adapt to this changing reality: Feed the Facebook AI machine as much data as possible.. For example, instead of asking people to contact you via email on your Facebook Ads, ask them to contact you via Facebook messenger/Instagram/WhatsApp. With this, you're feeding the FB algorithm data that will help it find similar users who might also be interested in your business. Plus, you can eventually ask people for their email in a Messenger app anyway.

2. Apple is making it easier to market your app on social media

The news: Apple has announced a handy marketing tool, allowing you to more easily create custom marketing assets (like images and banners) to promote your apps on social media.

How to use this tool: Go here and find the app or game you own. After that, you'll be taken to an URL like this, where you can choose "what you're promoting" (a new app, app update, a subscription offer), the background color, the language and the image sizes you want to create.

After you complete the steps (takes a minute max), you'll get a bunch of images with the size of Facebook posts, Instagram stories and so on.

The opportunity: You can really save a lot of time with this. Admit it: How many times have you missed announcing an app update or a subscription offer due to you being lazy to fire up Canva and do a simple banner? This handy tool cuts the time to do this to a few seconds.

3. Reddit made it easier to estimate how much it would cost to advertise there

The update: Reddit has announced a few updates for Reddit Ads. One of them is called "Bid recommendations".

With it, you can just choose the sub-reddit(s) you plan to target and Reddit will show you an estimated cost-per-click if you want to appear there.

The opportunity: As indie hackers, we're on a budget, and the last thing we want is to start advertising and receive something 3 clicks for $100.

Tools like these make it helpful to predict if a particular channel will make sense for us financially. There's a big chance there are at least 2-3 sub-reddits relevant to your industry, so try this out and see if it makes a financial sense to put some ads there.

  1. 2

    Interesting about Reddit...anyone knows what are the average prices to advertise there?

  2. 2

    Wow so many new things coming from Facebook. Which one would you say is the most relevant to IHers?

    1. 1

      Hah, it all depends on the industry/what you're trying to accomplish. There's not a one-size-fits-all answer.

  3. 1

    Interesting, I never think Apple has marketing tool

  4. 1

    Good quality content, thanks!

  5. 1

    Didn't know Apple had marketing tools.

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