Customer Messaging and Social Media Can (and Should) Work Together

When you think about your brand’s mobile users or social followers, it’s important to remember that these aren’t necessarily separate groups of people. After all, social networking is the most popular internet activity—and 60% of social media engagement occurs on mobile. If you’ve got people who are engaging with your social media presence who aren’t using your app or visiting your, that’s an opportunity. The same goes for loyal mobile users: if they’re loving your brand’s in-app or mobile web experience, social media can be a powerful platform for them to express that enjoyment.

So if your mobile strategy isn’t in sync with your approach to social, it’s time to take action to align your customer messaging across these key channels. To help you get there, let’s take a look at a two-pronged approach to integrating social media and customer messaging:

1. Take Advantage of Social Media to Drive Mobile Awareness, Acquisition, and Engagement

72% of U.S. adults are on Facebook, the world’s most popular social network, and 70% of Facebook users engage daily. Given the sheer volume of social media users and how strongly people tend to engage with social networks, it’s no surprise that social traffic is one of the top drivers of website traffic and a major user acquisition channels for mobile apps, too.

While many brands focus their social media efforts on paid app install ads, that’s not the only way to use social to bolster your mobile presence. By using social posts to promote new blog posts, significant website and app updates, and other appealing content, you can nudge people who follow you on social to download your app or visit your website—or to revisit them, if they’ve engaged in the past and drifted away.

2. Use Social Integrations on Mobile to Deepen Customer Engagement and Drive Organic Mobile Acquisition

If you have customers who love your brand, you want them to tell people. And social media makes it possible for your loyal, satisfied customers to broadcast that message to their friends and family all over the world. Marketers that use customer messaging to make it easier to share positive information about their brand on social can activate social ambassadors in authentic and meaningful ways, fostering organic use acquisition through social sharing and referrals. Another smart thing about this tactic? Users acquired this way are more likely to stick around.

5 brands using social to boost their mobile presence (or the other way around)

Looking to make fuller use of your social media presence and customer messaging channels to drive stronger engagement and organic customer acquisition? Consider taking a page from these five brands:

1. WEATHER CHANNEL

Let’s talk about the #weather. Send your friends the weather directly from The Weather Channel for iMessage App. Click the link in our profile to download. #iOS10 #Apple

A post shared by The Weather Channel (@weatherchannel) on Oct 2, 2016 at 9:01am PDT

When the release of iOS 10 made it possible for third-party brands to engage customers through integrations with Apple’s iMessage social and messaging platform, the Weather Channel didn’t hesitate. The brand launched a new social sharing feature that allowed iPhone and iPad users to send relevant weather forecasts to friends and family via text, demonstrating the value of the Weather Channel’s app and adding real value. Even better? The Weather Channel uses its social media channels to inform social followers about the new feature, encouraging organic app downloads and re-engaging lapsing users.

2. MAP MY RUN

What’s the point of working out if you can’t #humblebrag about it on social media? MapMyRun offers users the ability to share activity updates to friends within the app as well as those on larger social networks. By making it easy for users to share their activity with a larger audience, MapMyRun makes it more likely that users will stick to their workout goals (all that transparency is great for keeping people honest). And there’s also an added bonus: those shared activity updates can increase brand awareness, driving organic installs through this kind of grassroots social sharing.

3. DUOLINGO

Source: Reddit

When language learners unlock new fluency levels while using Duolingo, they’re more likely to feel connected to the app. Duolingo takes that a step further by using in-app messages to encourage app users to add that accomplishment to the professional social network, LinkedIn. The benefit of sharing this content on Linkedin is twofold: users get to bolster their professional profile by highlighting a new language proficiency, and Duolingo receives both visibility on a prominent social network and an understood credibility as a legitimate measurement of said proficiency. It’s a win-win!

4. EVENTBRITE

Attending an event can be fun—but attending with friends is even better. Events listings brand Eventbrite makes it easy to invite friends along by using in-app messaging to nudge users to share a given event on social networks or messaging platforms. That functionality makes Eventbrite’s app more useful for users, while also upping the chances that they promote the app on social, potentially driving organic app installs.

5. INSTAGRAM

Surprise! Now you can share up to 10 photos and videos in one Instagram post! https://t.co/OpBAUxcmJ4 pic.twitter.com/U2u0OmBJln



— Instagram (@instagram) February 22, 2017

When you add multiple photos & videos to a post, it’s easy to decide how you want it to look. You can even rearrange before you share! pic.twitter.com/J0uy9l02kt



— Instagram (@instagram) February 22, 2017

Surprise! 🎉 Swipe left on the post above to see more. Starting today, you can share up to 10 photos and videos in one post on Instagram. With this update, you no longer have to choose the single best photo or video from an experience you want to remember. When uploading to your feed, you’ll see a new icon to select multiple photos and videos. It’s easy to control exactly how your post will look. You can tap and hold to change the order, apply a filter to everything at once or edit one by one. These posts have a single caption and are square-only for now. On a profile grid, you’ll notice the first photo or video of a post has a little icon, which means there’s more to see. And in feed, you’ll see blue dots at the bottom of these posts to let you know you can swipe to see more. You can like and comment on them just like a regular post. This update is available as part of Instagram version 10.9 for iOS in the Apple App Store and for Android on Google Play. To learn more, check out help.instagram.com.

A post shared by Instagram (@instagram) on Feb 22, 2017 at 8:01am PST

When it comes to taking advantage of social networks to promote their app, Instagram has a big advantage—it IS a social network, after all. But while it’s smart about using its own social network to keep users informed about app updates and new features (like their new multi-photo posting capabilities), Instagram doesn’t stop there, choosing to use outside social networks like Twitter to spread the news further and encourage organic downloads.

Final thoughts

Coordinating your customer messaging and your social media efforts, if done effectively, can create a major virtuous circle. Done right, brands can acquire new app users and web visitors through their social posts, then turn around use web and mobile app messages to encourage the kinds of positive social sharing that drive organic customer acquisition.

To get there, make sure you understand the factors that influence customers to promote your brand on social, as well as the four major messaging channels and how to use them to effectively activate and engage your customers.