When it works, influencer marketing can be a wonderful thing, leading to huge sales, major brand recognition, significant buzz, or millions of people installing your mobile app.
Even if it's entirely accidental.
That's exactly what David Reichelt and Zeb Jaffer experienced with their hot app Color Switch. Color Switch is an addictive mobile game in the Flappy Bird genre: super-simple with just one action for players to take, but challenging enough -- or perhaps infuriating enough -- to keep people trying.
In 2016, Reichelt and Jaffer managed to get Color Switch to number one, not just in the App Store gaming category, but the top of the leaderboard of all free apps, mostly via a combination of social media marketing and micro-influencer marketing via Fortafy, a Facebook page focused on gaming and youth.
Then Kanye West kicked them off their high horse.
"We launched the game and got it to #1 through the Fortafy community," Jaffer told me recently. "We stayed at #1 for 28 days, but that's when Kanye started pushing his music platform, Tidal."
In January and February of 2016, Kanye West started mobilizing his 27 million Twitter followers to download Tidal, a music app in which he had an ownership stake, and buy "Life of Pablo," one of his albums.
"In February, Kanye West tweeted out: 'Get Life of Pablo to #1,'" Jaffer told me. "His fans go the app store, and they see that his app was number two and our app was number one. That day we picked up 750,000 new users."
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| Kanye West's tweet, as it appears on Twitter.com. |
On February 14, as West continued to push the new music platform, Tidal reached number one, displacing Color Switch. At first glance, that would seem bad.
Not, however, when you see what West tweeted:
While West's tweet celebrated Tidal's number one position in the app store -- a spot it soon relinquinshed -- the most visible app icons in the tweet, thanks to how Twitter displays images, were Color Switch, Snapchat, Messenger, and Facebook. The latter four hardly needed his accidental endorsement, but Color Switch took off.
"When he did get to number one, he tweeted a screenshot of the app store straight from his mobile … and ColorSwitch was number two," Jaffer told me. "And that day we did like 800,000 installs."
Kim Kardashian, West's wife, retweeted his tweet to her 50 million Twitter followers, and the rest of the family got into the action:
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| Kylie Jenner accidentally helps out too ... |
There are always, of course, many reasons why an app is successful. And Color Switch was already high in the App Store. But the inadvertent celebrity boost was a key reason, Jaffer believes, in giving the app increased momentum ... and staying power. Many apps shoot down the charts just as fast they shoot up, after all.
The app just crossed 150 million installs on iOS and Android combined, over half of which are from the U.S., Jaffer says. Fortafy Games, the company behind the app, still has only four full-time employees, including Marc Lejeane, a key developer, and Sam Ratumaitavuki, who focuses on viral marketing.
REF: forbes.com , Contributor :
John Koetsier is a journalist, analyst, and speaker. He analyzes and forecasts mobile trends for TUNE. Follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
