I read Twitter Means Business by Julio Ojeda-Zapata on vacation in Mexico. Julio is a nationally recognized tech journalist (for example, see his post about his recent appearance on TWiT) who covers tech news for the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

A quick tangent on my Mexico trip before I continue…

I knew Nokia was #1 in global market share for mobile phones, but I haven’t traveled outside of the U.S. much over the past year so this hadn’t really sunk in. I was amazed at how many low-end Nokia feature phones there were in Mexico. For example, I sat on a ferry ride next to a young guy who worked for mobile game company Gtech.  In my extremely choppy Spanish and his choppy English, we discussed the difference in iOS versus Android, and games built for feature phones.  Pretty funny discussion on who’s the target market for various phones.

I was late to adopt Twitter… Why?

I was down on social media after watching Facebook transition from its initial early adopters to its current position of mass consumer penetration. Through the transition to the mainstream, Facebook ended up becoming a pretty worthless professional tool for me. I’ve always been a LinkedIn fan, but I find LinkedIn tends to be where relations go to die versus to develop.

What caused me to finally pay attention to Twitter?

I was urged by friend and fellow Minnesota tech entrepreneur, Philip Hotchkiss, to adopt Twitter for professional purposes about a year ago.

How did I get started?

I started following individuals I came across during my general professional life.

Eventually, the number of relationships I followed became hard to manage so I started building Twitter lists on key conversations I like to participate in, such as app marketers, app developers, tech media, and Minnesota tech.

What did I miss during the Twitter early days?

By being a late adopter to Twitter, I missed out on some of the early business success stories. Julio’s book did a great job of retelling these early stories.  Here are a few excerpts that specifically apply to app developers:

Evernote’s stellar customer service, for Windows apps and other OS apps, fix problems before most users even notice them. “Twitter has proven invaluable for identifying problems with its software, if a bug crops up, Evernote will hear about it, almost instantly,” comments Andrew Sinkov, Evernote Marketing Director (page 58). Evernote built a strong following due to its popularity with the web-tech set.  Tweets help identify bugs, as well as capture usage ideas, as a vehicle for new product/feature communication, and a polling medium to get user feedback. 

Promoting the MyLite iPhone App- Graeme Thickens and DoApp: “He (Graeme Thickens) used his @DoApp identity as a sort of news feed to keep followers apprised of developments in iPhone application development, which was a superhot subject in the consumer-technology universe” (page 57).  Thickins searched for mentions of DoApp on Twitter and asked for permission to post some of the more creative tweets.  Users were finding all kinds of interesting uses for the myLite program, which is a combination strobe, emergency flasher, and rock-concert lighter.  Nearly two dozen uses were identified including: a radiologist setting it to red for use in the x-ray room; and a WVA medic using the emergency flasher at night festival “so other members of rescue and fire could find me in a dark sea of people.”

Amy Worley, Director of Digital Marketing, H&R Block, used Twitter to increase awareness of their desktop software (page 41). Worley was on a crusade to publicize the company’s digital offerings, including its TaxCut options, for doing taxes online. She used Twitter to broadcast tax tips like tax deductions commonly missed or W-4 tips.  She also used Twitter to answer tax questions, creating a two-way conversation with users.   Twitter evolved to become an integral part of their marketing efforts showing that H&R Block is a true advocate for the taxpayer.  

My own personal Twitter business success story

While on vacation in Mexico, I joined my fellow colleagues at W3i in launching Apperang, a service which pays consumers to try iPhone and iPad apps. 

A couple of weeks prior to the launch, I used Twitter to reach two app developers, which resulted in their participation in the public launch of our iOS app promotion service before we were even live. I found that many app developers are hard to reach, and Twitter is a very useful tool for engaging in conversations with them.

Perhaps even more telling of the business value in using Twitter, as a part of our launch, was how an unsolicited tweet was able to connect me to a writer at TechCrunch named, Gagan Biyani, which ultimately landed us a story in Mobile Crunch. This was no small feat for a company headquartered in central Minnesota, far from Sillicon Valley. Later on, several other tech blogs followed on the TechCrunch coverage and they wrote their own stories. The post Biyani wrote ended up being among the most popular in Mobile Crunch for the entire week – during a week that was competing for coverage against the iPhone 4 launch. Not only was it good industry buzz that resulted in several leads from additional new app developers who wanted to participate in our app promotion service; but it helped provide a big organic boost in early adopters on the consumer side of our service as well, which has provided great feedback while we are in our public beta phase.

I would highly recommend Julio’s book for anyone involved with using Twitter for business purposes.  I am also looking forward to reading Julio’s new book when it is published on how businesses are using the iPad.

If you are an app developer interested in tips around the business of apps, I would recommend following @W3i, or if you are interested in following me personally, @robertjweber.  Please comment if you have any interesting stories on how you used Twitter to grow your app business.

Most of the pay per download networks utilize some method of cross promotion to drive additional installs while users are installing or interacting with another app.

So, how do these pay per download programs, like W3i’s Application Network for Windows apps and browser add-ons, compare in cost to other channels for app distribution such as search, display, affiliate, and OEM?

To answer this question, I had W3i’s Media Buyers examine past campaign performance across these difference channels and tallied up our effective cost per download by channel. The following bar graph is based upon the actual campaign performance which was achieved.

As you can see from W3i’s campaign results, pay per download programs can create a meaningful distribution channel while lowering an app developers costs by often as much as one third the cost of other alternatives!

Many app developers have tried search and affiliate programs to promote their app because they are more widely recognized tactics, but have failed to launch and optimize their apps for low cost pay per download networks.

Make sure you ask your pay per download program how they adhere to industry best practices, and what care they take in establishing a valued user experience. The engine that powers W3i’s Application Network, InstallIQ, has received the Truste Trusted Download certification and is white listed by Truste.

Whether you have an iPhone app, a Facebook game, a Windows application, or a browser toolbar, contact W3i to learn how you can launch and optimize your app using W3i’s pay per download program. 

This article was written for app developers seeking downloads, however, if you have a website and would like to promote W3i’s applications, go to W3i’s affiliate sign-up form.

The team that manages Freeze.com recently launched Tweativity; a free Twitter backgrounds desktop app which leverages Twitter’s API’s to encourage sharing.

As you can see from the following screen shot, one of the marketing goals of this desktop app is to leverage Twitter’s messaging API to go viral:

I installed Tweativity and would highly recommend it. Give this free Twitter backgrounds app

I’ll report back on how it is performing and lessons learned over the coming weeks.

Well, one casual PC gaming company is bucking that trend, and making a big splash in the world of Facebook games. 

iWin’s Family Feud game for Facebook was reported to be one of the fastest growing Facebook games recently with an astounding 75.76% increase in users week-over-week according to Inside Social Games.

I spoke with iWin’s founder CJ Wolf this week to congratulate him on his success. Based on our conversation, I expect to see many more Facebook game successes in their future. Keep up the good work iWin.