I forced myself to spend a week in Instagram instead of Xcode

For anyone like me that’s never heard of Lagree before https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lagree-buddy-wrist-metronome/i...

I’ve been working on promoting my seating chart app for teachers, Shuffle Buddy, on social media. I had a 1M view pop on TikTok when I first launched and have now been clawing along to try for continued engagement.

It’s reassuring to know that social media posts are hard for everyone and that it isn’t supposed to be easy. I keep looking for ways to create content that is genuinely beneficial to teachers and also convinces them to try my app, but it’s hard.

As a solopreneur I'm dreading the gutting of US TikTok... Things are going to get much harder for organic promotion if there's a separate US app under a non-TikTok name that only Americans can use.

You can look into https://sideshiftjobs.com or https://playkit.xyz for scaling organic posting btw (unaffiliated).

Personally I just message a lot of people directly myself and get lucky with friendly responses because creators like my apps enough that they use it themselves (edtech market makes this easier as the apps are genuinely and wholesomely bettering). Then I convince them to start new accounts focused on my app promo, in addition to less frequent commissioned promo on their main accounts.

For doing it yourself you need to get multiple devices and multiple accounts going, there are tools to help with that too. You can also post the UGC content that you pay others to produce for you, onto your own accounts. It's too difficult to consistently go viral without more frequent rolls of the dice. Focusing on a single branded account made more sense before current social media algos which don't care about your followers and won't even show it to them if the content isn't engaging enough to go viral beyond your following.

I share your aversion to modern marketing tactics, but by your logic, programmers that develop the addictive social media algorithms are the meth cooks. Everyone is complicit. Modern day "tech bros" get a significantly worse rep than marketing folks these days. No use in participating in this blame game.

It's just an industry term with a particular meaning. You don't need to rage at me about people getting paid for doing ad work because you don't like the jargon and don't like marketing.

People who do UGC work get paid enough to not have to work full-time if they don't want to, giving them more time for other things in life than most jobs. Typical jobs care more about exclusivity over your entire working day than the value of your output (hence why we have more of a "laborer" market than a "labor" market), let alone sharing that value back to you as is typical with UGC contracts. It's disappointing to see that kind of elitism here.

edit:

When you pay for ads/boosted content instead, all contemporary platforms have tried hard to make the paid ads look convincingly like “organic” content for long enough for the content’s hook to land - just look at X, Reddit, TT etc.

At least with “organic” promo, established accounts have a reputation to preserve or foster when they choose what promo work aligns with their audience and their values. As a consumer I can usually evaluate how much to trust a creator too by how scrupulously they choose their promo.

With paid ads I know I am just seeing it because they were the top bidder for my attention and that the only reputation protection from the platform is to avoid particularly criminal or other extreme content.