The Mistake:
Flying Fun has been in the app store for just over two months and has received around 7,500 downloads. When we launched the app, we made the crucial mistake of assuming a soft launch was a good idea. As you can see, the first few days in the App Store are crucial. During this time, the app is “Featured” in the “NEW” section of your chosen category – hence the nice spike in the first week. Having now learnt from this mistake, I would encourage any developer launching an app to go hard and fast with their marketing strategy from day one and take advantage of this initial traffic.
The Next Step:
Flying Fun is now undergoing some major updates to introduce more social aspects to the game. The objective is to bring a viral affect to our downloads and begin an upward trend in growth. The social features will include:
- Social sharing: Users will be able to share their high scores to Twitter and Facebook. A users high score along with their friends scores will be displayed on a Social Leader board powered by Facebook. We've chosen to go with Facebook as opposed to Apple's own GameCentre as the Facebook network is considerably larger and more engaging.
- Incentivised Sharing: Users are encouraged to share their high scores, challenge friends and download Geek Me to earn extra coins that they can use within the game. By giving users a carrot, they will be rewarded for promoting the app onto their social networks and (hopefully) increasing downloads.
- One-on-one gameplay: Friends will be able to challenge one another and compete for the highest score. Even better – an iOS user will be able to challenge an Android user, dramatically increasing the viral affect of this feature.
If I could do things differently, I would have included these key features from day one. This would have increased the size and duration of the spike in downloads. The app would have been “Featured” for longer, ranked higher for each search term in the App Store and downloads would have been considerably higher by now.
Watch this space – New social integration and Flying Fun for Android are coming soon…