What social media marketing strategy templates would you recommend?

I've been in the picture messaging space for a while now with my apps Lutebox (voted one of London's top ten most loved apps) and now Click Messenger. I've written a few articles about the space including a recent post about the Future of Mobile Messaging. Snapchat started out as an app called Picaboo, which pretty much did what it does now (prior to the latest update with chat and video calling). They quickly rebranded but saw a little uptake in user numbers and had quite low downloads for several months. Then around Christmas 2011 one of the founders' mom had told her friend about the app, who told her kid and her kid basically then spread the word throughout their high school in L.A. That was what really blew up their download numbers as it spread across teenagers at local high schools. As far as I know they didn't advertise in the early days, relied solely on word of mouth. Also it is assumed that they have a solid user base. Comparatively speaking, their user base may be in the low tens of millions, which may a great base of users, but nowhere even close to being as big as Facebook or Twitter. I'd be happy to speak about this in more detail or about the picture messaging landscape and what I believe to be the future of mobile messaging.

I started on Clarity just by answering questions last summer. I used to love Quora but really disagreed with a number of changes they made and so when Clarity launched answers, I started answering questions. I'm incredibly busy but let's face it: we all have extra time. We spend it looking at our phones, on Facebook, socializing with friends, whatever way each person does it, we all spend time on non mission critical stuff. Because I genuinely enjoy helping others, I treated Quora as a way of relaxing the same way others would read news sites or blogs. And so I switched all that time to Clarity by answering questions. I don't recall the exact specifics but by providing real answers (not just, "call me, I can help you), I had my first call request within about a month of my first answer. And I got a nice review. And some more questions answered, and a couple more calls, and a couple more reviews. And from that point, the call volume increased. Simultaneously, I started referring all "can I pick your brain" requests on LinkedIn and email to my Clarity account. And so some calls initiated that way. More reviews. Now, a year later, I have done over 200 calls, with the majority of it inbound from Clarity. Take it from me, if you make the time, and provide genuine help to people, you will get rewarded for it. But like anything in life, if you're not willing to invest the time and resources, you're unlikely to see any return.

It can certainly be tough to build up a substantial follower base, starting from nothing or very little, especially if you haven't launched your product yet. But here are a few tactics to help you get in front of more people pre-launch: 1) Start sharing tons of useful content. Before you bother sending people to your Twitter feed or Facebook page, you want to make sure they'll find something valuable once they get there. If you have the time, create original content that ties into your industry, your product, or your company in some way (without directly promoting yourself, though). If you don't have the bandwidth to create your own content, find other articles from bloggers you admire or experts in your industry, and share their content. Just make sure you're putting out information that's highly relevant and valuable to the audience you're trying to attract so you can engage them once they find you. 2) Create conversation. The people who aren't following you yet aren't seeing your tweets, so how do you show them value and get them to discover you? Start a conversation! At Change Collective, we're rolling out our first course on Becoming an Early Riser. So I'll do a Twitter search for "need to wake up earlier" and find a bunch of people who are tweeting about the exact problem we're setting out to solve. By favoriting their tweets or replying with -- "That's great! We think we can help - check out our newest course & let us know what you think!" -- I'm getting our product on their radar and simultaneously providing value to them. 3) Ask for help. Start with your fellow team members, and ask them to share the company's Facebook posts or retweet some of your tweets. You can even create lazy tweets for them to share. What about your board members? Advisors? VCs? They all have a stake in helping your company grow awareness and adoption, so find an easy and appropriate way for them to help by leveraging their networks. And if you have friends and family who are excited about your business and supportive of what you're doing, they probably won't mind a friendly request to help spread the news every once in a while. Hope this helps! I just joined an early-stage startup and I'm currently building up our marketing from scratch. Happy to jump on a call and offer some tips from the trenches if you'd like. Best of luck!

You've answered your own question. Reach out to your prospects with the question, such as "How would you...". Ask what people want then give it to them if you can with integrity and thoughtfulness.

Your best bet to get traction quickly in USA is to advertise on mobile ad networks. You may need to advertise on CPM/CPC basis instead of CPI if you have a paid app so make sure you understand your user lifetime value and watch conversion rates closely so you don't overspend. That said, depending on what your niche/vertical is, there are many other ways to market non-gaming apps.