A little Twitter hack to optimize iOS installs

This post is inspired by a tweet jason put out earlier today regarding Twitter app install badges. TL;DR: Here’s a hack to put an iOS install card at the top of your Twitter profile, as we wait for Twitter to roll out the official app install badge. Hopefully this should optimize your acquisition funnel just a little bit. As a result, we now can have our landing page for Cutesy and our app install link in our Twittter bio together.

What’s the big fuss? {{problem}}

Twitter has an awesome feature on deck that is currently in Beta, available to a few accounts. This app badge should help conversions from Twitter account→ app install, and it’s making some people sad that it’s only available for established apps and accounts.

“Should help” might be a little bit of a understatement compared to the status quo… Take a look at our current bio. Do you trust that link? We intentionally didn’t add a trackable shortened link because that would look even less trustworthy. Sadness. Such sadness.

So what’s the hack? {{solution}}

I actually don’t have hard data at the moment to see if this is a bonafide solution, but it took 20 minutes to experiment and implement it. Basically, you’re creating an app install ad, and pinning it to your profile. We set the spend at $0.01, so it won’t cost you anything. 😎

Looks good? Lets do it. There will be two parts. Design the image in sketch, and create the Twitter ad.

Designing the Image in Sketch

What’s nice with this app install card is that unlike regular Twitter images, there’s no funky auto-crop. What this means is that you don’t have to add this extra margin on the side and hope that Twitter automatically detects the content and fits it in. 😅

Create an 800 x 320 artboard.
Look for design inspiration here and there. Design.
Export to PNG.

You will most likely need to repeat these steps when you upload the image to the Twitter ad platform as you experiment. If you have a lot of Twitter followers, I’d recommend creating a separate Twitter account to test.

Twitter Ads

Go to http://ads.twitter.com
Go to campaigns. Create a new campaign:

3. Setup your Campaign + Select your Audience: You’ll need to do some setup here below: linking your app, selecting your audience etc. Even though we don’t plan to pay for this ad (Twitter, I promise we’ll pay for some ads soon!), we set up the audience targeting based on what we would want, such as keywords, devices, gender, just in case.

You might want to set up conversion tracking. I didn’t because I was overwhelmed by the choices. Plus, we’re focusing on product right now. Bajeezus give me a break yo. Okay I’ll stop talking to myself in the picture captions.

4. Set your budget: Ah, the joys of being bootstrapped. Lets do as much as we can, for free! Turns out the minimum daily budget is $0.01. For those worried about paying $0.01, don’t worry. Your bid won’t be met.

5. Add your creative: If you’re fancy, you might want to A/B test the text and image. (Side note, I haven’t been able to get the image to save using Chrome. If the image takes longer than 10 seconds to save, you might have the same issue. Repeating these steps in Safari worked for me).