Acquisition Channel Opportunities: Meta, Discord App Store, Spotify Podcasts

This week, I sifted through over 4200 marketing/tech articles in search of news-as-opportunities for you to get more paying users. Here are the top 3 I found:

1. Facebook just told us what's most popular on their platform

The news: Facebook released their "widely viewed content" report for the third quarter of 2021.

The report contains the most viewed posts, pages and content across Q3 2021.

The most viewed domains: YouTube ranked first, followed by GoFundMe, Amazon, Twitter, UNICEF, and Linktree.

The most viewed posts: This is where things get interesting.

Many of the most viewed Facebook posts had one thing in common: they asked questions that you could answer creatively. Here are some examples:

• Spell your name, but for each letter press the first word that comes up in your predictive text…
• Name something that a lot of people like, but you can’t stand.
• Tell me to leave your house without using the word leave.

The opportunity: If you want to create a post that spreads organically on Facebook (or any other social media for that matter), one good idea is to ask a question that sparks people's creativity and prompts them to provide an interesting answer.

I've seen many of these questions on Twitter, for example, with the "wrong answers only" spin:

2. Discord will make third-party apps and bots more discoverable, opening up a new acquisition channel for indie hackers

The news: Discord plans to add a new "app discovery feature" in spring 2022, which will allow users to discover verified apps and bots (currently numbering around 12,000).

App marketplaces are a powerful acquisition channel: App marketplaces are a channel where the saying "build it and they'll come" still holds true. They give you exposure without marketing and can often help you get your first 100/1000 users if your extension solves a need.

The opportunity: Discord is huge. According to The Verge, more than 30% of Discord servers now use bots, and 430,000 of them are used every week across Discord by its 150 million monthly active users.

I'm also seeing a trend of teams migrating from Slack to Discord, so there will undoubtedly be an opportunity to build Discord apps for teams apps like Tettra started on Slack and now generate $100k/MRR).

3. Here are the most world's downloaded apps in October

The news: AppFigures and SenorTower, two of the biggest mobile app analytics platforms have released their "Most Downloaded Apps" report for October.

Instagram and TikTok are on the top: Both lists contain Instagram and TikTok as the "top apps by downloads", both on Google's Play Store and Apple's App Store.

Spotify is a newcomer to the list: According to AppAnnie, a "newcomer" into October's top list is Spotify. Spotify ranked 10th in AppAnnie's report thanks to a healthy balance of downloads from both the App Store and Google Play.

The opportunity: It's always a good idea to keep an eye on the most popular mobile apps because that's where our posts and ads will show up. For now, those apps are TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube.

The Spotify opportunity: If a platform receives an unusually large number of downloads but few people are aware of it, this could be a good opportunity for cheap ads.

That seems to be the case with Spotify. Their ad business is increasing as well, indicating that more and more businesses find success in podcast advertising. Is your SaaS going to be one of them?