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Acquisition Channel Opportunities: Facebook, Twitter Newsletters, Privacy Ads

Want to get more paying users? I've analyzed over 2500 marketing news articles over the past week and identified the top 3 most relevant for indie hackers focusing on growth:

1. This announcement may make Twitter the #1 acquisition channel for newsletters

The announcement: Twitter will allow you to promote your Revue newsletter directly from your Twitter profile. If you own a newsletter, you know how difficult getting new subscribers is, so this is big.

How it will work: Below your profile bio, you'll see a "newsletter" section with a Subscribe button. People can then click and read a sample issue or subscribe immediately.

Who can use this: If you have a Revue newsletter (reminder: Twitter recently acquired Revue) you'll be able to activate this immediately. The only limitation is the number of people who'll be able to see your newsletter.

For now, Twitter will show this newsletter section to a small set of their users. They plan to slowly expand this though and show it everyone.

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2. Facebook and Snapchat just told us what's most popular on their platform

The news: Facebook published their "widely viewed content report", telling you which websites, Facebook pages and posts were seen by most people in Q1 2021 and Q2 2021.

The type of posts most popular on Facebook: conservative, curious, interactive, cute. In other words, these posts evoked an emotion:
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Snapchat has also introduced Snapchat Trends, their own version of Google Trends, telling you what's (currently) most popular on their platform.

The opportunity: Inspiration. If you want to make your ads or organic posts more "edgy", then these reports can definitely help. Look at some of the most popular posts and pages that publish them and ask yourself: "How can I incorporate some of the elements in my own content?"

3. How to make your ads work (again) in a post-privacy world

The problem: Apple Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) - these annoying 'allow to track' pop-ups you see on iPhone. As a result, ad costs have increased (the average CPM on Facebook has increased by 47 percent over the past year alone) and it's become harder to track where your conversion come from.

What you can do: Consumer Acquisition did a nice round-up post on the pains founders and advertisers face as a result of privacy changes. At the end of the post, though, they included some pretty nice recommendations I highly agree with:

  • Create 20-50 new creatives (since 85-95 percent of new creative concepts fail). In other words, test more ads (the #1 opportunity on Facebook's 'widely viewed content report' can help you get some inspiration)
  • Remain consistent with creating news ads (because creative fatigue is real). According to some reports, winning ads last only 10 weeks (before people start getting tired of them).
  • Consider doing more contextual and interest-based advertising if you’re seeing diminishing returns from Custom and Lookalike audiences (if you've been reading about Facebook Ads, almost everyone recommends to do Custom/Lookalike audiences, but their effectiveness has been diminished as a result of Apple IDFA changes).

I'd also like to add a few of my recommendations:

  • Use the contrast effect. Twitter has recently "updated their colors to be high contrast and a lot less blue" as part of the overall redesign of their site, for example. Can you find contrasting colors and use them in your Twitter ads so they stand out?

  • Be careful not to land on the wrong (read: piracy) websites. This recent report will give you a pretty good idea of how big this market is and how not to end up on ThePirateBay's brother site for your cute social media SaaS.

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  1. 2

    Really Interesting read 📖, I've also added my newsletter 📰 to my Twitter Profile 😊

  2. 2

    The Twitter news could be big for newsletters. Just wonder what % of Twitter users see that box.

    1. 1

      I don't think anyone knows this.

  3. 1

    Winning ads only last 10 weeks. This is probably more true in B2C where you spend a lot. Wonder if it's the same time frame in b2b..

    1. 1

      I think for B2B it's even less than 10 weeks.

  4. 1

    Interesting, this is the first time Facebook is telling us what's most popular on their platform.

    1. 1

      Hope they didn't hide anything :

  5. 1

    This comment was deleted 2 years ago.

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