Bebo's Meme Marketing Success

A story about how Shaan and his team launched the Bebo app to #1 in the App Store through an unconventional social media marketing strategy.

"We had this network of Twitter accounts with about 50 million followers combined. When we were ready to launch, the engineers wanted us to post traditional promotional tweets with tracking URLs. But Steve, our social media guy, had a different approach.

He said we shouldn't use any links because nobody posts links on Twitter. When we asked how people would download the app, he said 'They'll download it if they hear about it a bunch and feel like they're missing out.'

Instead of tweeting 'Check out the new Bebo app,' we posted memes. Things like 'My teacher when she hears about Bebo for the 50th time today' with a gif of a teacher throwing a phone out the window. I thought it sounded bad that people were annoyed at us, but Steve explained that's exactly what we wanted - people who weren't hearing about it would feel out of the loop and go Google it.

I thought it was stupid, but we did it his way. We hit number one on the App Store charts and got about 250,000 downloads in the first month. We spent basically zero dollars. Steve owned a bunch of these meme accounts, and because he had clout in the social meme world, he pulled some favors. We maybe paid a few thousand dollars total to get hundreds of thousands of downloads and the number one rank in the overall App Store charts."