Home » Mobile Marketing Tips » Monday Mobile Marketing Tip: Use Facebook to Determine Competitor’s Monthly Active User Numbers

Every Monday, I write about something new you can try this week to drive more downloads for your mobile app and increase engagement with your existing app users, based on what has worked (and what hasn’t) for 23snaps.

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While this isn’t strictly a marketing tip, it provides some insight into your competitors, and helps you understand where you rank against other apps in your market.

There are plenty of tools that try and give insight into your competitors and their user numbers, including App Annie and Xyo.net (which has some of the best ballpark download numbers I’ve seen). But raw download numbers are becoming less and less relevant to an app’s success. How can you determine whether or not your competitors are retaining their users, and where you stack up?

The best place to do this is, in fact, Facebook. Every app that has installed the Facebook SKD and allows app users to login using Facebook inadvertently displays an estimate of their active users. You can find this stat either by browsing for the app in the Facebook App Center, or by typing the app name into the search bar.

However this isn’t simply an estimate of app downloads –it’s an estimate of how many people have used the app in the last 30 days, a much more accurate representation of app success.

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You do need to take these numbers with a grain of salt – and they can vary depending on the industry. Temple Run 2, one of the most popular games of all time in the App Store only displays 10,000+ active users on Facebook because the majority of players don’t login at all, let alone with their Facebook credentials. 23snaps is appealing to many families because it’s an alternative to Facebook, meaning that a smaller percentage of users connect with Facebook than they might for, say, Instagram. However for all of the inaccuracies, checking the active user numbers through Facebook is an fair estimate of how popular different apps are with users and in relation to one another.

Why is this useful? Well aside for satisfying a natural curiosity about how other apps are performing, you can also begin to build up an idea of average engagement rates for your industry. Between the estimates provided by xyo.net for total downloads and Facebook for monthly active users, you can calculate an estimated engagement rate for a number of different apps. Where do you fall?

My Monday Mobile Marketing Tip for this week: Check out a few of your competitors’ active user number of Facebook. Where do you stack up against them?