"Facebook’s Teen App Used A 'Psychological Trick' To Attract High School Downloads"

Buzzfeed:

TBH noticed that teens often list their high school in their Instagram bio. So, using a private Instagram account of its own, the company would visit a school’s location page and follow all accounts that included the school’s name. TBH made sure its private account featured a mysterious call to action — something like “You’ve been invited to the new RHS app — stay tuned!” The startup would make one private account for each high school it wanted to target.

The company found teens were naturally curious and would follow the private account back.

TBH’s founding team told their Facebook colleagues they would typically wait 24 hours to collect all inbound follow requests from the high schoolers before moving on to the next, key phase of the strategy.

“At 4:00PM when school gets out (The Golden Launch Hour™), add the App Store URL to the profile,” the TBH team wrote. Shortly thereafter, the startup would make the private Instagram profile public, triggering Instagram to notify students that their requests to follow had been accepted. Teens would see the notification, visit the profile, and be shown a download link in the account’s new public bio. And many followed the link to TBH.