How to market your app on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts

TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts all show posts to people who do not follow you. A new account's post is judged on how the first viewers respond, not on how many followers the account has, so a founder with zero followers starts on the same footing as everyone else.

That is different from most of the internet, where reach is earned slowly through followers, links or ad spend. It is why short-form video is usually the first marketing channel worth trying for a consumer app, and for many SaaS products too.

Three shapes cover most of what works for an app, and none of them needs a camera crew. A slideshow is a few still images that tell a small story - a problem, a turn, the moment your app helps. A wall of text is a short video of bold words over a simple moving background - a thought or confession the viewer recognises. A demo video opens with a short clip that carries the opening line, then cuts to a screen recording of your app doing the one thing people want.

Slideshows and walls of text are quick to make and easy to test. Demo videos show the product itself, so they work best once you know which problem viewers respond to. Use all three; the platforms reward variety, and you learn faster.

The slowest way to find a post that works is to invent one from nothing. The faster way is to find posts in your category, or about the problem your app solves, that already did well, and study their shape: the opening line, how many slides, where the turn comes, how long it runs.

Copy the shape, never the content. Write your own words about your own users' problem, use your own pictures or screen recordings, and make it about your app. A shape that worked for someone else is not a guarantee, but it is a far better starting point than a guess.

Most people decide in the first moment whether to keep watching. The opening line should name something the viewer feels or wants - a frustration, a habit, a small embarrassment - in their words. Your app's name in the first line is the most common way to lose them.

A useful test: if the opening line would make sense on a post from someone who had never heard of your app, it is about the viewer. Save the app for the turn, once they already care about the problem.

Posting regularly matters more than any single post. Several posts a week, every week, gives you enough attempts to see what your audience responds to. The same video can go to TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts, and a slideshow to TikTok and Instagram (Shorts takes video only); each platform's audience is different, and one may suit your app far better than the others.

Post to accounts you own. Services that rent you fleets of pre-warmed accounts can produce views quickly, but the audience is not yours and stops when the subscription does, and running account fleets is generally against the platforms' terms.

After each post, look at what it actually got on each platform - views, likes, comments, shares - and compare your posts with each other. Write down the opening line and format of the ones that did best, and make more like them. Ignore any tool that turns this into a single score you cannot check.

Be honest about what the numbers can and cannot tell you. A post's views are a fact; whether that post caused a download usually is not knowable from the platform alone. Watch your app's installs or sign-ups over the same weeks, and look for the trend rather than a per-post answer.

You can do all of this free. CapCut and the platforms' own editors make slideshows and edit screen recordings. TikTok's web uploader, Meta Business Suite and YouTube Studio each let you schedule posts on their own platform. A note on your phone is enough to track what each post got.

Paid tools save time at different steps. Schedulers post one piece of content to many platforms at once. AI content tools turn a prompt or a link into posts. Ad-creative tools make video ads for when you start paying for reach.

Topped covers the steps in this guide for app and SaaS founders: our team hand-picks real posts that already worked, Topped proposes your version as a slideshow, a wall of text or a demo video - and when a For You draft is built on one of those posts, the card shows that post and the number it got. You approve it, it publishes to your own accounts - videos to TikTok, Instagram and YouTube Shorts, slideshows to TikTok and Instagram - and the Scoreboard shows what each post got. There is a free plan with no card.