Facebook and Subsurface

[Robert Helling]

Dirk,

> On 30. Jul 2019, at 02:37, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
> 
> With Google+ gone and RSS feeds a thing of the past, I wonder how people get updates for software like Subsurface.
> For a while I thought it was Facebook - we used to get about 6-7k impressions on our updates and that seemed to be about half of our user number, so that seemed about right.
> But the last few posts that I made got barely over a thousand impressions - yet our active user numbers (downloads as well as connections to the cloud storage) aren't stagnating at all, quite the contrary, they keep going up.
> We have more than 10k active users of cloud storage at this point (which in itself is interesting as we have only about 8k downloads combined of iOS and Android - so people are using the cloud to just sync between different desktop installations... cool).
> 
> So... should I worry about reaching only about a thousand people with our announcements on FB? Or simply shrug and say whatever? I guess the app stores notify people automatically and at least those users who haven't turned off the update check will also get the notification within the next few weeks. So maybe I simply shouldn't care?

I had a similar problem with my blog: How can I reach my audience and let them know there is new content available? I also settled with FB but clearly this is getting worse and worse.

This morning, I discussed the issue you raised with my wife who as you know works in marketing and also has to bring the news about great new products (in her case: audio books) to customers including social media. She confirmed, that FB does no longer generate any reasonable reach unless you throw big money at it (and I can see this in my timeline. I admit, I actual use FB as a user but there are fewer and fewer interesting posts from my actual friends spread between more and more paid advertisments). And FB is losing active users as people tend to go to other places looking for interesting content (with the shift to other platforms of the day happening at shorter and shorter time scales. So there is no point in also running a Subsurface presence in Instagram, Whatsap, Tinder, Tic Tac and whatnot). It doesn’t help that additional people  turn away from FB because of  privacy issues.

[Side remark: I am using email as the medium to communicate with students, in particular for announcements etc. There, I at least have their addresses. But I get more and more requests that they would prefer to get those on WhatsApp, a medium that for me has zero advantage over email (which can be sorted and searched for example) except instant notifications on the phone]

So, besides all this bad news, what can we do? We could make the update check mandatory rather than optional. Additionally, we could create a subsurface-announce mailing list with the promise of sparse traffic and encourage our users to subscribe there (for example by having a subscribe option in the program as well as on the download page). And, of course, it’s a no-no to call it „newsletter“, better something like „update service“ or similar.

Best
Robert

PS: When it comes to web forums for divers, I believe that for some time, scuba board is by far the most useful for divers. I look there regularly and have a notification set so I get an email once anybody mentions the word „subsurface“. Other programmers (like diving log or pasta deco) advertise new versions there. But I don’t know how useful that is. What I can see is that happy subsurface users advertise our program when the occasion comes up and others ask what software to use or how to solve problem x (for example dive planning).
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