Marketing/promoting your product
In this section we’ll share some tips on marketing your product. There is no one-size-fits-all and context matters a lot. Below you’ll find some effective techniques used by others in the past. Note that you can and should try multiple approaches (i.e. personal “we just launched!” vs. informative “here’s what you can do with…”). Asking your network to help spread the word is always a plus.
Tweeting/sharing on Facebook
General tips
Keep it brief. Communicate what the product does, include an image/GIF that grabs people’s attention, no hashtags, and tag @ProductHunt. We look for makers/company launch tweets (and Facebook posts) that we can amplify by retweeting or sharing from our accounts. 🚀
Make it personal
Posts that lead with “I just launched my first product!”, “After months of hard work, we’re ready to share what we’ve been working on…” resonates with people and can attract a broad audience. Authenticity works best.
What to emphasize
The first words you use are important, lead with something that grabs attention. What is the one thing that will resonate with people about you as the maker, and try to connect that to the core value your product could provide for them.
Link directly to your product page
Not to producthunt.com
Don’t use hashtags
Or, limit use of hashtags. Hashtags are blue, the URL you want people to click on is also blue, when @ mentioning people that’s blue as well. Too much blue dilutes the blue URL of your product that you want people to click on. P.S. Hashtags are completely ineffective unless they happen to already be trending on Twitter (as they do during live events or newsworthy topics). Outside of that, people don’t click on them and they’ll distract from the flow of your tweet structure 
Photos vs. Videos vs. GIFs
Twitter preview images will use the first image your post’s gallery by default. Video can work well if they are raw demos (shot from smartphone) or not overly produced (it depends, generalizations don’t help here), but overall, videos will lead to less clicks to your product. We’ve found that GIFs work best for finding the right balance between grabbing people’s attention, communicating info about the product, but not giving away too much upfront in a way that limits clicks back to your product (from @ProductHunt we use GIFs often, and even have an entire @ProductHuntGIFs Twitter that only tweets GIF content).
Tag vs. @ mention
Tag people in photos instead of @ mentioning them to have a cleaner post (less “blue”), unless you specifically want to highlight the person as part of the content (rather then get their attention). You can only tag in photos, not in video or GIF attachment.
How to really promote your product
There is only so much that you (or we) can do to market your product. The key is to get everyone that’s visiting the site, on their own accord, to share your product. You can do that by clearly explaining what your product is and the value it provides. Get people to feel something.
The name “ Pitch Decks From Top Startups ” communicates everything you need to know upfront. The tagline “A collection of startup pitch decks that raised $700million”, gallery images of popular startups, and the maker’s comment all work together to reinforce the value prop.
The tagline: “Silence embarrassing notifications while screensharing” clearly explains what the product does: blocks notifications. But note that the tagline could have easily been “Automatically turn on Do Not Disturb when screensharing” …which likely wouldn’t lead to this kind of reaction:
Get people to feel something.
By using the word “embarrassing” in a situation most people can imagine themselves in (screensharing) it makes the audience relate and instantly understand the problem the product addresses (even if it’s not a situation they’ll likely find themselves in).
Here are some other popular tweets about Muzzle:
🔥 Dave: Best landing page ever?
🔥 Ben: “Best landing page everrrr”
🔥 Andreas: “Best. Landing. Page. Ever.”
🔥 Ryan: “Best landing page demo I’ve seen this year”
Show people
The Muzzle team not only did a good job of describing what they made, they also created a hilarious landing page that turns people’s screens into the embarrassing situation. The landing page made people laugh, while demonstrating the product’s use case.
Think of ways to demonstrate a specific use that gets someone who has never seen your product before instantly get it. GIFs are often the fastest way of getting people there, while enabling them to easily share ( Giphy Capture and CloudApp are both easy to use and community favorites).
P.S. Including a photo that shows you, your team, or visuals that tell your story can work particularly well on social.
P.S. For anyone, not just makers launching productsYou are more than welcome to share any product using the tips mentioned above. We actively look for good content to retweet regardless of when it was launched (just make sure to tag @ProductHunt so we see it and link back to the site). 🙌
Product Hunt Newsletter
We send a newsletter to hundreds of thousands of readers every weekday with the previous day’s top 5 most upvoted products. The best thing you can do to make it into the digest is focus on having a successful launch, using the tips we provided. Subscribe . 💌
You can also be featured in the newsletter after your launch.
The first part of the newsletter highlights product collections, timely topics, product recommendations, a big product launch, and basically any time Instagram decides to ⌘C ⌘V Snap. This is the biggest source of traffic from the newsletter in terms of what people click on.
If you’d like to be featured in the newsletter, here are the things we look for:
- Curate CollectionsCreate content around your product. If you just launched a super cool alarm clock app, curate a “morning tools that make you more productive” collection. Doing so provides us with cool content to share with the community. If we use your collection we’ll be sure to give you a shout out. Let us know if you made a collection or have a concept in mind (you can ping our newsletter editor directly on Twitter or Email).
- Ask Product HuntThis section of the site is gaining momentum and a common source of inspiration for future newsletters. We encourage you to participate by asking questions and providing product recommendations. Get started: producthunt.com/ask
We hope this is helpful. Good luck on your upcoming launch! Please remember to not get discouraged, whatever happens.
Product Hunt’s tagline could have been better.
Fred is using a recent Time Travel feature we added to see the top products for a particular date , including the best of all-time for 2015 , 2016 , and 2017 as well as by month. Browse through these popular launches for inspiration.✨