App Store Keywords for Social Networking Apps: Why Head Terms Are Closed

Cells are estimated volume / estimated difficulty, 0-100. "Messenger" and "social media" hit the ceiling of the scale in several storefronts, because the top 10 are apps with enormous rating counts. They tell a new app almost nothing except that it will not displace them. The phrases that carry information are further down: "video chat" is near zero outside the US, and "friend finder" drops from 64 in the US to 6 in Japan.

The US median rating count for these phrases was about 294,500, against roughly 5,600 in Japan. Names are the shortest in the study and rarely repeat the query: only 23% of top-10 names contained every query word. In a category dominated by brands, a name is mostly a brand, and the ranking text lives elsewhere. We can describe that pattern; we cannot say whether brand strength or metadata drives rank.

1. Skip the two giants. Spending subtitle or keyword bytes on "messenger" or "social media" has a low expected return when the median result has five-figure ratings. See long-tail App Store keywords.
2. Mine the middle of the table. "Community", "friend finder" and "group chat" sit between 30 and 48 mean difficulty, and the Japanese and Brazilian columns are far lower than the US one. Specific audience phrases beat generic ones.
3. Use the secondary category with intent. An app can have a primary and a secondary category, and the primary determines where it appears when browsing or filtering. A niche social app that belongs equally to another genre may do better as a primary in the smaller category. Read how to choose primary and secondary category.
4. Check what you actually compete with. Only 63.3% of US results had Social Networking as primary genre; Lifestyle (11.7%) and Photo & Video (10.0%) filled most of the rest. A dating or hobby community might be better measured against Lifestyle, and a video-first product against Photo & Video.

The study took six generic English phrases per category and queried the iTunes Search API (entity=software, limit=25) in six storefronts; each Social Networking row reflects 36 queries and 360 top-10 slots. Because the phrases were English in DE, JP, FR and BR, those columns show English-language demand only. For the full method see the research methodology, the research hub and how we measure. Data: category CSV. Entertainment-style social games should also be compared with Games.

LocalASO is a Mac app that estimates volume and difficulty for keywords in 52 storefronts using public rating counts. It is a one-time $29 purchase and the download needs a license key to run. See pricing.