I don't know if it was most effective because it was the only thing I tried and it worked beautifully. Earlier this year there was Cricket World Cup and most of the world cup schedules I checked were in the form of a long table, nothing interactive. It was a pain to find matches happening on particular day/team/venue in one glance.<p>So me and another friend set out to create a schedule viewer that will give us match info within 1~2 secs and wrote a simple but interactive schedule viewer[1] with AngularJS over a weekend. We posted it to r/cricket subreddit but didn't get more than couple hundred views. I also tried tweeting other former cricketers,cricket writers but my tweet got buried in no time because these people had fans ranging from 100k to 2mil.<p>Then I noticed espencricinfo.com website had a twitter section that listed tweets from all these prominent cricket figures in real-time as they were tweeted.<p>So during the match when everybody was watching and tweeting, I started tweeting these folks link to our interactive dashboard. This increased chance of them seeing my tweet and we got RTs from a lot of them this way. Of course for that our dashboard had to be the best out there and it was (it worked on mobile browser too).<p>With just few tweet to celebrity cricketers/sports writers we went from hundreds to over 30k page view and 7k recurring viewers over the course of world cup. The key I think was to get noticed when they were most active and also have a nice app/content to convince them to RT.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.itinora.com/worldcup2015" rel="nofollow">http://www.itinora.com/worldcup2015</a>
At Startup School NY, Chase Adam talked about winning a contest with Watsi by paying bar bouncers to not let people in if they didn't vote for them first.<p>This could probably be abstracted to app promotion.