A few comments on these examples: Buffer: > The company grew its user base from 0 to 100,000, largely through the impact of guest blogs on third party sites,

A few comments on these examples: Buffer: > The company grew its user base from 0 to 100,000, largely through the impact of guest blogs on third party sites, written by founder Leo Widrich. Was a good idea in the olden days, works a lot less now that Google has started cracking down on spammy guest blogging practices. Facebook: > To counter such resistance, Facebook has progressively turned off the message facility on its own app and telling mobile users they must migrate to Messenger. The result is a rapid growth curve to underpin the Facebook messaging masterplan. This is certainly 'effective', but it really, really annoys users, and will probably not work as well for a company with decent competitors. Network effects and being a near monopoly helps Facebook get away with this stuff, but if your small service tries it... well good luck there. TripAdvisor: > For instance, Tripadvisor encourages hotels to publicise good reviews by displaying badges. This is good for the hotels in question, but the badges also link traffic back to Tripadvisor and make Google rank that hotels reviews higher in their own search results. Ah, the old 'have people display a widget that links back to your site' trick. It's an okay strategy if your reputation is somewhat good or you got in early, but Google has worked to discourage such things in recent years too. https://searchengineland.com/google-reminds-webmasters-widget-links-webmaster-guidelines-258393 https://searchengineland.com/google-reminds-webmasters-widge... Pokemon GO: > There was no advertising for Pokemon Go and no explanation of how the game actually worked. All the maker Niantic did was tweet that it was available. This was also why the game died out so quickly too. Niantic was terrible at communication, and spent weeks seemingly doing nothing to address issues people had with the game. No comments online, no social media posts, nothing about updates with features people were looking forward to... The result was a huge die off, with things only recovering a bit when they actually opened up and spoke to their customers again. Either way, the advice is simple: Remember that what works for a large company or certain brand may not work for you (or others), that a lot of tactics used in the past have been disincentivised after SEO abuse and that your marketing trickery may be your downfall if you don't realise when a change in tact is needed afterwards.