Written by Victoria Tran, Communications Director at Kitfox Games. Currently working on Boyfriend Dungeon, Lucifer Within Us, Dwarf Fortress, and Mondo Museum. We just released Six Ages! This was originally posted on our Medium blog.

Every indie community person I know has dealt with the same problem. You need new, constant, content for your studio’s social media channels but:

When Kitfox first started in 2013, the team described the studio as being “scrappy”. While we’ve moved past that description for the most part (WOO!), I find it to be the perfect word to describe a *part* of my community style.

What Does “Scrappy” Mean? 

For my purposes, I see scrappy to mean doing a lot with little resources — whether that’s time, content, or ability.

Scrappiness requires a lot of different things, but more than anything it’ll require this:

Let’s be clear about quality versus quantity though. While scrappiness means things won’t be “perfect”, it doesn’t mean you should be posting low quality content either. Laggy GIFs/videos, uninteresting screenshots, extremely-hashtagged tweets… this is not what scrappy is.

Why Be Scrappy? 

So… other than the fact that you can do stuff with little resources, what’s the benefit of being scrappy?

How To Be Scrappy

Now that you know the what/why, it’s time to get into the harder part of how you’ll be scrappy. Often, this falls on reusing and repurposing content — which is when you take an asset and make it into new assets in different formats. Every studio has their own unique limitations, so everything won’t necessarily apply to you, but hopefully it’ll help!

Break Down Your Trailer

Trailers are my FAVORITE material. They don’t come around often, but when you do release one, you can bet it’ll be material for the next while. Trailers often have “chunks” to them — an exciting action portion, a more informative part, some cinematic, etc. Break these up into separate GIFs to not only have content for ages to come, but to also see which ones do best when you post them.

For example, below are two different “mood sections” from the Mondo Museum trailer that could become separate posts. They highlight different things: the left focuses on “building”, while the right is more about “look at these cool, personal exhibits” aspect of the game.

If you watch the trailer, here’s how I would split it up to become individual GIFs for content:

Often these GIFs can be a good indication of seeing what people latch onto about your game, or be a signal that they don’t necessarily understand what’s going on with it. (For example, Lucifer Within Us is a complicated game to explain, so I try to REALLY break it up in order to allow people to focus on what I’m trying to get across.)

And if there’s a still screenshot you can grab from the trailer that looks cool, even better!

Repurposing Art

So when I’m making scrappy social content, here are the very basics I need:

I’m not an artist, so my ability to create new assets is quite weak, but I am proficient enough at Photoshop that I can often find creative workarounds when I need a quick image to throw up on social.

Many think good content often has shiny new images associated with it, but that’s not necessarily true. I’ve often reused images or tweaked them slightly in order to create new posts, relying more heavily on the caption of the image to make it seem exciting. Remember, social media moves at a breakneck pace, so more often than not you can assume people haven’t seen your image before OR have already forgotten about it.

For instance, in the case of Boyfriend Dungeon, I was stuck with only some sword portraits and a background.

As a base for many social posts, I’ve used the image above and just changed up the caption, or added different things.

It became three different posts (which rely heavily on text):

Again, this involves a certain level of creativity and timing when it comes to repurposing art into new content. It’s difficult to give tips on exactly what you can do since it depends on the voice/tone of your studio and what you have available, but for the day-to-day of your social media, you don’t need bombastic posts every time. Unless that’s your thing!

Reposting Articles

After a big announcement or reveal, you’ll hopefully have at least a few articles about your game that you can use. Often you can retweet them, but after awhile you can also pull quotes you want people to pay attention to (and don’t forget to link to the article again of course.)

Let’s be real here, not everyone will click or read an article in its entirety, so this will help direct their attention.

                                                                    Link to tweet

Timing

One of the things to keep in mind when you reuse content is to not share it TOO frequently, lest people get too used to seeing that one image and automatically scroll right past it. I tend to put at least a few months in between reusing content, depending on what it is.

You can also plan your content for different holidays! Hubspot has a good calendar filled with all of the silly/serious holidays, if you need one.

Ending Thoughts

Social media is very good at making it look like we all have our best foot forward at all times, which is not always the case.

Especially among community developer circles, I think we can get A LOT of imposter syndrome thinking that everyone has their stuff together, while in reality we’re all scrambling to find SOMETHING. At least in my case, you can rest easy knowing that I too am struggling to find things to say about our games when I’m not allowed to. But that’s okay.

It’s actually kinda fun being scrappy.

See ya online.

<3