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Smart ways to use social media while promoting indie games
Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram - video games marketing is directly connected to social media. Sadly, social media are becoming less and less accessible. So what’s the best way to reach the broad audience directly and without costs?
5 Min Read
Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram - video games marketing is directly connected to social media. Sadly, social media are becoming less and less accessible: they’re moderating content, introduce algorithms, cut the reach, aggressively sell ads. So what’s the best way to reach the broad audience directly and without costs?
What you need is a little bit of cunning and some ingenuity to use the social media and their tools creatively.
Below you’ll find the most interesting solutions that we’ve tested at b-interaktive during the campaign of Alpacalypse - a mobile game from the 8-bit era.
1. Celebrate the release with a Facebook event
Despite the fact that having a fan page is a must nowadays, to get truly spectacular results you need qualified specialists, good publish plan and regularity - elements that are really hard to get in an indie studio. Falling reach (reach is the amount of people who’ll see the post), huge amount of information and lack of good ideas for an absorbing interaction with the fans are the reason for all this.
A solution for that might be using other functions than the most popular fan page and groups. I’m talking about the events, or, to be more precise, creating an event connected to the game release date.
This solution has many pros:
you’re promoting a game, not necessarily the developer - not everyone knows about the creator of the game and not every studio cares about being recognized. Event has only one goal - to inform about the release date;
increased visibility - members will get notified about all the information posted by the event’s creator (they’re on by default) - you’re sure that they’ll know about everything that’s important;
automatic notification before the launch - an hour before the event’s date every member will get a push notification on his or her mobile device (if the Facebook app is installed) or a web version of the notification. There’s no easier method to reach all those who are interested in your title at the same time. Remember to set the release date as the event’s start date!
2. Use the power of the native video
Lately, Facebook has been emphasizing videos by supporting native clips (posted directly, not linked from Youtube or Vimeo) with reach bigger than usual.
Instead of posting another status with a nice graphic and link attached it’s much better idea to focus on teasers, trailers and making-offs. Especially since you can put a link to a landing page or app store site at the end of the video.
1. Use hashtag events
Hashtags aren’t merely sorting the Twitter contents; they’re gathering whole communities around themselves. Gamedev industry created many hashtags used to exchange information, present work and promote own titles.
If you care about better visibility on Twitter and in the gamdev community in general (especially the English-speaking one) it’s good to start with the most important ones:
#gamedev, #indiedev - hashtags followed by many bots. Bots are retweeting (to all followers) texts with this tag what results in great visibility;
#wipwednesday - hashtag for ‘work in progress’
#screenshotsaturday - saturday’s screenshot party
#IndieDevHour - weekly event devoted to discussing various aspects of the game development. It even has its own page: www.indiedevhour.com;
#igdev, #alldev, #gamedesign, #iosgames, #androidgames - other interesting hashtags.
OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA
There’s more to the internet then just social media and game development industry is also present in some of the less mainstream places.
1. Become best friends with Reddit
One of the most popular social news portals is also a place of experience exchange between many indie game developers. Reddit community can provide you with many tips and its members might become the first customers/players of the newly created title. Just like any other community, Reddit requires some carefulness and manners, not to mention that a promotion of a game shouldn’t be limited to a few marketing keywords thrown at the most popular subreddits (subforums).
You’ll find some useful hints about promotion of an indie title on Reddit here.
Here, on the other hand, one of the members created a list of the most important gamedev subreddits.
2. How about crowdspeaking?
What is crowdspeaking? To cut the long story short it’s using the strength of the fans, followers and people supporting the project to propagate information about it in social media.
It’s not about personally convincing every single friend to publish information. There are crowdspeaking platforms that can do this work for us.
After creating a campaign (services of this kind are quite similar to tools like Kickstarter) you just need to invite players to support the project. By joining the event as a supporter you’re automatically agreeing to publishing information about the project on your social media profile at the exact date and hour that was chosen by the creator of the event. What really matters here is not money but rather your social reach (number of followers, fans and friends).
That’s it! Information compiled on private profiles of many people on the launch day can bring unexpected results or even help you reach journalists (you never know who has a journalist friend on Facebook).
Today, there are only two platforms that matter - HeadTalker and Thunderclap. Both of them have some pros and cons. Here you’ll find a very good comparison.
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