Guest Post by Travis Taborek
Is this you?
You’re working 14-16 hour workdays for cents on the dollar.
You post your art and screenshots and no one notices.
Whenever you host a sale no one shows up to the party.
It’s pretty disheartening, isn’t it?
I don’t blame you. But fear not, for all is not lost! I’m here to help.
Social media marketing is tricky. There are thousands of other indie devs out there vying for the attention of people who are casually scrolling their feeds while they’re taking a crap or goofing off at work.
But it can and SHOULD work to promote your game. It’s where your ideal customer is, so it’s where you need to be. You just need to figure out how to make it work for you.
And how do you do that? Well, unfortunately, there is no winning magic formula. If there were, marketing would be easy.
BUT. There are a few tools, strategies and rules of thumb you can use to help leverage social media to build an audience for your indie game.
Let’s layout what those are.
The Big Secret
Let me ask you this first of all.
What do you think is the secret to social media success?
I’ll give you a minute.
Alright, here it is.
The answer is consistency. That’s really all there is to it.
Choose one platform where you express yourself best.
Post to that platform once a day, every day, at the same time. You can even skip weekends.
Reply to anyone who comments within 24 hours.
Find 15-20 accounts you think your ideal customer would also like. Interact with them daily. Tweet at them. DM them. Ask them questions. Show interest in their work.
Every day, find 10-20 people who use the same hashtags you do, and comment on them.
Just do that, every day. It may take months, it may take years, but if you just do that, then slowly but surely, over time, you will build an audience.
Consistency peppered with hard work. That’s the non-secret.
The problem is that consistency, doing the same thing at the same time the same way every day, is actually really hard.
Life gets in the way. You get sick. You have bills to pay. Family issues come up. That’s why most people only practice consistency when they’re being paid to do it. And unfortunately, no one is going to pay you for being a solo game developer, at least not yet.
Here, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3d6INU79Xg&t=5s.
This is a video by Tim Ruswick, a game developer, creator of Indie Dev Underground and an expert on the subject of indie game marketing.
In it, he shares how most millionaires all share one common trait: consistency. Doing the same thing over and over, every day, even when it’s hard, better positions you for success than the majority of game developers who only practice consistency in spurts.
Trial and Error, Experimentation and Automation, and Batching Content on the Fly
That’s all well and good, but if you’re like most game developers then just the labor of putting a functioning game together takes up all of your free time and probably occupies your every other thought.
How do you do that AND post consistently to social media?
That’s an excellent question. The answer is to automate the process of running your social media calendar so that the majority of the work happens in the background so you can do what you do best: making your game.
Here are some of the tools I use:
Later: https://later.com/
HootSuite: https://hootsuite.com/
Buffer: http://buffer.com/
You might want to use Milanote too: https://www.milanote.com/. This is what I use to plan my social media calendars.
(I prefer Later because it gives you the most features and most streamlined interface for what you pay for. Be warned though that it’s an image-first platform.)
Here’s what I would do if I were you:
– Get into the habit of recording yourself working in your dev environment with the Win + G key
– Take the most interesting parts of that footage, be it art assets, code, level building or scriptwriting, and repurpose it into the material you then use for your social media profiles. GIFs. Screenshots. Video clips. Carousel images. Time-lapse videos.
– Use a social media scheduler to post content once a day Monday through Friday and A/B test different types of content with a series of small, structured experiments, while continually optimizing off of the material that gets the best reach and engagement.
Screenshots or GIFs? GIFs or carousels? Carousels or videos? Real-time videos or time-lapse videos?
What about memes? What hashtags do you use? What times of day do you post?
Keep asking those questions, A or B. Throw a bunch of shit at the wall. See what people like. Give them more of that.
Test. Learn. Rerun. That is the creed of the marketer.
As a good rule of thumb, it’s ideal to schedule your social media calendar at least two weeks in advance. Ideally it would be more like a month.
Try that for a while and see what happens.
Inbound Marketing Methodology – and How it Relates to Your Indie Game
Before people buy from you, they have to like you.
Before they like you, they need to know who you are.
How do they know who you are?
You find people who use the same hashtags you do, and you talk to them. Ask them questions. Compliment their work. Share their content with your own audience.
You don’t do it by plugging your own product. You do it by making yourself present, by reaching out and engaging with people.
You can’t just post art and expect people to come to you. To get the wheels turning, you need to reach out and start conversations with people. Social media needs to be social.
Not as many people get that as you might think, but that’s often particularly true if you work in STEM and tech fields like game development.
Think of it this way.
How do you get followers?
Well, to answer that question you need to ask yourself: why were these social media platforms made in the first place?
To connect people? To educate and inspire? To ease the spread of information?
No. Of course not. That’s a blatant, outrageous lie. That’s just what they want you to think.
Social media is fun and in certain applications it’s incredibly useful, but on the whole social media is often a cesspit of toxicity, narcissism, self-aggrandizement and misinformation.
But that’s not to say that social media doesn’t have value.
Building relationships with people who have mutual interests. Keeping up with trends. Forming groups around a topic or subject area. Networking.
Social media is good for that sort of thing. I mean, the internet is built on niche communities like this.
However, the idea that social media was made for the purpose of connecting people is the narrative pushed by the companies that make these platforms to win the public over to their side, and only a fool would be naive enough to believe them.
So why then? What is social media for, really?
Well, it’s actually pretty simple when you get down to it.
These platforms exist for a single purpose: to make businesses money. That’s the dark and sordid truth.
How do they do this? They do it by showing people ads.
And how do they get people to see those ads? By incentivizing users to spend as much time on the platform as possible.
Each of the major social media platforms accomplishes this in different ways.
Twitter, for example, works like an RSS feed for trending topics. These topics can change from moment to moment, and both the algorithm and the content of the platform reflect that.
That means the average tweet has a half-life of something like 15 minutes. That means that in order to use it effectively, you need to be using it an average of once a day. Ideally multiple times a day.
And before you ask, yes I’ve checked. Most successful indie devs with strong and engaged social media followings do this too. Unfortunately, that’s just what it takes to break through the noise and stand out in a market that’s oversaturated with indie games and sees 10’s of thousands of new releases every year.
That’s how Twitter works. Little, bite-sized pieces of information. Given all throughout the day.
So the next time you have a thought about where your game development process is going, write about it on Tweet Deck (https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/) and schedule it a few hours from now. Then go back to what you were doing. Rinse and repeat.
Or take Instagram for instance. Instagram is a feature-rich engagement platform.
There’s a lot of different ways you can use it, and the more you use them the more the platform rewards you. Release stories all throughout the day, the biggest brands do it about 5-10x per day. Use IGTV maybe once a week, and let your audience know when you’re posting there.
Each one has its own subtleties and material that works best on it. IG likes videos. Twitter likes GIFs.
But to circle back to the original question: how do you get followers?
You make them feel good.
Reach out to them. Find people who use the same hashtags you use. Who play the same games that inspired your own. Your favorite YouTubers and streamers.
And then talk to them like people. Compliment their artwork. Ask questions about their work or their field. Share their tweets and posts and videos and stories with your own audience.
That’s how you get the system to work for you rather than against you.
Here, read this book sometime: https://www.amazon.ca/Zen-Social-Media-Marketing-Credibility/dp/1942952066
This is a book called the Zen of Social Media Marketing by Shama Hyder. It’s a primer on the theory and philosophy behind social media marketing.
In it, she outlines the fundamentals of inbound marketing methodology: the art and science of drawing customers to an online business by establishing trust and providing a good customer experience.
Most people think of marketing as outbound: pushing a product through various channels out into the world.
In fact, in the case of online content, it works the other way around. The cycle goes: Attract. Engage. Convert. Delight.
Like this: https://www.hubspot.com/flywheel
The Theories Behind Content and Social Media Marketing
Fair enough. But what makes good content?
Here, look at this: https://themodernnonprofit.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Honeycomb-of-Value-1024×1024.png (source: The Modern Nonprofit)
Content, including social media content, is a product of the online business that is your indie game.
Good content, by definition, has to provide value to your ideal customer. If it doesn’t, it won’t sell.
It should be participatory, helpful, unique, entertaining, educational or meaningful, at least two of those and ideally three.
Questions, for example, often make best calls-to-action for social media posts.
So the next time you post screenshots throughout the week, try asking your followers:
– What games does this remind you of?
– Do you remember this other game that we enjoyed when we were kids?
– What do you think of (trending issue in the games industry)
– What has been your best experience with my game?
– What do you think I can improve on?
See what kinds of responses you get.
Polls too. Abylight Studios, the publishers of Hyper Light Drifter on Switch and iOS, make effective use of polls in their marketing. They’re fun and engaging. Check them out on Instagram and Twitter.
Here’s another rule of thumb: https://arinet.com/resources/blog-posts/70-20-10-formula-social-media-success/
Remember how I said that social media success is more about building authentic relationships than selling your product? Well, this is more or less the ratio you want.
70% of your content should be informational and be building your brand. The screenshots, the GIFs, the polls, that’s this stuff.
20% of your content should be retweets or cross-posts from the other indie game developers and enthusiasts you engage with online. They’ll appreciate it, you’ll make them feel good. You’ll make them want to be your friend.
But more to the point, you’ll send the message that you’re not just out for yourself. That message builds trust. Trust is how you build a business.
BUT (and this is important), this shared content NEEDS to be relevant to your audience. Don’t cheapen your brand just to get in with the in-crowd.
Then, there’s the final 10%. The promoted content. The content where you go in for the conversion. Post your sales. Signups for art contests. Wishlists on Steam. Only about 10% should be to actually sell your product.
So, to reiterate:
70%: Here’s something we think you’ll like!
20%: Check out this cool thing my friend made!
10%: Buy my shit!
It’s called the 70/20/10 rule, and it’s one of the theories behind content marketing.
But Most Importantly…
Just have fun!
Social media is supposed to be fun. It’s designed to be fun. It’s like a game, one where you compete with millions of other people to get the most attention points.
If you have fun making content and engaging with your audience, the platform will reward you for it.
And that’s the biggest thing. Just, try to forget how monstrous and evil social media really is beneath the surface and just try to get creative with it. People will respect that.
Or, if you really can’t be bothered and would rather have someone else do all this for you, get in touch with me to schedule a free consultation at Travis Digital Marketing!
The post How to Batch Social Media Content When You’re an Indie Dev with No Spare Time! appeared first on Gilded Octopus.
