Social Media Deep Dive: 'Among Us' TikTok Strategy

[Music] thank you hi and hello to the people in chat this is very cool this is like Dual Purpose presentation and very very hyped for this um and I am also good segue very hyped to talk about Among Us this Tick Tock strategy with you which I have seen some people go like Tick Tock is my Nemesis and I understand and I understand there's a lot of social media platforms out there so this is going to be a deep dive into one of them to hopefully kind of help you navigate everything so as a brief introduction my name is Victoria Tran I'm the community community director at intersloth we make the game Among Us and the Henry Stickman collection and at any point and afterwards you can find me on Twitter at the V Tran um usually around there as many of us really are and before I kind of get into like the

in-depth portion of Among Us is Tick Tock I do have a confession uh that at this point I'm like a Serial instigator Creator content maker for indie game Studio tick tocks uh Among Us is not the only one that I've worked on and I think that actually gives me a lot of really nice context and contextual context and info uh when it comes to other kind of game studios and other genres so as a really brief overview of what I've done I initially started the kickbox games Tick Tock account uh in February 2020 and they did amazing I did not get them to 25k followers like you see here I think I got them to like 10K and they've done an amazing job with it and they obviously had a bunch of different games and also was interesting in that it was a studio account and not just a singular game and then in July 2021 I worked on the unpacking a tick tock account which which by the way

they're doing amazing they're like up for awards they're very proud of them uh and that did Super well that I think got to 170k until I left in December 2021 uh because that was just a side thing that I was helping them out with and then finally we reached the like Among Us Tick Tock account which is my main thing and I started that in December 2020. um so yeah so I've worked on a bunch of different genres a bunch of different games uh different kind of contexts when it comes to game studios uh and as much as Among Us is a very huge Tick Tock account I think there's a lot of lessons that I learned throughout all three of them that can be applied to whichever kind of tick tock account you have okay so let's kind of get started a little brief intro all that kind of stuff um so this is a study that was done by tick tock conducted by material so just a heads up that you know there might be some bias there but according to the study that they did tick tockers are 1.5 times more

likely to immediately go out and buy something or wishlist something uh they discovered on the platform compared to kind of other platform users and this is sort of the big thing of why everyone keeps talking about Tick Tock uh it's just that the discoverability for it in terms of other social media platforms is quite uh good in terms of their algorithm um people continually learning something new so learning more updates about your game learning more about your game that's a huge part of it and of course uh just being inspired and there's a lot of really great indie games out there and you know AAA games out there that it's really interesting to see the ways in which they Inspire other Tick-Tock users and really make it uh into the cultural Zeitgeist I suppose so really briefly again I'm going to go back into Among Us Again a little more in depth about it uh so we launched as I said in December 2020 uh we got a ton of followers within the first six months uh

which is very uh not actually not that rare in terms of tick tock okay that's a lot it's a little bit it's rare in terms of tick tock growth to have that many um but you will often see like when a lot of indie games or a lot of other Studios kind of talk about that the amount of follows that you get on an account does kind of exceed the rate in which you would see on like Twitter or Facebook if you're using that or Instagram that sort of thing um and for context I am the person who's currently working on all the community and marketing side stuff and Among Us which means that I don't get as much time as I would like on it uh because I have so many other things to do uh and the goal for our Among Us account which might be different for your accounts uh was brand awareness engagement and sustainability so sustainability of our community because at this point uh we had really good discoverability so that wasn't one of the goals for the Among Us account and of course huge caveat Among Us

already had a huge player Base by the time I launched a tick tock I don't really take credit for all the growth there um and in terms of effort that I put into it so for the Among Us account I put in about one video per week at minimum um I would love to do more but as I said it's a little bit difficult because I have so many other things to do uh so at my frequency I go once per week and I did that for the same thing for uh unpacking uh where I did one video a week and Kit Fox was around two videos of a week if I could swing it but again it was there's a lot there's a lot of things going on so I often couldn't do as many as I wanted I honestly consider the effort that you have to put into Tick Tock quite high so unlike um like a tweet where you can just type it out or something of creation for me takes around 15 minutes to one hour per video depending on how uh magnificent you want and how much editing you're doing uh the trends can take one to two hours per week in order just to like scroll through it and re and watch uh

all the things that are going on and also I put in like an hour per week on engagement so that could be be like going through other videos and liking them and commenting on them going through our own comments and commenting through them basically personality and cultural understanding of tick tock has to be quite on point um and engaging with it so it is it is quite a high effort uh social media platform so I just wanted to warn you about that all right so I will soon get to the case studies but I really want to go over building a brand identifier on Tick Tock um this kind of goes through a very social media General strategy but there are some unique considerations I put into Tick Tock structure so the first thing is like you really want to talk uh think about how you want to be recognized on Tick Tock because that's a huge thing it's so visual right so the first thing is silent tone so how you want to sound on Tick Tock do you want to be quirky wholesome relatable calming competitive I usually pick three big adjectives that will describe your overall content and then everything kind

of trickles down from there so what lighting will use how polish will things look what kind of content will you create how do you want your audience to understand you then you go for a consistent brand elements so it's really beneficial for a tick tock account to have like one person or character continually and distinctly appear in videos so scrolling through videos is really quick and not everyone checks the username and profile pic so having a distinct face someone can immediately associate with your Tick Tock account really helps people identify your content easily and it's very common for people to have like only one to two people like actually appear in a tick tock when it comes to like their own account um if you don't want to use your face totally fine just use consistent elements you can have certain lighting a distinctive mark an object a color palette a video game character unpacking for example didn't have any characters whatsoever so we really went with like uh really distinct elements of it um hook uh the first one to three seconds of a video is extremely important as with you know anything I'm

sure you've heard like the word hook so many times now but you do really want to front load your video with the most interesting thing possible and it doesn't even need to be visual it could be a question like um how did I make feet move in my game or uh times I use the Among Us account for my own personal gain and everyone hates this task or something like that basically pose an idea and use the rest of the video uh to expand on it and then you have Trends and this is a beautiful way to keep engagement right tick tock is known for its viral Trends and hopping on to that in a timely manner is really nice because if you can't think of anything or if you want people to stick around for something they'll tend to do it if there is like a trend that they know like a hook or some punch line is coming and a lot of people think like those Canadian brand voice really matter especially like if I'm Indie and it does I think and according to the Sprout social index um some of the reasons why Brands stood out more than others according to Consumers uh was like things like memorable memorable content

um personality or distinct personality and campelli starts compelling storytelling and a lot of times with social we're not gunning for like a one-hit viral thing we're really aiming for sustainable practical practical Community engagement and we can create content that is memorable and keeps us a top of mind all right so I'm gonna go a little bit more in depth into the actual Among Us videos that we've done so there are kind of five content types that I found really helpful for me when it comes to Among Us um those are things are game updates so these are ongoing updates about the game whether it's bug fixes or huge announcements um personality Tick Tock so videos hopping on Trends or having fun with the community uh behind the scenes things that shows off more developer focused looks at the games and what goes into making it um gameplay so videos that focus on game content that is already out and miscellaneous things so this could be reactions um we have merchandise so I use merchandise that sort of thing and game updates by far get the highest

engagement and share rate for Among Us this isn't really a shock uh the difficulty here is really to make a game update interesting sometimes especially when you know you don't have much to show for it or you need it to keep people informed about things like bug fixes which is a little bit difficult um but I do try to keep these as short as possible generally people always recommend to keep these as short as like any Tick Tock as short as possible just because the looping is really good for the algorithm um but it all varies anyways so when it comes to the actual game update some things that I've done that have worked really well is really um focusing The Tick Tock right so we've had like Among Us updates whereas like hey these are all the things that are happening and instead I just broke it apart into bit by bit pieces so for example we had an update on June 30th that introduced a bunch of new things but the one standout thing was we had a new task that was Vent cleaning I mean part of you know really understanding your community and knowing what makes them tick and really

what like makes them laugh or makes them excited is to know what they talk about so a lot of people talked about Vent cleaning being a kind of joke task in Among Us or a joke excuse and we actually implemented it and so when I put it into the tick tock that was the only thing that I focused on and I didn't talk about any of the other things that we had and I was just was like hey we have Vent cleaning and that made it more interesting than just like a casual bug update a casual update full of fixes and stuff like that there was also another time uh where we updated the game and I'm sure many of you have been through this before and it just broke the game like it wasn't working um and the hard thing on Tick Tock is to really commute especially when you have a big community on it is to just communicate hey we're working on bug fixes because you can't just tweet out hey we're you can't just tweet out on Twitter hey we're working on bug fixes and do like a quick status update so for this um I kind of hopped onto a trending meme at the time uh which is like a song

which you can't hear and the gesture uh and I really made fun of the fact that we completely broke the game which people took really well and we got a lot of software developers relating to the video too and it really successfully uh conveyed information about keeping the game updated and that we were aware of the problems that people had with a meme so that's cool um so these tick tocks that I'm going to talk about next are the personality based tick tocks these are super varied in terms of our virality uh but that's okay though the point of these tick tocks aren't necessarily to get big numbers so it's always nice uh but to solidify our tone with the community and create that connection as an indie studio and these videos can often be longer all right so the one that I'm kind of focusing on here is that at the time of posting tick tocks the only question I was getting in comments was stuff about uh where the new map was and you can get this too you can be like oh God like everyone keeps asking me when the release date is everyone keeps asking me if it's coming out on mobile that sort of thing

um and hopping onto a trend and really like not being afraid to be honest with your Tick Tock Community is one of the things that they just like love the most um even more so than like a lot of other uh social media platforms I found that they've just really latched on to this kind of self-awareness next we have behind the scenes videos these honestly for me are the poorest performing ones and I think it's because I'm not very good at them I've seen other Industries do like so good uh with them and I I don't know it could be because I'm making it wrong it could also be because the majority of our community really cares about new items and not really old ones but that's okay the videos here tend to be longer and aren't necessarily a target for the for you page for me anyway they're usually more just to get our community engaged so for example um you can answer questions from tick tocks like in The Tick Tock comments and respond to them and that could be a way that you talk about more behind the scenes stuff um here it probably would have been a

better hook if maybe I'd like shown a little more of the actual Among Us character but that's all right it's one of those things where you can kind of learn from your from videos that don't do as well it's and also just like you know reading the comments and being able to respond to them next are the gameplay videos these focus on gameplay it takes up a Content it takes content straight from the game and plops it into a fun little video um and these tend to do relatively well but they definitely vary due to the fact gameplay can cover anything from like difficult tasks gameplay Styles looking at game details that sort of thing um and again it's really important I think to really hone in on one part of a uh the gameplay aspect so for example we had an update for Among Us roles and the actual trailer that I put onto the tick tock uh down I prompted a tick tock account didn't do super well but this video that I just talked about focusing on the shapeshifter kill and showing it in the game did way better in terms of

views uh so that's a really interesting thing miscellaneous stuff merchandise reacts interactions among us has plenty of other things to talk about and you may too so whether it's do adding videos or showing off new merchandise merchandise I find it you know just really fun to be able to talk about it um one of the things that I will say is that it does much better than I thought but you have to be very careful about not straight up being like buy this thing because I feel like the algorithm or like tick tock on the back end doesn't really like the whole like bye bye bye um thing so instead what I usually do is just literally show off like the products don't even say honestly like where they can get it you can put a website maybe in the comments or something or like respond to people but otherwise people just really like looking at cool stuff and merch for sure is one of those things that is big on tick tock all this to say is that like I've shown you videos that have a lot of views but it is a it is still a learning process

you can see like on the top left uh I have a video that had like a hundred K views and that's not as much as the one right below it which is 12.9 million views it really is one of those things where like I no don't I wouldn't trust anyone who just guarantees that you can go viral all the time it is definitely just working and figuring out what content works with your community and continually kind of testing it um and that's really important I think when it comes to Tech talk but also when it comes to any social media platform is really testing and keeping track of what works and what doesn't work um and how do we actually measure success so this is a very rough overview this is like a snippet I took out of like a spreadsheet um but this is the kinds of ways that I track like how well is something actually doing um what is our engagement percentage because that's something that's really important to me and from this we can determine things like personalized tick tocks get the highest engagement compared to other categories

particularly in the number of people commenting um however game update tick tocks usually get the most visibility overall so it's like what am I aiming for am I aiming for visibility am I aiming for engagement um the most shareable content was the water bottle video which makes sense because people probably wanted other people to see the merch and to buy it um that really happens quite a bit um and the second most shareable content was usually anything involving game updates because people would tell their friends like hey uh let's play this or you know they share it with their communities behind the scenes videos are things that I probably shouldn't post a lot of or I should really change what I do because it is not doing as well as the other categories um and gameplay is more like solid Mill of the road content and before you page is obviously the best place to be in for visibility but once people are on your profile page having content that interests them will really help boost stats it's really all about thinking like you know what are your goals for tick tock is it just views that hopefully convert

to wishlists uh do you want engagement on the platform are you aiming for shares overall pay attention to what's happening with your content so you can better prepare for Success on the platform all right so this is another chart uh shout out to System shout out to System chalk on Twitter for this who is an amazing Economist and really helped me out with this um we plotted this Among Us data on a graph that measures engagement and found that overall engagement percentage doesn't actually really shift based on the video length so if you consider success to be people watching to the end of something then shorter videos are better but we didn't really see anything that indicated longer videos were hurting engagement measures we also did a plot for length and Views and while it does show a negative Trend it's not a very strong relationship I'm not saying completely irrelevant because the three longest videos are also the bottom three for views and The Tick Tock algorithm does reward videos that get re-watched over and over but it's fair to say that at least part of the connection is that we just have more success in the short video Club none of this really counts as

a breakthrough by the way or anything really especially considering you know how smaller sample size is with the Among Us account um but as in like the number of videos we we have but we were just curious about the length and was a little surprised to see how stable the engagement measure was no matter how long the video was and this is what it looks like for among us but it's possible this graph might look different for other game audiences as with any content things really vary from game to game and all of this is to say people getting excited and informed about your game is never a straight line it's really this infinite Loop that again Tick Tock put out it's about discoverability consideration review and participation with your videos and according to the study 44 of the daily Tick Tock users did want branded content to be fun and entertaining so again it's just it's this Loop of figuring out what people want what people are responding to and I wouldn't be discouraged if it doesn't work out all at once in the beginning

and I'm going to really briefly go over the community and being part of it because some initial warnings if you haven't been on Tick Tock before expect to see two comments the most will this game be on mobile and is it free don't forget Tick Tock is a mobile only app basically so obviously the users will be prioritizing their phone but also many are used to free mobile games being the norm this isn't just to discourage you to say tick tock users won't buy or wishlist your wish list your game on PCR console definitely the opposite it's just that I want to warn you and like any platform there are biases and types of comments you may see and you know just just be aware don't don't take it too much to heart people do care about your game even if they ask if it's free and it isn't always easy right so to be perfectly clear initial viral tick tocks that I got on the Among Us account were just inundated with dead game comments any like big game you can see they just get so many dead game comments that isn't to say you have to give up the on

the platform though when you do get negativity at least engaging with it really helps if you have people pay attention to who is reading and who is engaging to the con with the comments um and again why it's because it's not just about going viral it really is about building a sustainable long-term Community for your studio and if you hate going on a social media platform or your studio Haze going on a social media platform because the comments are really bad that's not a great place to be in so really leaning into it can if you have like the mental capacity change the sentiment create fans and highlight those that are ready in your corner and create a healthier space for your team and you know really analyzing the negativity is it bugs is it lack of updates a viral thing Etc it's something that I really went into where like after like a period of honestly me being like I hate it here I started responding to more comments uh because I know I know how lovely Tick Tock can be so I started responding to things and like actually as Among Us just not punching down on people but trying to be like hey I appreciate you're here or hey I'm just

reading these comments even if it's a joke right um and it actually started working right so we can see here uh people started being a little bit nicer about things uh and then on the left again another example of me just kind of responding to a very uh negative comment and the thing about Tick Tock Commons is it doesn't like really or I don't know how they order it but some things will just like pop up at the top even if you respond if you know if you don't respond to them even if you do respond to them just because it's getting a lot of Engagement so often at the times at the top we'd see like Dead game comments so I just make sure I respond to those because you can see my reply below and then on the right you can see kind of the sentiment start to change where people were like hey why are you actually why are you saying this that's kind of mean um and again it's one of those things where um being an indie game Studio doesn't really help with this and just being a person that is responding to it and people understanding there is a person behind the camp has really helped all of this to say is basically to make an effort to be a part of the community

that you post in understand and pay attention to how the community act interacts in the space the language they use even emojis all right so we're almost near the end and then I can take questions because I know there are a bunch of questions in chat and maybe there are a bunch of questions in the audience I'm not sure um but price is important why have I kept talking about tech talk about social media that sort of thing especially when you maybe have heard it's not super great for uh in terms of like conversion in terms of all social media platforms so this is a study by hootsuite's digital 2022 report and the interesting thing about this graph is that I measured the percentage of Internet users because each Channel as a primary source of information when researching Brands though keep in mind this is not game specific or anything so there's some you know messiness here and we can see on the lower part of this graph from 35 to 64 year olds is as we expect find a brand on Google any search engine for more information about the

brand its offerings and what it's like the interesting part is the youngest age group here 16 to 24 year olds uh and the younger we get on this graph the more we see social networks are actually the places people go to search up a brand and this group is the one that does it over a search engine and I'm not 16 to 24 however I can confirm that actually I have started using social media like I will type it in in like Instagram or something when I want to find out more about any kind of product because honestly it's just easier for me that way and this isn't to say SEO or anything isn't important it's just that as you know uh we kind of build a culturally relevant brand it means we need to engage with culturally relevant platforms and things are always changing I understand it's really stressful we there was a MySpace now there is no Myspace Facebook I don't even know what Facebook is doing um and now we have Tech talk and we have so many other things and there's

probably more and more things coming and it can be really stressful I understand uh but there are reasons to which uh you know we want to engage with these platforms as Studios as games as people whatever and again this is what works for among us and this is you know how we got all this data with like you know experimentation a little bit of flexibility agility all of these are super important for our constantly morphing platform like Tick Tock where the trends are driven by users and internet memes um and working with data alongside cultural interest in the space is key to making a successful brand in a space like this engage with your community not just remember it's not just about numbers going up but having like a healthy and thriving long-term player base and then you know as the bigger the player base goes maybe you can depend a little less on social media platforms if that's not your thing if that's not what you like um and as I said you really want to engage with the platforms to be a culturally relevant continuing brand but also be a brand that engages and is conscious of the world that it's a part

of hopefully you want to make a good Mark wherever you are too and every brand success measures by far are very different but merging quantitative and qualitative data will take you very far thank you for listening to me uh Babylon for quite a while I guess we can start doing questions um I know there is a lot in chat but for people who are attending in the audience I don't know if maybe I'll answer a question in chat while the audience can uh think about it okay questions let's see um how does marketing on Tick Tock differ from other social media systems is there anything you found that's significantly easier or harder on different platforms that's a very big question um I think a lot of social media platforms if you're talking about marketing if you're talking about like paid marketing or something that could be very different uh as with anything I think with Tick Tock

the thing that a lot of people struggle with is just how organic Tick Tock needs to feel sometimes um and especially when you're if you're making like a sponsored or an ad on Tick Tock a lot of the time like you will automatically scroll through it if you can see that it's a clear brand but if it's like uh someone who's like a little more I've seen people like use like influencers on Tick Tock like just like kind of talk about a product more organically um but still have to add things uh that's something I think is one of the things that people are struggling with I hope that was your question um do we have questions from the audience yeah person hello oh yes hello hi hello hello I'm a huge fan and uh yes so that's kind of a two-part question we were actually both a finalists last year in the game hers for best community manager Indy so I would love to be your friend if possible um and also what do you do if something is failing and the studio is freaking out uh how do you pivot or react to that

is there kind of a a panic plan or do you have any tips or advice or something like that when something is failing like let's say on social you kind of have a not the reaction you were hoping for maybe you've done kind of a troll post or a meme post and it's kind of getting maybe canceled or something like that kind of the worst possible and you're getting a lot of really negative negative response do you have any tips for that on Tick Tock or really any socials yeah yeah kind of give super blanket response answers are you what did you post right so it's it's right so it's one of those things where it's like well I mean there's only so much firefighting you can do depending on how severe the community thinks it is like if you made like um a joke and they're like a silence brand because I don't know it was a really old Meme and whatever then it's one of those things where you can just move on from it people like again uh people's attention spans and remembering

of things super fast I would just keep posting um maybe I don't know what it is feel free to DM at DM me on Twitter I don't know what's happening uh but I would say when it comes to yeah it's just being honest with whatever your your studio and understanding that sometimes things don't tick up well with the community or at least like responding to the comments in there and being like you know what you're right that was in the greatest joke we could have made gonna fix it or do I don't know again I don't know what happened um but I would say like really taking note of what the community is saying and making an effort to like respond engage with it like I took like almost like a day just going through comment Dead game comments and responding to it um so hopefully that helps okay thank you so much and thank you for being here yeah no thank you um okay I will switch to a chat question um is there an ideal video length that

you found drove the most engagement yes under 15 seconds always uh well okay most engagement um no because as the graph kind of showed it honestly was pretty consistent it's if you want the views though then under 15 seconds all right in-person question hey Victoria it's Jared hello oh hey um yeah thanks for always being willing to share everything that you've learned from like all these games that you've worked on um I was wondering for discoverability of a game that let's say is relatively unknown like you did with boyfriend dungeon or unpacking what would be like one big point that you'd give advice for discoverability of a relatively unknown game on sick talk yeah so okay oh God one um that's a mixture of things the the biggest thing is always just like the hook of your Tick Tock content so that

the first video that ever blew up on Kit Fox games when I was working on it that like got like the first like the first beer I had like oh like maybe like over a hundred thousand views views in um or maybe over 10 000 views and it's been a long time sorry I'm stalling uh is one where I was like I was basically talking about like dating your weapons or something it was just like one of like something that was kind of if you heard it for the first time you're like ex wait what so having people like really uh have like a wait what moment is usually quite helpful when it comes to like discoverability um like the weird like so if you go on Tick Tock there's like a weirdness to it there's like a little bit of a chaos to it and that really uh is something that hooks on quite a bit and when it comes to unpacking oh I also sorry I also meant to say having like three to five hashtags usually pretty good um please make it relevant but some people like just look at the

hashtags other game studios are using and kind of learn from that uh and for unpacking the first one that kind of went viral was honestly just talking about the joy of I think talking about organization because so many people love organizing things um onto like Tick Tock has like organization Tick Tock there's book talk there is game talk there there are so many like sub Tick Tock genres is that really honing in onto one genre that you like you really want people to discover uh is usually the way to get more discoverability foreign I just ignored it sorry uh thank you for being here uh if you have any more questions and I know there are a lot of questions in chat and I'm sure in person um please feel free to message me on Twitter it might take me a little bit to get to it but I will try to get to it or

just tweet at me um so other people can see the question too yeah thank you so much for being here I hope it was helpful and have a good GDC stay safe if you're out there okay bye [Music]