Social Media for Game Devs!

hey this is John us making video games with you and today I want to talk with you about social media because two months ago when I got started I was pretty confused which certainly have not for sure to be honest again developer which social media platform so you start with what should you focus on should you try to spread yourself across as many social media platforms as possible should you just focus on one social media platform what is the best strategy as a game developer on social media and don't get me wrong I'm just getting started I don't know all that much about it but this is pretty much the stuff I wish somebody had told me when I got started so hopefully you can learn something from my experiences and hopefully in five years I will look back on this video and think that poor little guy didn't know what he talked about at all is it necessary is it helpful to be on social media as a game developer as a game designer from my experience I can say yes it's absolutely xactly helpful firstly the first thing you need to consider obviously is you want to get your game out there maybe you want to Zen your game that is not possible if people don't know about your game and

social media is essentially a free marketing tool I mean you get attention for absolutely free who would say no to free marketing all it costs you is time so is it worth it just from a marketing perspective yes and then on top of that it can also help you to build a cool community to get some really good feedback for your game and to make your game absolutely awesome I'm absolutely positive that my game would be a lot worse off if I were on social media and simply the fact that I communicate a lot with my community and with other game designers via social media is a big plus social media takes a lot of time is it really rather to spend all the time on social media if you want my honest opinion on that in the short run know if you're looking for some quick victories for some short wins putting all that energy Media might not be rated but I think it can absolutely pay off in the long run if you have the consistency and the patience to post consistently over the period of five years of ten years then I

think it's going to be absolutely worth it attention is everything nowadays social media essentially gives you free attention whatever you want to do attention is always useful if you want to get your opinion out there if you want to make a difference in the world if you want to sell something whatever you do having an audience having attention is always super useful in the long run I think it absolutely pays off to invest your time on social media in the short run subtract time I let's start with the question should you be only on one social media platforms or should you try to be on as many social media platforms as possible and they're kind of strong arguments for both sides one side argues you need to focus on one because if you focus on all social media platforms at once you can spread yourself too thin you can manage all of them at once and you can't grow all of them at once if you focus on everything none of that will grow and I mean yeah it's probably kind of true also focusing

just on one social media platform alone is also kind of dangerous why if the platform shuts down what if there's some algorithm changes on you don't get the traction or the attention that you used to on that platform so being a multiple platforms as kind of a safety measurement and it also allows you to do a lot of cross promotion to your other platforms which is why be on multiple platforms is also a good idea so what can you do should you do just one should you do multiple and honestly I think there's a good solution and that is focus on one social media platform try to make that your thing and then beyond the other ones as well so the way I do this is I focus on YouTube I want to grow and YouTube that's my main platform that's where all of my attention goes I still have Facebook Twitter and now also Instagram and the reason for that is it just takes some time to grow a following on any social media platform the very early your start the better the more you can grow and then at some point when I want to get serious about any of those

platforms its way easier because I also have a little bit of a following if you - suddenly shuts down or doesn't promote my videos anymore I have some platforms where I can go and you can stay grow on those other platforms the only thing you need to be careful about is that those platforms don't become ghost towns any social media platform you are on should be updated every now and then at least once a week so people can see you're still active if they come through your account and SEO this guy hasn't been online for one year then it's really of no use I think so that would basically be my advice pick one social media platform that you want to focus all of your attention on that you really want to grow on and then go on all the other ones as well and just you know a little bit up Laura with pictures maybe you won't post a week at least you get a little bit of a feel for the platform you can grow a couple of followers I think this approach makes a lot of sense this is a good compromise between being only on one and spreading yourself too thin across all platforms as a game developer

as a game designer which platform should you start with and for me the answer is one of the two either YouTube or Twitter Twitter's a really good platform for game designers and game developers because pretty much all game developers are on Twitter and that also means that pretty much all of the game critics are on Twitter pretty much all of the big youtubers are Twitter it's very easy to reach those kind of people near twitter and to communicate with them that's one of the biggest pluses of Twitter I guess and the gaming scene there are just a lot of people on Twitter and also the people who care about games the people who review your games it's a decent platform to start with YouTube is cool if you feel comfortable with making videos but that's not for everybody you know just writing a tweet every now and then and posting a couple of pictures is a lot more comfortable than standing in front of a camera and talking or stuff like that also YouTube is a lot more work you need to put a lot more work into YouTube obviously the advantage of

YouTube is you get a lot more engagement you get a lot more active followers that if you really construct a feedback this kind of stuff doesn't happen that much on Twitter so both have kind of upsides and downsides one of the two either YouTube or Twitter then maybe an interesting questions also how do you grow on social media I think you need to understand what social media platforms want they want to make money and what they need for that is they need people to stay on their platforms as long as possible so what you basically try to do is help the social media platform to achieve that goal your job is to keep people on the platform and if you good job at that then the platform will promote you the most important thing in my opinion is consistency and I've heard this from a lot of other people as well you need to be consistent so for example if you want to grow on YouTube literally the best way to do it is to do daily uploads that's why I do many uploads it's the fastest way to grow and it's pretty much the same for all the other

platforms Twitter Instagram post regularly and post often that's the fastest way to grow otherwise you just need a lot of patience if you don't post it off and then it will obviously take longer to grow yes I said your goal is basically to maximize the time other people spend on the platform and the better your content the more time they spend on the platform if your content sucks then people will watch it maybe they will even leave the platform and that's what all social media platforms don't like at all other one thing to keep in mind is you need to be a little careful about linking to other platforms or linking to your web sites from your social media for example if I post a youtube link on Facebook it gets absolutely annihilated because Facebook doesn't want you to go to youtube facebook wants you to stay on Facebook and the same goes for the other platforms Twitter doesn't like it when you post YouTube links but especially Facebook it doesn't general the organic reach of Facebook is absolutely terrible on

Twitter it's a lot better on Instagram it's actually pretty good and then also if you want to grow obviously engage with your audience that's the biggest way to make that's the easiest way to make them spend more time on the platform if you have actual conversations with them they will obviously be a lot more engaged than just from during your content passively so if you can give your viewers and your followers some active engagement that's perfect that's what pretty much all social media platforms encourage and what they promote if you're on social media focus on one niche don't do everything don't write about games than about movies then about this then about that just have one topic one specific niche and talk only about that for me this is game development if you talk about too many different things people follow you and then suddenly they see three posts where you talk about something completely different they're not interested in that and they will unfollow you also one thing you absolutely need to keep in mind about growing on social media

platforms that growth on any social media platform is exponential your followers don't grow in a straight line but they go like this like this like this like this one suddenly it explodes somewhere or at least your growth speeds up faster and faster over time so don't be too worried about creeping around with 50 followers 60 followers because if you have enough patience and if you put out good content then this exponential growth will start kicking in earlier later if it doesn't then maybe your content isn't good but if you make good content and you're consistent you can probably rely on that exponential growth curve I don't have too much experience with that I can tell you for sure that's true I mean I have German youtube channel that exploded to five thousand subscribers without me having to do anything and I didn't as I said I didn't even upload so I pretty much got from two thousand to five thousand without uploading anything at all on that channel which is pretty

hilarious which makes me confident that this kind of exponential growth will start to kick in on this channel as well and other social media platforms you can't be had 100% sure because who knows how those algorithms work nobody understands them the only thing they're trying to do is maximize time to spend on their platform because that means they can show more advertisement to their users and earn more money so one big social media mistake I see a lot of people make is they just use it to put out content to put out content maybe this works on YouTube a little better because people expect that on YouTube I don't know how well that works on Twitter because why should people care about your latest screenshot by should people care about what you have to say about anything really your content needs to be absolute killer on Twitter you need to make really cool gifts little videos really cool screenshots maybe for attentional just don't use Twitter to put out content don't use

Facebook to put out content use it to listen use it to listen what other people actually have to say for example what I did recently is I searched for RTS game on Twitter and saw all the people that talked about RTS games in the last week on Twitter which is absolutely amazing if you think about it and I just started to engage in conversations with them for example what do you think makes a good strategy game why you like the strategy game that we talked about here stuff like that and then you can get into a conversation it helps you to learn about what you want to do it helps you to find some people that are actually interested in strategy games some of them even tested my games all of them gave me really cool advice some of them followed me so especially if you keep in mind that your growth is exponential so even the little victories you have in the beginning will help you to blow up your channel a lot more in the future and sometimes connections are just worth more than anything else if you find somebody who really cares about your gives you a ton of useful feedback you

can find those people on social media all you need to do is watch out for them have a look engage in conversations when should you start showing your game and my answer is pretty much right away my weight with it it's actually pretty cool for your viewers to see how again gets better and better how the graphics improve over time so I think there's absolutely no reason to vote back especially when you're a small through your small developer every little bit of attention you can get this a plus will start as early as possible also will try to make your game look kind of okay as early as possible so it's more shareable and watchable and consumable don't know if that the best approach for every project but I think for small indie projects it's the best approach to just put stuff out right away again try to get people interested in your game right away social media addiction because I can clearly feel I'm getting addicted to social media and not even joking you suddenly feel like oh I need to post I

need to post I need to check again oh somebody liked my video or somebody likes my image so good I'm checking social media more and more often and checking Twitter way more than I should and checking Instagram way more often than I should obviously all of those platforms are designed to be addicting they're designed to give you those social rewards where's the Oh somebody like this and somebody commented on that and for some reason that just makes our brain happy I don't know I hate all I need to know is you actually need to be a little careful the problem I'm having at the moment is I know that the social media is super useful for me it's a super useful tool that I want to use it actually helps me to achieve my goals to get me forward as a game designer developer but at the same time I also feel like and kind of addicted so should I stop using social media no personal telephone to achieve my goals it also kind of makes everything more fun because every time you do something you can share it and get

instant feedback that is just a cool feedback thank you that pretty much makes everything more enjoyable it wouldn't make any sense to quit social media maybe you have to set some boundaries sometimes timeframes where you're not allowed to check social media there are a lot of people who really destroyed their relationships because they constantly need to check their Twitter and their Instagram when they're with friends and they don't really care about their friends anymore they just live in their phone and it's not a new brand realistic scenario maybe if you haven't used a lot of social media you might think that this will not happen to me but if you actually care about growing a following on social media this happens way easier than you think so that was my little rant about social media hope you found this informative and interesting and something I would look back on this in five years and maybe in one year and think you knew nothing and it's probably the case I don't know that much about social media I haven't been a big social media user

pretty much for my entire life I just got started with it two months ago kinda barbarism predicted yeah so that's that make the world your playground see you in the next one peace out