I have a question regarding content and the process of building an audience. Among the many marketing resources that I've come across, I noticed a few recurring themes (related to Twitter posts and updates). In short, many stated that you have to post at least 5 or more times a day to engage your followers or they will stop following you.

Missed this the first time around. I saw that same advice when I started running GDNet's social media, and tried it out; the response was terrible, most likely because it was somewhat obvious that I was really struggling to find real content for those updates, and generated more negative feedback than anything. Your mileage may vary and I would encourage you to try different approaches to see what works for you, but for me we got a much better response once I stopped trying to push out a minimum number of updates and instead concentrated on trying to push out the sort of updates people really want to see, whenever there was something available. For me that's normally still a minimum of 1 post per day, and sometimes up to 10 posts on a busy day, but occasionally nothing for a couple of days in a row; if I don't have content that's genuinely likely to be interesting I've found I get better results from simply posting nothing than I do from pushing out some sort of update just for the sake of it.

We've also received a lot of great feedback about keeping the accounts "human"; responding to things with an actual opinion rather than just PR talk, posting things as we find them rather than setting up an automated feed, just leaving up the occasional mistake with an apology and correction in the comments rather than trying to make everything perfect.

I have trouble with social networking, too. I've made accounts for twitter and facebook, but don't have the following to make much use of them. My concern is that without good networking (social or professional), a good game can go completely unnoticed.

I'm sorry to hear that. I do hope that it becomes easier for you moving forward. The question of how to build a following is a difficult one, for sure, because there are so many people who are striving toward the same goal at the same time. My understanding is that [unfortunately] an indie in today's market really has to make a lot of noise for people to notice him or her among the crowd. And even in that scenario, luck is still a huge factor.

I have a question regarding content and the process of building an audience. Among the many marketing resources that I've come across, I noticed a few recurring themes (related to Twitter posts and updates). In short, many stated that you have to post at least 5 or more times a day to engage your followers or they will stop following you.

Missed this the first time around. I saw that same advice when I started running GDNet's social media, and tried it out; the response was terrible, most likely because it was somewhat obvious that I was really struggling to find real content for those updates, and generated more negative feedback than anything. Your mileage may vary and I would encourage you to try different approaches to see what works for you, but for me we got a much better response once I stopped trying to push out a minimum number of updates and instead concentrated on trying to push out the sort of updates people really want to see, whenever there was something available. For me that's normally still a minimum of 1 post per day, and sometimes up to 10 posts on a busy day, but occasionally nothing for a couple of days in a row; if I don't have content that's genuinely likely to be interesting I've found I get better results from simply posting nothing than I do from pushing out some sort of update just for the sake of it.

We've also received a lot of great feedback about keeping the accounts "human"; responding to things with an actual opinion rather than just PR talk, posting things as we find them rather than setting up an automated feed, just leaving up the occasional mistake with an apology and correction in the comments rather than trying to make everything perfect.

Thank you for sharing your experiences with us (between your first post and the more recent update). It helps to see which approaches others have taken in the past. This is certainly doable.

Update:

For anyone who's interested in learning how to build an audience online (on YouTube, specifically), I would like to share this podcast. I found it quite useful!

Onigiri Flash, on 27 Jul 2015 - 2:12 PM, said:
"Do I really and truly need to register on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Etc. to be a successful game developer?"

LinkedIn is for jobs/recruitment. It's useless for building an audience for your games. (I think it's near-useless in general, but that's a whole different story.)

I partially disagree. LinkedIn is much less about jobs/recruitment and much more about professional networking. It's a great way to stay in contact with those that you've met and a great way to find out about various types of opportunities (speaking engagements, meet ups, guest blog posts, etc.). There are many people who I met at Steam Dev Days who I would have fallen out of contact with had it not been for adding them on LinkedIn.

I was thinking about this thread again, and remembered a guide to which I had been linked quite some time ago. The advice within is intended for Kickstarter projects, but I imagine that at least some of it will likely apply to the more general case of indie game development. Either way, it seems worth linking to:

A Lobster's Guide for Video Game Projects on Kickstarter

I haven't done more than skim a few pages thus far (and in any case don't feel terribly confident regarding social media or the running of crowdfunding campaigns), so I'm not in a position to recommend the guide myself. Nevertheless, it may prove useful.

Every time I add a feature to my game I record a video, put it on YouTube, write a journal entry here referencing that video, convert the video to animated gif with ezgif.com, then post that gif to twitter and Facebook.

So far I have the most success with Twitter and the gdnet journal.

On twitter take part in posts by more popular users, e.g. last night I posted to one that said "anyone want to show a gif of your game in action" and within an hour I'd gained 25 more followers and a ton of people had favourited my tweet.

Only people who view the videos are funneled there by other social media and these forums, and Facebook is good as useless as if it's not a narcissistic picture of how good you want everyone to think your life is, nobody on Facebook gives a crap.

YMMV, good luck!

I was thinking about this thread again, and remembered a guide to which I had been linked quite some time ago. The advice within is intended for Kickstarter projects, but I imagine that at least some of it will likely apply to the more general case of indie game development. Either way, it seems worth linking to:

A Lobster's Guide for Video Game Projects on Kickstarter

Thank you, Thaumaturge. Bookmarked.

Every time I add a feature to my game I record a video, put it on YouTube, write a journal entry here referencing that video, convert the video to animated gif with ezgif.com, then post that gif to twitter and Facebook.

So far I have the most success with Twitter and the gdnet journal.

On twitter take part in posts by more popular users, e.g. last night I posted to one that said "anyone want to show a gif of your game in action" and within an hour I'd gained 25 more followers and a ton of people had favourited my tweet.

Thank you for sharing your process. I'll keep this in mind, for sure.

Do you think it's ok to also post videos that aren't directly related to a particular game on the same channel (for instance, a "how-to" video or animation related to game development)?

Only people who view the videos are funneled there by other social media and these forums, and Facebook is good as useless as if it's not a narcissistic picture of how good you want everyone to think your life is, nobody on Facebook gives a crap.

YMMV, good luck!

Haha...Ok.

Thank you for sharing your process. I'll keep this in mind, for sure.



Do you think it's ok to also post videos that aren't directly related to a particular game on the same channel (for instance, a "how-to" video or animation related to game development)?

You're welcome!

It's definitely a good idea to post more videos to the channel on YouTube rather than less. More videos means more presence in search results for potentially different terms, which means it's more likely someone might view other videos in your channel and find out about your game, that wouldnt have otherwise.

So long as there is some relation and you can loosely associate it with the channel this will work, otherwise nothing stops you creating more than one channel under your account and referencing them from each other...