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petertos
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« Reply #20 on: October 31, 2013, 01:06:08 AM »

To S16VATR:

Do you have your official Troll card? I'ts mandatory to troll on these forums.
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ANtY
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« Reply #21 on: October 31, 2013, 01:23:42 AM »

To S16VATR:

Do you have your official Troll card? I'ts mandatory to troll on these forums.
don't talk to him, otherwise he'll never go away
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ryansumo
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« Reply #22 on: October 31, 2013, 05:35:23 PM »

In a week I got 100 new followers from the article I wrote (How NOT to market your indie game), and that's quite something when you don't even have 300 total.

but I guess that alpaca could go even more viral :p

That is a good title though.  I'm working on an article now that hopefully will get some hits, although these "mistakes (name of developer ) made articles are starting to get way too common".
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SprouttheGame
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« Reply #23 on: November 04, 2013, 05:00:36 PM »

In the past few years, I've read a lot of books on Social Marketing and the ONLY one I thought had any value at all was called Social Marketing is Bullshit. And it's pretty much right.

Every single book would go, "Look at this great viral marketing campaign by Nike, by Avida, by Dove, by Campbell's, etc; now you should try it!", and I'm scratching my head like, who do they think is reading this book? They use established brands to prove how brand building is important for start ups? Insanity.

Back to the library over and over. Same stuff, different author.

I think social marketing is absolutely necessary and valuable, but it isn't where you're going to get the majority of your business. Contacting members of the press and looking spots across traditional medium is the bread and butter. Social marketing should be used to bolster your main efforts.
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ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)
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« Reply #24 on: November 04, 2013, 05:32:54 PM »

the press is better for obtaining new fans, but social networks are better for retaining old ones. if you release a series of a lot of products (such as sequels to your games, DLC's, etc.) then social networks become more important than if you are only trying to sell a single product
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SprouttheGame
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« Reply #25 on: November 06, 2013, 03:36:14 PM »

That's well put Paul. Social Media will definitely help with maintaining loyalty, but usually when it is discussed it seems to be treated as some kind of magical customer tree that Joe could become a millionaire from.
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« Reply #26 on: November 07, 2013, 10:10:42 PM »

the press is better for obtaining new fans, but social networks are better for retaining old ones. if you release a series of a lot of products (such as sequels to your games, DLC's, etc.) then social networks become more important than if you are only trying to sell a single product
Then again I imagine the biggest issue indie developers have is obtaining new fans to be able to take off (or at least as fuel for taking off later), more specifically when they start, so no, that shouldn't be underestimated either.

But yes, social media is a good idea for retention. Even better though is if you can get the fans interact with each other, so they get reinforced as a community. That tends to be much more solid than just fans contacting the developer directly. You could do this with social media, but it's easy to forget to do this.
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OkijinGames
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« Reply #27 on: November 09, 2013, 09:59:55 AM »

My Facebook page has over 19K followers and the game page on windows phone has over 1.2K facebook likes.

You may disagree but I take these "likes" or "followers" more like a confidence or prospecting tool than a social tool. If a potential buyer sees that several thousand of people have taken the time to "like" the product I am selling then he would probably feel more confident giving it a go and spending his 2 bucks and even if not it cannot harm.

So as a direct advertising tool I would say it is not really a panacea (only a few percentage of referrals) but indirectly it can give some weight to a starting business or product. At the end if the goal is to get more referrals, one would probably have better results with a blog discussing about gaming related business/technologies and well placed backlinks...
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ANtY
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« Reply #28 on: November 09, 2013, 10:44:21 AM »

how
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williamkwan
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« Reply #29 on: December 07, 2013, 05:29:39 PM »

My Facebook page has over 19K followers and the game page on windows phone has over 1.2K facebook likes.

You may disagree but I take these "likes" or "followers" more like a confidence or prospecting tool than a social tool. If a potential buyer sees that several thousand of people have taken the time to "like" the product I am selling then he would probably feel more confident giving it a go and spending his 2 bucks and even if not it cannot harm.

So as a direct advertising tool I would say it is not really a panacea (only a few percentage of referrals) but indirectly it can give some weight to a starting business or product. At the end if the goal is to get more referrals, one would probably have better results with a blog discussing about gaming related business/technologies and well placed backlinks...

May I ask how you got all these followers and likes? It definitely makes your games look legit, but did it come after you were already getting a lot of sales from other marketing strategies, or were you aggressive with social from the start?
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kurismakku
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« Reply #30 on: December 11, 2013, 11:37:38 AM »

My Facebook page has over 19K followers and the game page on windows phone has over 1.2K facebook likes.

You may disagree but I take these "likes" or "followers" more like a confidence or prospecting tool than a social tool. If a potential buyer sees that several thousand of people have taken the time to "like" the product I am selling then he would probably feel more confident giving it a go and spending his 2 bucks and even if not it cannot harm.

So as a direct advertising tool I would say it is not really a panacea (only a few percentage of referrals) but indirectly it can give some weight to a starting business or product. At the end if the goal is to get more referrals, one would probably have better results with a blog discussing about gaming related business/technologies and well placed backlinks...

May I ask how you got all these followers and likes? It definitely makes your games look legit, but did it come after you were already getting a lot of sales from other marketing strategies, or were you aggressive with social from the start?


If you got some money you could also promote your page via Facebook system, it is not super expensive, and it is specially good when you just starting, it is more likely someone will like your page if it have 300 likes then if it have 10.
What is great is that you can set that your page is promoted to only specific group of people, for example 14-18 years old gamers that like survival horror games, and live in US.
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« Reply #31 on: December 11, 2013, 04:51:19 PM »

This thread reminded me of something I saw on techmeme the other day. Facebook is apparently clamping down on displaying business pages to users for free - they suggest businesses buy ads instead.

It’s going to get harder and harder for many businesses to reach fans on Facebook without paying for ads — that’s the message of sales material that the company sent to partners, as revealed in an Ad Age report.

... In the sales deck, Facebook first says it expects “organic distribution of an individual Page’s posts to gradually decline over time,” then it suggests, “to maximize delivery of your message in News Feed, your brand should consider using paid distribution.”

Comments at the bottom of the article suggest that, as of recently, people have been seeing massive drop in organic post reach, ie. how many posts get displayed to followers for free, just because they liked the page.
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OkijinGames
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« Reply #32 on: January 12, 2014, 04:14:18 AM »

May I ask how you got all these followers and likes?

I started my facebook page about 1 month before the publication of the game and spent about $50 over the month in a Facebook campaign with some posts. I found that kids are very much willing to engage on simple images such as "Find the difference..." or "How many..." like this one and Facebook knowing so much about their users allow for very tight targeting.

Posts that do not get much attention (and that I usually hide from the timeline) are links to my blog articles which are more dev/business related. At the end one must make a choice as to what the page is used for so I keep the content relevant to the end-user, the player.

Players also use as much the Facebook private messaging system as the contact form on my website so it is definitely a tool that has its usefulness (besides marketing) especially when targeting mobile users who have a tendency to rush to the store rating systems to notify their anger when something does not work for them Smiley
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« Reply #33 on: January 13, 2014, 11:14:05 PM »

Hi there! Major thanks to ANtY for starting this topic. It's very relevant to what I've been trying to do for One Upon Light for the past few months.

I started my facebook page about 1 month before the publication of the game and spent about $50 over the month in a Facebook campaign with some posts. I found that kids are very much willing to engage on simple images such as "Find the difference..." or "How many..." like this one and Facebook knowing so much about their users allow for very tight targeting.

That's an impressive fan base your page's got (I've just taken the liberty of adding myself to it Smiley). I'm interested in your experience when you were just starting to build this up, before the launch of your game(s). The posts you've mentioned that encourage fan participation seem to me to work best if you've already got an audience to begin with. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to get that level of activity with a 200 like count.

What in your experience drove the most number of likes to your page?

For One Upon Light, we've got a significant spike after its showing at IGF China back in Sept last year, but we didn't have an official facebook page for the game at that time yet and the likes were for our game lab's page. We thought it would make sense to have a dedicated page for the game itself, and that it would be easy to direct traffic to it from the game lab page. That wasn't the case. It took several months for the One Upon Light page to hit its current 200 likes. That was with a head start of about just about 100 from the game lab's original facebook page.

There was mention of the good #screenshotsaturday can do. I definitely concur; it's one of the better ways of reaching out to the internet at large. I don't have the hard stats but I wouldn't shy away from saying that it gives us a good chunk of our followers on twitter.
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OkijinGames
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« Reply #34 on: January 30, 2014, 05:16:50 PM »

I'm interested in your experience when you were just starting to build this up, before the launch of your game(s). The posts you've mentioned that encourage fan participation seem to me to work best if you've already got an audience to begin with.
Hi SyDaemon, since posts can be "boosted" individually for increased reached (especially to target people who do not already know your page), I would say that the number of existing fans on a page does not make much difference. For example, on July 1st my page had 1281 likes but one post had over 1800 likes.

The question is whether it is really worth spending money on facebook. Personally (I am running a one-man show at the end) I think it is a fairly affordable way to give weight to a business and products, connect to users and get some referrals in the process.

Having dedicated pages (per game) may be fine but only if you have the time and resources to handle them. I gave up on this idea very quickly.
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« Reply #35 on: April 12, 2014, 12:56:15 PM »

May I ask how you got all these followers and likes?

I started my facebook page about 1 month before the publication of the game and spent about $50 over the month in a Facebook campaign with some posts. I found that kids are very much willing to engage on simple images such as "Find the difference..." or "How many..." like this one and Facebook knowing so much about their users allow for very tight targeting.

Posts that do not get much attention (and that I usually hide from the timeline) are links to my blog articles which are more dev/business related. At the end one must make a choice as to what the page is used for so I keep the content relevant to the end-user, the player.

Players also use as much the Facebook private messaging system as the contact form on my website so it is definitely a tool that has its usefulness (besides marketing) especially when targeting mobile users who have a tendency to rush to the store rating systems to notify their anger when something does not work for them Smiley


So I just saw a documentary on social media manipulation, and one of the subjects covered was buying fake Facebook likes. It seems that you can buy these fake likes for practially nothing (they visited some different companies in Dhaka in Bangladesh, and I think one of the prices mentioned was 1000 likes for $15), and I immediately remembered this post and how odd it seemed that a one-man mobile game company that's less than a year old has 24,000+ likes... Lips Sealed
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« Reply #36 on: April 13, 2014, 08:49:21 PM »

Here's something I've been thinking about lately that's sort of connected.

I'm wondering when one should make a Social media account specific to your game?  Right now while our game has a devlog and mediakit, all of my social media stuff is still under my name.  It seems sensible to create a Twitter account for the game, but at this I feel like there's not enough content to garner people's interest.  Any thoughts on this?
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« Reply #37 on: April 22, 2014, 09:44:55 AM »

So I just saw a documentary on social media manipulation, and one of the subjects covered was buying fake Facebook likes. It seems that you can buy these fake likes for practially nothing (they visited some different companies in Dhaka in Bangladesh, and I think one of the prices mentioned was 1000 likes for $15), and I immediately remembered this post and how odd it seemed that a one-man mobile game company that's less than a year old has 24,000+ likes... Lips Sealed

Interestingly my Facebook page has just been "unpublished" at Facebook request after some complaints I guess from this forum since looking at the analytics there is an unusual amount of visits coming from this thread - I may be wrong but the coincidence is quite strong and there is no other reasons I could see for this action – apologies if this is not the case!

A said before, my company has spent a regular amount in advertising budget with Facebook Ads to promote my posts and my page. I have never hired any external services and I believe this is fairly easy to verify since the reach from the Facebook Ads spending is so prominent!

I have contacted Facebook to investigate the incident and review my analytics data for the page as these free accusations are just ridiculous.

I started my business 9 months ago in the video game industry and this thread is one of the few interactions I ever had with the indie community. I guess that is the indie way to say “Welcome”!?

Hating on people’s hard work will take you nowhere…

Peace!
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« Reply #38 on: April 22, 2014, 10:18:01 AM »

and I immediately remembered this post and how odd it seemed...
And regarding that "odd post" as you called it that is how I got 400+ likes on a single post. (by reaching out to 30K+ legit people, not by buying "likes")
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Christian Knudsen
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« Reply #39 on: April 22, 2014, 11:03:09 AM »

I've only posted my suspicion in this thread, so I have no idea why Facebook has removed your page.

I just find it odd that most other indie game developers are struggling to get Facebook likes, but all it apparently takes is a simple "how many X can you spot in this picture" and $50 worth of Facebook ads.

EDIT: Maybe you've fallen victim to something like this and this?
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