Hey, I'm also in the same situation so I'd love to hear from others. Here are my thoughts to your second point:
2. Lack of any social media following
Every week I'm investing some time to building my social media following. This will take a long time and a lot of and trial and error.
My plan is to publish content that is meaningful to the community and hopefully get people to follow me because they like what I do. Direct promotion isn't always working and in some case (e.g. like Reddit) not always welcome.
In concrete steps:
1. Choose your goalWhat kind of outcome do you want: Twitter follower? Mailing list subscribers? Reddit followers?
2. Test platformsPick a few platforms to publish content on. Stick to them for a while and if doesn't work for you change them. E.g. I started with Twitter and the r/gamedev subreddit. I'll keep posting on Twitter but I'll stop on Reddit as that sub isn't very active. You may consider Facebook or the TouchArcade forum, it's up to you, but my advice is to not to spread yourself too thin.
3. Test contentCome up with ideas for content, pick a few and start with those. For example:
- I'm posting gameplay gifs on Twitter on #screenshotsaturday. My game isn't very viral, so I don't get much traction for now. I hope that when I'll have more "giff-able" gameplay to show this will improve. I recommend the GDC
- Posting on TIGSource Devlog to show how your game is progressing and get feedback could help to you build an audience over time
- Using social media to help others and answering questions could lead to a slow audience buildup
- Other ideas: build and share tools, write tutorials or game reviews. I started publishing short video game reviews on Twitter (like this one for A Short Hike or for Guacamelee!) hoping people will like them, but so far the response was ok. I'll keep doing them because I enjoy it, but I may switch to writing tutorial as they may be more useful to people