SOCIAL MEDIA POWER

Posted by Cysero on 7/2/2014 1:41 PM

When you're making a game, there are a lot of things to consider. How fun it is, the platform or platforms for which it is being developed, how you are going to get traffic, how to fairly monetize the game without cheating your players or short changing yourself. But one of the major things that people forget about is the power of Social Media.

FACEBOOK POWER

You can use Social Media for a lot more than just advertising. For example, when we were making Battle Gems we decided to use Facebook Connect as a bridge so you could save you progress across platforms.

Let's say you have Battle Gems on your Android Phone and you buy the Founder package. You also have Battle Gems on your iPad Air but you don't want to pay for Founder twice (unless you do, that's OK with us). We made it possible to connect your Battle Gems account through Facebook no matter which device you play on, as long as it's connected to FB, you play the same game with the same Founder.

This won't be possible for all of our games, but it worked out that time. Connecting to Facebook in Battle Gems also lets you see how your friends are doing on the game and even fight them in the upcoming recently released PvP update.

Facebook logins also make it much simpler for a lot of the world to log in and try a game without going through the process of registering. Just click Facebook Login and BAM, you're playing.

So, why did we use Facebook instead of our Artix.com logins? It's all about the numbers. Here are some facts about Facebook.

Right now, 1.28 BILLION people use Facebook. That's 20% of population of Earth.
757 MILLION people log into Facebook daily. That's TWICE the population of the United States.
Teens (12-17) have an average of 300 friends each (not counting fake and spam accounts).

Just think about those numbers for a second. If we had used our own Artix.com login instead of Facebook we would be missing out on about 1.27999999 billion possible new players. If the "average Teen" posts a Photo Op on their wall, that's showing Battle Gems to an average of 300 people.

TWITTER POWER

Personally, I really like Twitter. Just the other day over my Twitter someone mentioned how he couldn't believe that he was taking directly to his favorite AE dev. Twitter has enabled fast, short and direct contact between people who once seemed unreachable. For me, that is a VERY important fact. I have always been a fan of how directly we have stayed in touch with you guys and community outreach is part of my job (also, why I write these posts).

Most of the AE staff use their Twitter account for far more than just letting you know about updates but also use it to gather data on bugs, get feedback on works in progress or releases or just to say Hi and keep in touch with the community, one person at a time. That is an AMAZINGLY powerful tool!

Of course, when you have 67,000 followers, you get a few thousands tweets a day and it's impossible to respond to all of them but I try to as often as I am able, which is pretty often considering the 140 character limit on a Tweet. I know that I respond to more tweets than any other AE Dev but that's just because I make it a priority. The other Devs are there and even if they don't respond, they read your tweets. Now some Twitter Stats.

Total number of registered Twitter accounts: 645,750,000
Average number of tweets per day: 58,000,000
Number of people who sign up for Twitter each day: ~135,000

These numbers are STAGGERING, guys. They are MIND BLOWING and any game developer who doesn't use Social Media to their advantage is missing the bus. It's VERY time consuming so even if you have to bring on a Social Media Manager (Beleen has become ours) then you should try to do so.

TIPS AND TRICKS

Here are a few tips to help your game get the most out of Social Media.

Use Pictures. Facebook posts with images get 37% MORE views and substantially more likes. Just look at the posts on any of our Facebook Pages and see for yourself.
Use hashtags. Posts on Twitter and even on Facebook show a lot more activity (up to 60% in some cases) in tweets or posts that effectively use #HashTags.
Longer posts do better. Not as long as MINE but generally Facebook posts that are around 100 words do better than a Tweet sized post. (most Tweets average 10 words).
Learn to punctuate. Especially learn to use Exclamation Marks! Studies have shown that it just gets people excited and that leads to more activity in social media.
Ask a question. Artix does this a lot. When you ask someone something they feel inclined to answer even if it's just to tell you that it's none of your business. Asking for opinions or feedback in Social Media guarantees more activity.

As always, I hope this helps shed some light on why we do the things that we do. I also hope this helps you up and coming developers to make your game the biggest success it can be.