A few days ago I had to clean up our storage unit. One of the boxes I took home was part of my manga collection. As a new rule of thumb I don’t work on weekends (but I’m writing this on Saturday- whoops!) so I spent the day rereading some of then. Since I’m a shounen junkie, a lot of them are from Shounen Jump. As I finished a couple of them, I noticed that at the end of every manga they had a straight-forward marketing strategy…
Let’s take a look at the end of a handful of mangas to see what I mean. I’ll list out a few different mangas to give examples of different advertisement strategies and then see how we can relate this to video games.
This summer Steam introduced their games festivals, tri-annual events on Steam where users could try out demos for upcoming games. Anyone who’s a Steam publisher can enter them and the demos are featured on Steam. For indies, it’s a win-win.
However, with the second Steam Game Festival now coming to a close, it’s clear this isn’t the marketing goldmine we’ve all been looking for. Today I’m going to quickly go over my experiences with both game festivals and what I hope to see in the future.
One of my college roommates (still) spends a lot of time browsing newer social media platforms- one of them being Amino. I knew it was an app that Gen-Z uses but that was about it. And then another friend said she used it and that there were visual novel and artist groups on it. Now I was intrigued.
I had never heard of people using Amino for marketing, but surely it had been attempted, right? This was a popular social media for younger people. Millions of downloads. It had been attempted, right?!
After hours of searching for articles, threads, something along the lines of “I’m going to post on Amino to promote my thing” I came up empty-handed. So I trenched into uncharted territory. Here’s what I found.
So a year or so ago I released my version of a social media calendar for indie game marketing. Now, I’ve spruced it up a bit.
What is a social media calendar?
A social media calendar is basically a cheat-sheet for marketers to look at to figure out what to post that day. Don’t think of it as something that’s set in stone- think of it as an idea. Feel free to take some ideas from this and form your own weekly social media calendar!
(Right click -> Open Image in New Tab to see it fullsized)
I listed 3 ideas for every day of the week. This doesn’t mean post 3 times a day, this is just an idea for what you can post each day! If you’d like more ideas for social media posts, check out my article on over 40 different post ideas for your indie game studio.
Here’s the text version of the calendar:
Monday
#MotivationMonday- post something motivational
Post a link to a devlog or editorial
Share a piece from the soundtrack
Tuesday
Post a poll- ask for feedback, something silly, etc.
Post a preview of something new to come
Share concept art
Wednesday
#WIPWednesday- post a WIP of whatever you’re working on
#IndieDevHour- 7PM UK time post something indie dev
Do a giveaway
Thursday
#ThrowbackThursday- post something old and compare it to how it looks now
Ask for feedback on a new asset / screenshot
Introduce a team member
Friday
#FanartFriday- RT fanart of your game
#FollowFriday- thank some of your followers and tag them
Link your trailer or new gameplay shots
Saturday
#ScreenshotSaturday- post a screenshot from your game
#CutieSaturday- post art of a cute girl from your game
Show a behind-the-scenes look
Sunday
Post a funny quote from the game
Say what inspired you to make your current game(s)
Write a devlog on the process for making part of the game
Feel free to share this article or the calendar itself around. If you liked this post, I’ve got plenty more marketing & game dev articles on this blog under the Articles tab.
Often when developing games we find ourselves in a bubble of development. We trick ourselves into thinking things are set in stone when they aren’t. We start believing that we have to do things a certain way. Everyone does it eventually. So I created a series of questions to ask yourself while in different stages of development. Did I miss any important ones? Send them to me on Twitter or Discord!
Thought I’d make a quick post this week on a list of things you can do right now to kickstart your brand new social media account. I got the inspiration for this when someone in Devtalk+ was asking me for advice on their game dev / art Twitter that they hadn’t used for years so they were looking for a fresh start.
This guide is primarily for game dev and art accounts. However, other types of accounts can take some ideas and implement them as well. If you find any of these helpful or something I missed, please let me know!
Before we start… decide what your account will focus on. Will it be for your studio? Or promoting your graphic design to game devs? Or sharing your art to the world? This will make it much easier moving forward.
Note: for personal accounts (such as my own) they can have multiple aspects but can have 1 primary focus. For my personal account, I’ll RT fanart from anime and games I like and post about my chihuahua Leroy, but the primary focus is game development ideas and philosophies (i.e. not sharing my game dev progress but rather talking about game dev concepts like marketing).
