Tag: Marketing

My experiences with Amino and takeaways from it

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.

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).

A few months ago foleso and I were sitting around as usual trying to answer the 2930809384 questions we have about marketing and target audience and whatnot. We were talking about boys love / yaoi media—namely, who the target audience for all ages games were. Most of the boys love games we see are 18+, while both of us would rather make all ages games.

As marketers, we come up with assumptions and then try to prove them wrong. Marketing ≠ advertising. Marketing is about trying to find who can benefit from your product/service and how to better build it for them. We had a lot of assumptions about yaoi fans and what they enjoy, so the only next step was to test those. I started a survey.

Some terms, before we get started:

• Yaoi: a term in ENG fandoms typically to mean boy x boy gay content, though not used often in JP fandoms
• Boys love (BL): a term meant for boy x boy gay content
• Boy x boy (BxB): two gay guys. Guys who like each other romantically. Don’t know how else to phrase this.
• Male/male or Men loving men (MLM): this doesn’t mean multi-level marketing scheme. It’s basically the same as BxB except some people use this term to refer to character who are older.

As I mentioned before, foleso and I are both fans of boys love media, but we know our tastes don’t represent the majority. Our assumptions at the beginning were:

• People who use the term “yaoi” want 18+ content and are typically younger
• People who use the term “boys love” are fans who have liked BL content for years, are more into gay content in general, and are typically older
• A majority of BL fans want fandom content and got into BL media through fandom
• A majority of BL fans identify as women

The survey we conducted ended with 222 responses and was posted on Discord, Twitter, Amino, deviantArt, Facebook, and more. We asked people to share it around, especially other BL game developers, since our reach is only so big.

Click page 2 to get started! (Warning: very long)