Welcome to the first post of our LOOKBACK series, where we examine recent marketing strategies and see what went well and what went wrong.

We launched our Facebook page on February 2nd at 1:30 pm. Admittedly, we didn’t expect much since we’re newbies to the industry and our game was only in an early development phase. We have no experience with Twitter and only got into Tumblr recently. Chris is relatively active in the reddit community. The question was: how can we take advantage of available resources and reach out to as many followers as possible and start building a fan base?

The Plan

Launch our social media pages with a shotgun approach and pray to all the gods of the world that we get a crapload of followers!

Just kidding. Well… partly just kidding…

The other part was to launch with high engagement content. The Early Development Prototype Teaser was extremely key to this launch. Photos are the most common post type, but videos generate significantly higher engagement, according to a study by Quintly. We wanted to have something cool and worthy of spending some time looking at–to show that we are committed and working hard.

Time of day was also important here. According to a million infographics, posting between 1pm and 4pm on a weekday results in the highest average click through rates. It’s a Monday. It’s right after lunch. Who doesn’t check Facebook during the afternoon slump?

Summary

Overall, it went O.K.! As you can see below with Facebook’s built-in analytics, our posts reached a total 526 people (meaning it popped up in their feed), with the video teaser post taking up 349 of it. 74 of those people subsequently read the post, watched the video, or liked the post. The other posts, primarily photo posts, had an average reach of ~30.

The low engagement to reach ratio can be attributed to some theories:

• Game story was not enticing enough. No cliff hanger.
• A shotgun approach means your target audience probably very broad. How many of them are hardcore pc and console gamers? How many of them even play games? I have no idea!
• The studio doesn’t come off as being personable. There are no pictures of the team members.
• Too early in development to create a fanbase.
• The minimum viable product is unclear.
• Our branding as an indie game studio is not unique enough to stand out from the ocean of indie studios.
• I didn’t share the page on my timeline.

Either way I’m very happy how this all turned out. It was a lot of fun working with Friendship Club to produce this video, and watching the number of page likes increase each hour is so exhilarating. Knowing that up to 50 of our friends believe in our potential success is a huge motivation.

If you guys have any input, please share!

For all of you wishing to venture out into the diluted indie space, mastering social media is a must. It is the primary avenue for expressing your brand and connecting with people who have the most buying power for your product when it’s complete.

Next Event: Picnic Day at UC Davis!

Our next big event will be at Picnic Day at UC Davis. We’ll be showing off a working prototype and will be giving away some free stuff! If any of you are in the area, come drop by and say hi!