How to Find the Right Social Media Platform to Promote Your Video Game

Social media has simplified our interactions and made it easy to connect with people across the world. Businesses are part of this social media craze, with marketers turning to different platforms to connect with clients. 

The average person spends about 2 hours on social media every day, which means that having a precise social media marketing strategy is one of the most effective ways to boost game performance. 

It's essential to identify the best platforms to build their online presence, but with all the options available, this can be hard. In this guide, we highlight how gaming studios can identify the right platforms for promoting their games.

How to find the best platform for your game

With all the effort it takes to run a business, finding time to have an active presence on all social media platforms is impossible. Companies need to narrow their choices to a few platforms to ensure the best return on their investments, and here is how you can find out what will work well for you.

Identify your company goals

Gaming companies must link their social media channels to their high-level business objectives. If it’s unclear how a particular platform will help you achieve your goals, then that channel should not be adopted for brand promotion. Some of the goals you may hope to achieve through social media marketing include:

Brand awareness

Brand awareness includes greater brand recall and familiarity with a company’s products. Businesses with this particular goal should choose established platforms with a huge following and avoid upcoming or niche sites. Another effective method for brand awareness is through paid advertising, and you will find social media advertising plans that generate high ROIs. Facebook Ads is an invaluable tool for brand promotion, allowing businesses to reach a large and highly targeted audience. 

Sales gen

As a gaming studio, you should be looking to generate sales by marketing your game on social media. People have embraced the concept of online shopping and are more open to purchasing products or seeking services online. Ensure you have content that engages your audience and asks them to buy. Try promoting offers, in-game deals, or special events to get your audience to play.

Lead gen

Most businesses also use digital marketing platforms to connect with potential clients and generate valuable leads. Lead generation is the first step in the customer acquisition journey, as it allows businesses to establish relationships with potential clients before converting them into paying clients. LinkedIn is the ideal lead gen platform for B2B marketing, while Facebook and Twitter are highly effective from a B2C perspective. 

Conversion

To convert leads, gaming studios need to educate their target players on the importance of their games and how they address their entertainment needs. Your company may have promising games, but without suitable outreach mechanisms, you may find it hard to attract players and penetrate the market. Social media is an excellent tool for educating potential players and generating brand loyalty through targeted posts, how-to videos, and infographics. 

Read more about brand loyalty and social media in our blog on Growth Marketing Genie: How to Increase Brand Loyalty with Social Media Marketing.

Traffic

Some websites have nothing to sell on their platforms and even give away information for free. Such websites use display advertising to monetize their sites; to do this effectively, they need a lot of raw traffic to click on the ads. Content marketing and SEO are some of the best digital strategies that can be used to generate traffic. 

Define your budget

Before initiating any social media marketing campaign, you need to define your budget to ensure the proper usage of your marketing funds. The budget allocation should cover all the costs of promoting online, such as paying for advertising on the platform and the fees for the digital marketing staff. Social media management is a professional service, and businesses need to hire top talent to perform this role. How you interact with clients on social media will affect your brand reputation, and as such, companies need to hire people with excellent customer service skills. 

You must also have dedicated social media managers to ensure prompt responses to gamer queries. Players are increasingly using corporate social media handles to make inquiries, and should a business take too long to respond; it may lose potential clients to its competitors. 

There should also be an allocation for content creation services and payment for graphic designers, photographers, and videographers. Studios need to ensure that they are posting high-quality content on their social media pages to spur user engagement, and they will have to pay professionals to create such content. 

Research where your audience exists

After setting your brand goals and aligning them with your social media platform selection, the next step is finding your target audience. You must identify the platform your audience spends the most time on to ensure your marketing messages are correctly received. User demographics inform effective online marketing strategies, and gaming companies need to use these data-driven insights when selecting social media platforms. 

For instance, based on demographics and active engagement Pinterest is dominated by female users, and your sales figures will be low should you use the platform to promote men’s only products. Snapchat is popular with young users, making it less ideal for businesses that sell products to seniors. 

Facebook has a broader reach than all other platforms and can reach any type of general consumer. LinkedIn is better for professional use and helps reach industry leaders and business owners. With its narrow focus, LinkedIn can also be used for B2B lead generation and general networking. 

Instagram is a highly-visual media that relies on images and videos for conversations. It is popular with a young audience, making it the best platform for businesses promoting visual products like video games!

Keep all of this in mind when you select the right platforms for your game.

Research what your competitors are doing

Besides finding the platforms your audience spends the most time on, you also need to research and find the platforms your competitors use to promote their games. This information is vital as it will help you understand the industry and how users respond to marketing messages. 

You should analyze the type of content your competitors post and how the content is received. You should be particularly interested in user interactions with posts, such as likes and shares, as this shows how popular specific posts are. This information will guide your social media marketing strategy, as you will know what content to post to spur user engagement. 

Determine the types of content you want to create

Certain content formats are more suited to specific social media platforms, and this is something you should consider when designing your social media strategy. The content posted on your social handles should enhance your brand identity, and this is only possible when you use the right content format for your posts. 

If you intend to post industry-specific content such as company news, whitepapers, and industry updates on your social media pages, then LinkedIn is the right platform to use. Such type of content is suited to B2B audiences who are predominantly found on professional networks. 

Businesses that post short-form video content targeting younger users should choose Instagram or TikTok as their ideal brand marketing platforms. If the video content is longer and universally appealing, they should use YouTube, one of the world's largest search engines. Facebook and Twitter have also effectively generated high user engagement with video content. 

Brands with engaging games should consider Pinterest for sharing image-based content. A case study by Shopify shows that 93 percent of pinners used Pinterest to research, plan, or purchase, making the platform a powerful marketing tool for online stores. Instagram is another platform that allows gaming studios to share their brand stories through high-quality image content. 

Be realistic about how many channels you can manage

When selecting social media platforms to promote your game online, pick those you can manage to ensure a superior user experience. The channels you manage should not be so many that you can't operate each one optimally. They should also not be too few such that your online brand visibility suffers.

You can use automation tools to make simultaneous posts on different platforms, but you will still have to monitor the accounts for user engagement and respond to player concerns. For this reason, you need to use several platforms that you can manage effectively to ensure the users get premium services.

Social media is your key to marketing success!

With the right strategy, social media can make your game stand out among the masses and help you grow into a leading figure in your industry. Get all the tips you need to know in our ultimate guide here: Your Must-Have Guide for Social Media Marketing!

You don't have the time or resources to get on every social media platform, so you must be on the ones that matter. Game Marketing Genie can research to help you find the perfect platforms and create relevant, valuable, and educational content for your audience. 

Need more info? Let's have a chat about how we can help you become the business you want to be!