As someone who used to be against sharing information on the internet, tackling social media was something I dreaded most. But it was something we had to do. Here’s the process from the standpoint of a really reluctant newbie. (Or if I can do it, so can you!)
I used to avoid social media. For the longest time, I only had Facebook, and I only used it to stay in touch with people. I never commented, rarely liked, and god forbid, never posted anything. Then, after a lot of persuading from different colleagues and a realisation that I’m missing out, I created a LinkedIn profile. The whole creation process was pretty stressful for me, as it required me to fill in a lot of information and I wanted to really think about everything I would write, and I was very self-conscious of how it would look, and I was constantly second-guessing myself. Similarly, when we were supposed to create a profile for ourselves on Kickstarter at the beginning of the Crowdfunding Boot Camp, we were the last team to do it. I was in charge of it, and I wanted to use the email that we could use forever, and know if we would go to Kickstarter as a physical person, or a company, or something else, and all the other info they could possibly require me to enter. And so on. You get the idea.
The creation of a landing page (= web page with basic info) for Hike! wasn’t too bad. But then we had to promote it. Of course we had to, I didn’t have any illusions that traffic would pour to the web page once it was live. I know that it doesn’t matter if you have the best product, if no one knows about it, no one will buy it. And I knew that social media is a perfect platform for promotion and that everybody’s doing it. But it went against all my instincts.
I managed to avoid it for a while — I made excuses that I needed to do more research, that we needed to do something else before etc. — the usual arsenal. And for a while, it worked — no one in our team is really into social media, so no one really wanted to be the one to do it, so we didn’t talk about it. But then, our colleagues from other projects started wondering why we still don’t have it, and started ushering us we really should do it and offered help. And combined with our inner voices, this was all we were hearing, so we couldn’t really hide from it anymore. But we knew they were right, so we just did it at one point.
We knew we would do Facebook — it’s a platform that we were on (I can’t really say ‘a platform that we used’), and one of the team members had some experience with creating a page for a product. We started with the creation of a page, and I remember we had to research and ask around about the best way to set it up. Everybody told us that we should connect it with the Business Manager, and we had a great lecture on how to do it at Crowdfunding Boot Camp — we got step-by-step instructions on how to do it, for which I’ll be eternally grateful. It was not intuitive to me at all. The logic, the interface, the manager vs suite, everything. But I can say, as with other stuff, it gets better over time. One piece of advice that we received that I think is VERY important is that you should always have more than one person who has admin rights. Apparently, there were cases where people had only one admin, and Facebook, for some reason, decided to lock that person out of their account while they were running ads, and no one had access to stop the ads. So they were spending like crazy and no one could stop it until that person got their account back. Quite a cautionary tale.
Okay, so we managed to set up a Facebook page for SnowBoardGames and we had some idea of the context we would post. But there is plenty more social media-wise, and we had a feeling it would be wise to consider other options too. Especially as people more skilled in the area will tell you that Facebook’s organic reach is quite poor. The platform that’s ‘the thing’ at the moment is TikTok, but it requires you to create video content, so we weren’t sure if that was a good fit for us. We aren’t really that trendy. And we are into board games, so you could say we are geeks. And we kind of rationalised that maybe other geeks are not that trendy either. And we came up with a lot of examples of people who don’t have TikTok. And left it at that.
Other options were Instagram, Twitter and Reddit. Reddit supposedly has a lot of potential, but it also requires a substantial investment of time, and we haven’t tackled it yet. Twitter didn’t really feel like a good fit, as we have a board game, and we don’t really have all that much to say, and sharing the lines from the rulebook didn’t seem like something interesting. But Instagram seemed like a good fit — at the time we were creating it, we already had some art that we could share, and we would have visual materials during the whole process — starting with art, then renders, then actual prototypes, components and so on. So we created an Instagram profile and started posting.
The whole experience was quite different from Facebook — there, it was mostly us and our friends that were the first followers, and then some other people came in too, but on Instagram, no one from the team really used it before, so most of the followers that we have found us because of the game, not because of personal connections. And it was quite amazing to see how more people found us each time we posted something, and how organic reach was way better than on Facebook.
One thing that is quite cool is that you can connect the Instagram account to the same Business Manager you use for Facebook, and you have everything in one place. You can create posts simultaneously for both platforms, which we do most of the time, and we make only minor tweaks for one or the other platform. I’m not sure if that’s the best tactic, as we’ve had posts that worked better on one of the platforms, and we now have some feeling of what would work where, so we could optimise it more, but we haven’t really dug into that yet. One thing that I can say, however, is that as daunting as the task of managing social media felt at first, a) it’s not that scary, and the consequences of mistakes are not that grave, b) there are plenty of tools to make it easier for you, and c) a lot of people are doing it, so you can find plenty of resources on how to do it.
I remember when we created the Instagram profile and announced that on Facebook, and someone immediately asked if we also had Twitter. So I guess that confirmed that it’s worth investing in different platforms and addressing people on the platform they like using. But we also agreed that we won’t just start using all of the platforms, as we would not be able to manage them all regularly.
So there was one last platform that we wanted to use — BoardGameGeek. This one isn’t really a mainstream social media, but rather a page that contains to my knowledge the most comprehensive board game database, along with forums and community pages. So it’s really specialised in tabletop gaming. We’ve used it before, but mainly the database part. So we created a profile for SnowBoardGames and started participating in the forums to build a presence. And I must say we were surprised by how great the community there is. There are forums dedicated to board game design, and a lot of very knowledgeable people participate and give actionable feedback. So it feels great to be a part of that, and we’ve also found that it’s a good medium to get feedback on the design dilemmas that we face. So I guess this platform feels the most natural fit for us, and it was the one that we gained confidence in using it the quickest.
Aside from Facebook, Instagram and BGG, we also have a newsletter that people can subscribe to on our landing page. Based on other projects’ experience, this is a must for someone preparing a Kickstarter campaign, and it’s one of the metrics that tells you when your project is ready to go to Kickstarter. We (try to) send out updates on the project once every 2 weeks to once a month, and we usually also include a question, or a poll or something that engages the readers to give us feedback. This is great because we can get feedback from potential clients, and incorporate it into the game in a way that makes the game more appealing to the audience, and on the other side, potential clients are engaged and can influence the project development, which (hopefully) makes them feel more connected to the end product. I think we’re doing an okay job with the content, but I know we really should do more on attracting new subscribers.
We also have a Kickstarter pre-launch page, where our project has an image and a title and it can be found under Kickstarter’s upcoming projects. People can subscribe to it and be notified when it launches, and as with the newsletter, the number of people who are subscribed tells you something about when your project is ready to launch. Contrary to the newsletter, however, you don’t have the contact info of people who are subscribed, so you can’t send them new content. The page just sits there passively, waiting for people to stumble upon it. So it isn’t really a lot of work, aside from the initial investment, because you need to prepare the Kickstarter page and get the project approved by Kickstarter before they allow you to set the pre-launch.
I’ve noticed that the more experience I have, the easier it is for me to use the mentioned platforms (surprise, surprise!), and the more relaxed I am about it. I may not do everything perfectly from the start, but it’s okay, as long as I learn and improve. And I have a lot more to learn and a huge potential to improve. I also think that our decision to carefully choose the platforms was the right one — we have delegated a bit, and we can manage them on the side, so the task doesn’t deter us from the main project, which is developing and publishing a game.
So all in all, I think I’ve made quite a big step forward in how I function around social media. An event that might support this statement was when I added the ‘co-founder of SnowBoardGames’ to my Linkedin profile, and discovered that I needed to create a page for SnowBoardGames in order to have a logo displayed, I did it effortlessly, without too much overthinking and stress. It’s not the most perfect thing you can create, but it serves the purpose of allowing me to have a logo.
I think we’ve come to a natural break where I can finish the post, so it won’t get too long, but I feel like the above is only part of the story. The part on the infrastructure, on the multiple platforms. On the hardware, if you want. So I’ll do another post on social media, about the stuff that is mushy and less defined — the actual content and interactions.
Cheers to embracing social media and the opportunities it provides! (And to sentences I never thought I’d say!)
Nika