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Research Week - Day 2 - Does Twitter Attention Help Sales?

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago2,110 words

I started this post wondering how best to build my Twitter audience so as to help my game's sales, but I've come out feeling that the best use of Twitter is to network with other creators rather than to appeal to potential customers.

This is day 2 of a week-long series in which I research how to use marketing to make money from indie games; ∞ here's Day 1 ∞.

I wrote ∞ a series of questions I don't know the answers to ∞, with the plan being to go through and answer them all, but while writing this post, I found it more natural to just cover a general category.

So this time, I've looked into how to gain attention on Twitter, whether that attention even helps sales in the end, and what other benefits Twitter could have if not directly financial.



I wrote ∞ a tweet ∞ yesterday about the first part in this series, and it gained much more traction than I expected! According to my analytics, my tweets usually get between 1000 and 3000 impressions ("The number of times users saw the Tweet on Twitter"), while this one got just over 10,000.

Tweets also have an engagements metric ("Total number of times a user has interacted with a Tweet. This includes clicks anywhere on the Tweet (including hashtags, links, avatar, username, and Tweet expansion), retweets, replies, follows, and likes."). My tweets usually have just below 100 engagements, occasionally jumping up to maybe 300 on a few tweets. This tweet had 1,296 engagements.

I also got a few new followers out of it.



(Since I was taking the last week off development, my recent tweets are about non-game stuff, but they didn't get significantly fewer impressions than the one about a Steam sale for MARDEK. About half as many engagements though... other than the poll, which sort of requires clicking on.)

It's fairly obviously because it related to something that most indie devs struggle with and have to think about, but I imagine using the indiedev hashtag was what helped them see it in the first place.

But it was also retweeted 11 times, including by the (bot?) accounts @NetworkIndie and @indiegamesdevel, which seem to focus on retweeting indie dev projects and news and as such are followed by many indie developers. I've just followed them both myself. Like with how youtubers and streamers with large audiences can help a games sales immensely by playing it for their audience, being retweeted by accounts with many followers surely makes a huge difference.

But I suspect that those accounts only found that tweet because of the hashtag. I've only recently started using hashtags, and annoyingly there are a bunch related to indie games dev and I'm never sure which ones to use, especially since space is limited. Some are surely significantly more active than others, but I'm unsure which ones.

There are a lot of tools to analyse hashtags' popularity, but they cost money, for the most part.

∞ Here's an article ∞ pretending to answer that question (which hashtags are most popular?) by directing you to its tool which does that. This is worth noting though:



Right. So clouds of hashtags actually harm tweets' chances of impressions and engagement? I didn't know that!

∞ Twitter seems to agree that using 2 hashtags is best. ∞ So this is valuable to know!

Among all the expensive hashtag analysis tools, I found ∞ this free one ∞, but it's very vague about what it's actually searching or what its results mean, so they don't seem all that valuable. Still, I ran a few hashtags I've seen on indie dev tweets through it, and it suggests that these are their relative popularity:



I also found ∞ this list of the best hashtags for indie dev ∞:



(I think I should tag all my tweets with ♯d from now on. Also that's techincally a musical sharp sign because actual hashtags are used for bold formatting in these posts!)

So tagging indie dev posts with just IndieDev and GameDev would be wiser than including huge clouds of tags. That can be my takeaway from this, since hashtag analysis is apparently an enormous business and isn't really something I can casually unravel in a fragment of a day!

∞ Here's a 2-year-old Reddit post where people are discussing this exact question ∞.

Someone suggests doing using ♯ScreenshotSaturday to - you'll never believe this - post screenshots on a Saturday. I've done this... once, maybe? I also tracked the tag in Tweetdeck for a bit, and it got a huuuge volume of traffic, so I wonder how much any individual tweet with it was actually seen. Still, something that can't hurt to do every weekend.

They also mentioned using ♯MadeWithUnity, because Unity actually retweeted them once and it really helped.

Seems from reading more that a common theme is that hashtags help for 'networking' but not 'marketing'; they get you in touch with other indie devs, but that doesn't necessarily mean more customers. Bots are also being mentioned a lot. I assume these bots look for hashtags and retweet anything that uses them. The commenters seem divided about how useful these bots' retweets actually are.

Someone helpfully chimed in:



Sometimes it's good and sometimes not. Oh, okay. That specific guidance is extremely useful, thank you.

I'm curious about what other people say re Twitter's relevance to actual sales in the end.


∞ Here's an article titled When Promoting Your Indie Game On Twitter Doesn't Work ∞. I find its writing style quite annoying! But let's see what it has to say.

The author mentions that users don't come to Twitter looking to buy things, they're looking for information that can help boost their social status. This is true. So indie devs should talk about what they hate about their industry instead of just asking them to buy things. Hmm.

Well... yes? I see tweeting as a way to share the process with others; actually pushing sales is a small part of it right at the end. For the most part it should just help keep interest in the game, for others and for me as the developer. It's difficult to develop in isolation, and nice knowing I can share what I've made with other people on a day-to-day basis rather than only once when it's fully complete.

At the bottom of the page, he has a link to how he can help with marketing stuff. This page mentions he helps via email, and contains ∞ this youtube video ∞ where he talks over one of his tweets about some fairly straightforward tips (post stuff daily, ask for action). "Learn these fundamentals, and I guarantee you'll get traction", his tweet says. The tweet has 7 retweets and 18 likes, and the video has achieved 313 views since January 2018.

Hmmmm.

I've seen a bunch of people who claim to have marketing secrets to share that'll definitely help you out, but when you look at their own stats, they don't seem to have worked too well for them. Makes me sceptical about any articles I read or videos that I see.


∞ Here's another r/gamedev thread titled "Is Twitter actually useful?" ∞.

Twitter is mostly useful for connecting with other devs more than for marketing, people say, again.

One person however talks about how they saw a huge amount of traffic on their game as a result of some serious Twitter efforts:



So this person has around 11 times as many followers as me, but his tweets get only maybe double my impressions, and far fewer engagements. Interesting.

I'd like to engage with other devs more just for the social/psychological benefits, the feeling of being nice and encouraging another as I'd like to be encouraged myself. The feeling of not being alone in this. I should do that more often!



This, I think, might be the main benefit of Twitter. As the success of Among Us makes extremely clear, a game's success is all about whether or not youtubers or Twitch streamers pick it up. So it's not as if devs' tweets result in sales directly, but rather they can network with those video-makers who might then play their games, and that'll increase sales.



Interesting. That's a lot more followers than most indie dev accounts I see, and far more than my own.



This seems to be another benefit. Twitter is a way of keeping people in the loop, it's about the human element, and I feel that the more you connect with followers as real people - rather than just shoving products in their faces - the more you are to find a place in their hearts.


...I just went down quite a rabbit hole reading about some surly-sounding dev's experiences with ∞ having this trailer for his game ∞ go sort-of-viral for a short while. He mentions having ∞ his own subreddit ∞, (328 members) from which I can see that the game's currently still in the works despite that trailer and the other reddit comments being from 2017. Hmm.



Phew... I've been looking into Twitter stuff for several hours now, and it's mentally exhausting since there are no clear answers really. I think I'll stop for today.

My main takeaways from all this are:

The purpose of Twitter isn't to sell games directly, but rather to connect with other humans who might either help keep your motivation up, or who might make videos or write articles about your game eventually. And it's best to just use two hashtags at a time, probably gamedev and indiedev.

Personally, I think I'll stop worrying about how to gain traction on Twitter, and let that happen naturally. I should connect with and encourage other indie devs more though! Maybe spending some time doing that every day - rather than just procrastinating watching pointless videos - might be a good idea. Something to do before bed.

I'll look into something else tomorrow!