Has anyone paid to promote their game page on FB in the hopes of building a large audience to convert into backers once their Kickstarter campaign is running?
Basically, is it worth dropping a few bucks to promote a game page? Has anyone had experience, good or bad?
What methods have you found the most helpful in building a fan base around your games, and turning them into backers?
You would think Facebook (FB) is CONDUCIVE to "building a community" around your game. That is NOT TRUE. I have invested about $500.00 in FB promotions and find that the results are disappointing - but necessary!
If you are going to USE FB, you will need to BOOST some of your content (links, illustrations, sample cards, etc.) And basically you need to build a list of LIKES...
BUT FB works in the OPPOSITE direction: they want YOUR FRIENDS to LIKE your product page and NOT the other way around.
Making FRIENDS from a LONG list of LIKES is TEDIOUS. Plus FB will complain after you "Friend" more than "X" people and say: "Is this really a Friend?" "No dummies, I'm trying to build a community... duh!"
And then once you have a SMALL community (100-200 LIKES) you have to convert those people to FRIENDS, if you want to keep ties... Friends can be more easily reached but REMEMBER only "Y" people will accept your request (I don't have percentages, but X > Y).
The other thing is that your POST will be nearly NEVER read. A normal message maybe reaches 10-20 people (stretching - but I have got some post in the 20 category). What that means is 20 people READ your content. "Are you excited as I am?" 20 people is NOTHING. Maybe 100 or more...
But that's FB for you... They want you to spend all kinds of money to get your message heard.
If you do a normal BLOG, you get nobody's contact information and you have no way to reaching out to people. At least with FB you can REACH OUT to people... And open a dialog. See what people think... Even IF you are working BACKWARDS...
So even FB is not setup to build communities - it's a very ONE-AT-A-TIME process. And this takes time. Perhaps if you are very methodical, you could reach out to 5 people a day, after 20 days, you'd be at 100!!!
Get it?!?! 100 people for a WHOLE MONTH... Is essentially a LOT OF WORK.
And if you POST on your timeline, expect 2-10 views... I on average reach 10 people and with NEW illustrations maybe 25-50 views.
But at least I'm DOING SOMETHING... It's not like I'm not trying...
However the results are greatly disappointing. It's the most popular social media site. But that doesn't mean it is conducive to building communities around a product.
Best of luck with FB ... If you have questions you can PM me (if you like).
FB wants you to have FRIENDS first, share the Product Page with YOUR friends and then network with Friends-of-a-friend (for example).
But if you want STRANGERS that LIKE you Product... You're going in the opposite direction and FB is not very "friendly" in that case.
It's as if YOUR COMMUNITY is supposed to be people you know IRL!
And with Game Communities that's NOT TRUE. Usually it's people who are strangers that have found your page and LIKE it based on its content.
Anyhow when you start using FB, you'll understand my frustration better...
People may be like: "You have X amount of LIKES, why do you want to convert them to FRIENDS? What's the point???"
Here's the point:
A> Early on you have hardly anyone who LIKES your game or even knows about it.
B> You need to create a TARGET audience for your Promotion of say your "BOX COVER".
C> That will probably cost you about $100.00. And it will reach about 10,000 people who fall into your TARGET audience.
D> You may need to do that two (2) or three (3) times before you get a good amount of LIKES (think 100+)
So I'm getting to WHY you want to convert LIKES to FRIENDS. So far your TARGET audience is a bunch of people (out of millions).
ONCE you have about 50 FRIENDS a NEW form of AUDIENCE is possible to target:
"Friends and their friends"
This in my case amounts to 65,000 people. And another $100.00 reaches about 10% so 6,500 people.
If you HOPE to get 1% (which is 650 people)... That seems POSSIBLE. I have not done it YET - but 1% is indicative of a real percentage...
But you have to spend some CASH to make this happen... I've been on FB since December 2015. And my community is just over 200+ likes and 70 friends. My reach is 65,000 people (which is not bad).
IF I can get 1% that would be AWESOME. Because just like you, I need to SELL about 500 units of my game to BREAK EVEN.
We're in the same boat - let me know if you have any "secrets" you're willing to share! :)
Hmm... At a CON, if you have a booth or share one, I find a sure-fire way of getting people interested: offer up some kind of PRIZE in return for an e-mail.
Obviously the e-mail MUST be valid, because how else are you able to contact them IF they WIN... Hehehe. I did this with "Quest AC" and got about 36 contacts at the Comic Con I attended:
I gave away a GIANT "Quest AC" poster, signed in GOLD by our artist!
Quite the nice prize for any kids room!
And BTW thanks for reminding me about those "e-mails"... I had forgotten that I had 36 additional people I can contact about my game! I will be sending them an e-mail very soon! Hehehe! :D
I do really like that; when testing another game, I made pins with a piece of the art on them which I gave out in exchange for filling out an "Unpub" review sheet. The promise of getting something in return for their efforts really seemed to help!
A shared booth could be a great cost-saver, too...thanks for putting that thought in my brain! Ideally both games could serve to compliment one another; I wonder how one goes about that, or if it's luck of the draw when your register? I wouldn't want to be next to some humongous 4X title any more than they'd want a little party dice game next to them...although there is some balance between a big time-sucker and a light filler.
 | Hidden Movement: What Makes it Cool? (35) by questccg |
| I need a 5th category of encounters (7) by larienna |
 | Dymino Monsters Update 4-18-2024 (2) by Stormyknight1976 |
| Wizardry Legacy: the Forgotten Academy (12) by larienna |
| TradeWorlds — Tactical Core (3) by questccg |
| Introducing, Jacob! (that's me by the way...) (0) by Jacob |
| Chat GPT: Testing as a design assistant (8) by larienna |
| Winner Announced for the Meta Progression Community Challenge! (0) by The Game Crafter |
| Hi guys ~ Gameland and Yaofish are officially accepting board game design submissions! (1) by questccg |
| A programmer's dilemma (16) by larienna |
| Qubits: a solo trick taking game (9) by Wobt2 |
| Worker placement, Role selection and Action cards: Is it the same thing? (11) by larienna |
| Site Ads and Google Experiments (0) by questccg |
| TradeWorlds — Smuggler's Run (7) by questccg |
| Single Item Shipping at The Game Crafter (0) by The Game Crafter |
| Protospiel Indy 2024 (May 24-26) (0) by The Game Crafter |
| How to avoid being blocked at content creation (10) by questccg |
| Protospiel Indy 2024 (0) by sirvalence |
| In need of some IDEAS concerning a "Battle" System (15) by questccg |
| How to avoid quarterbacking in an adventure game (7) by larienna |
| How complicated could math get? (23) by X3M |
| Can we have gaming ads on this website (7) by questccg |
| Dice Mitigation Challenge - Winner Announced! (0) by The Game Crafter |
 | Delving! - " That is when it hit me, it was starting to feel like other games" (3) by MarkJindra |
| Game Purchase Contract (0) by MarkJindra |
That's what I was afraid of...I've put the page out to friends and have over 50 "Likes" currently, but I'll need to sell around 750 copies of Scrambo at $20 each in order to make it past my goal of $15K.
I'll hope for some amount of virality once the campaign is going, just from people who frequent and support the site regularly, but I'd really like some "hub" where I can reasonably build an audience and engage them in the development process before the campaign goes live.
BGG is only good once a game is complete; I may put images of the prototype up just to have something there until I can replace with production images, but even that I wonder how effective it is at building an audience.
Even pounding the pavement at conventions would take months and months before I had a list of 750 people interested in backing the game...and affording even one trip to say GenCon is a stretch for me right now.
I've got the Facebook page, and the incredible people here on BGDF who never shy away from objective and helpful opinions. I've got ideas once the campaign is running such as an ad on BGG and a couple other sites...it's just the pre-launch marketing that has me a bit stumped.