It has been a while since I’ve talked about this topic and showcased what success big or small I’ve been having. Things have changed a lot since the start of last year regarding a lot of what I’ve been up to. With that comes some changes in where my focus is and what I’m overall trying to grow out.
One of the biggest things a lot of stuff within the Hive ecosystem seems to struggle with is keeping users informed, interested, and expanding their reach. A lot of people hit a setback or things are not going so well. As a result, they give up trying. Once something hits a critical mass it tends to snowball overall getting bigger and bigger.
Twitter For Different Brands
Despite the many changes that have occurred from me switching being a content creator about video games into developing my own game. I have remained active on Twitter. I even expanded out my efforts there slowly over time.
I know many are starting to give up on Twitter. Twitter can suck since you don’t own your account. They ban our favorite apps and people. They do all kinds of shady things like shadow bans and hiding people from search results.
It’s however quite hard to beat the kind of numbers you can pull without having to spend on an advertisement budget. It is also an easy way to reach outside of the Hive bubble if you include many different tags and engage with others.
Since there are now multiple things I’m running. This resulted in me setting a couple of different brand's Twitter accounts to give things a try. Some of them I gave up on since it did not seem like it were worthwhile since their impact was never going to be huge. Others I’m going roll will and utilize for months to come unless they ban it.
My Enjargames brand had an insane month in May. I ended up getting retweeted, liked, or commented on by some larger Twitter accounts on a couple of different tweets. While not everything was about Hive. What that kind of attention did bring me was a lot of eyeballs checking out my Twitter profile, reading my other tweets, and even clicking on links.
It also takes time to build up to those kinds of numbers. You can’t just expect your first time out on Twitter to be getting that kind of attention unless it’s for the wrong reasons that will more than likely result in some kind of ban. Those who go around spamming 1k’s of tweets monthly about Hive know a thing or two about that.
You can also see quite the difference in a newer branded account I set up for my game. While I created the account back in May of 2020. I had left it dormant until May 2021. As I was more looking to get the name than anything else.
My game's Twitter account also rarely tweets about anything other than my game. Even then one or two tweets per week, for now, is about as active as it’s going to get while things are in development. There will be a point where I start ramping up things over there. For now, since it has almost no followers I’m just pushing the ball once in a while to keep it rolling.
There is some crossover between these different brand accounts. They do each have their purpose. Enjargames is the broader support of a lot of things going on in Hive, my random thoughts, and share Hive posts from Enjar, Enjargames, and Nightly Dungeon. While Nightly Dungeon is just about the game.
Curator Page On Steam
One area I was expecting to suffer a lot since I have not been playing a lot of games or writing reviews was my Steam Curator page. Despite how broken I feel the Steam algorithm is for displaying my reviews that link back to my Hive content. It’s been gaining more and more traction.
This year I did not even make a Hive post about games I’ve played that went on discount during the major summer sale and stating my top 10. I’ve been busy with game development so my time for gaming has been reduced by a lot. On top of that, many games I am playing are not even on Steam in the first place. So I can’t even have a review from there anyways.
The great thing here is when I do make a post with a game over there it’s not even 1 min of my time. I more or less just post a link. Click a box or two if needed and write a one-liner. Easy. Even more so since there was a 6-month gap between game reviews to share over there.
Despite the lack of promoting this page on Twitter, in my blogs (they lack a logo you can use to link your page on other sites as they don’t want the Steam logo used), or anywhere else outside of the one-off here or there. It’s getting more and more impressions. It is all despite no one following it since after trying to get people to I gave up. Many hate the curator system over on Steam which is understandable. While the 6k+ impressions are not a lot. It’s a very targeted audience of eyeballs I’m getting for almost no time spent.
Nightly Dungeon Roadmap On Trello
If you need proof a higher domain is supreme you need to go no further than my game’s roadmap on Trello. No really, depending on your region if you try searching for enjar or enjargames and what it is there a good chance this is going be up there in the results. I was not expecting it to be outperforming a lot of my stuff like it is.
The downside is I don’t know what kind of numbers this thing is pulling in. It is also getting a lot of promotion from me as well. It’s linked in almost all my game development posts. I also Twitter about it from time to time. Along with me linking it a lot when I talk about my game or someone asks how it's progressing along.
When I first started to look for how I was going to have a roadmap for my game Trello instantly popped out as something I can take advantage of. They made it very clear a public page was going to be crawled by search engines. My first thought after seeing its domain score was –I’m ready to play.
You might notice I have a lot of my game development blogs linked to my Trello page. I might even have other Trello pages linking other content as well as a medium-term test. It is still a site I’m playing around with trying to understand how to get the most for free.
Enjar Games And Nightly Dungeon On Itch
Since I’m using Itch as a way to share my game demos, beta test, and other projects I’m involved in. It only made sense to see what all I could get out of their platform. They make it very easy to include links out to social media and other accounts. They even allow you to make dev blogs about your game.
Even more interesting is a section when writing a dev blog to state the original publishing date if you are migrating a post. Why I can’t say no to utilizes such a feature.
Outside of using as a downloading platform for files. I’m also sharing my more interesting posts about my process so far in making my game. While they are getting the full older posts. t the bottom I am linking back to the original blog post on Hive.
My Itch posts are also linking out to other Itch dev blogs about my game. This is the same tactic I use on Hive. If someone is interested enough they don’t have to go digging around for another post one is already being provided. If that is not enough they will have to come on over to the Hive to get more. As a result over time, the older posts start to build up more views and hopefully engagement.
While granted this is not a lot of views. I only started doing this 50+ days ago. It’s also another thing that not a lot of time is spent. Not to mention I was going to use this site anyway so I might as well try and build up some momentum there while I’m at it.
Final Thoughts
While there have been some major shifts in where I’m prioritizing my time over the last year and a half. I’m still going out and finding ways to reach out of the bubble and creating opportunity for some of it to follow me back to my Hive home base. None of this is costing me any money and outside of Twitter not a lot of my time either.
Indeed, I’m not getting insane results. There are quite a lot of different facets I have set up now. I’m also not expecting any overnight major successes either. All of these things are just slowly building over time. Like the 84 game reviews, I have linking back to my peakD blog on Hive. It takes time.
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Written by @Enjar.
