Why Your Game's Social Media Isn't Growing (And How to Fix It)

While sometimes social media is a great way for marketing your game for free, other times it can feel like running endlessly on a hamster wheel as you may feel it’s hard to gain followers and views on your post, especially when you are starting out.

But there are a few things you can do to test your social media and run some experiments for what works best. This article is for people that:

• Have been trying social media
• Failing to gain traction across their social platforms despite consistent efforts
• Are willing to run some tests and experiment with their socials

In this article we are going to cover:

• Shadow banning
• Probation Periods
• Low Quality Game Content
• Content Types
• Incorrect Targeting
• Posting Consistency
• Platform Problems

At Glitch, we do data-driven game marketing, and this article is also a part of a series of articles that looks at marketing like debugging a problem in programming. Marketing, like programming, has certain aspects you can test to help you get to the bottom of a problem. And once you know the problem, you can solve the issue and experience growth for your game.

Shadow Banned

The first thing to check is if your account has been shadow banned. Shadow banning is when a social platform will prevent your posts from being shown to others, but when you post it will appear that everything is normal.

The purpose of shadow banning is not to let spammers or scammers know that they have been banned. This way they do not create another account because they think everything is working fine on their end.

There are different sites for different platforms that you can use to see if you have been shadow banned.

• TikTok: https://shadowbantool.com/en/
• Reddit: https://cable.ayra.ch/reddit/
• X/Twitter: https://hisubway.online/shadowban/
• Instagram: https://grum.co/instagram-shadow-ban-checker/

Google around to search for various shadow ban test sites. If you are shadow banned, you can try to contact support of the social platform; bear in mind that this might take weeks or months to resolve. The easier route might be to create a new account.

New Accounts

Another reason why your posts might not be getting any views is that your account is too new. Often new accounts on social media have an undocumented “probationary” period. In this time period, you might be:

• Limited to posting too much (i.e., once a day)
• Restricted from posting to certain groups
• Posts might not get any views
• Posts might have to be approved first
• Various other limiting factors