Social Media Learning Track

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

When devlogs first became popular, they were typically long-form videos (often 5 minutes or more) explaining various technical aspects of game development. While these detailed videos can be highly insightful and engaging, they have one major drawback: the people watching these long, highly technical devlogs are often other developers, not your future players.

Long form highly technical devlogs do not attract your customers because:

1. They are too long: People generally enjoy short, “snackable” content between 15 and 60 seconds. There’s a reason why platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts are so popular.
2. They can be too complicated: Viewers may not understand complex concepts such as the algorithms behind procedural world generation or inter-system coordination unless they are also developers.

Instead, think of your audience as enjoying “behind the scenes” content similar to what you see in movies. It’s fun to watch:

• A quick, high-level demonstration of how a stunt was performed—delivered in 30 seconds and made easy to understand.
• Seeing 3D visual effects being created on the computer. 
• Watching the difference in an actor on the green screen vs the actual scene in the movie.

The same concept applies to game development: show quick, visually captivating snippets of an asset being created or a feature being implemented.

Types of Devlogs to Attract Players

Below are three main types of short-form devlogs that you can create to engage potential players—often years before your game is completed and even without a Steam or Itch page.

1. Before and After

“Before and After” devlogs showcase a graphical or functional improvement in the game. These can be extremely easy to produce. You can share:

• An image labeled “Before” and “After.”
• A short video clip showing how the game looked previously and how it looks now after an update or new asset.

This allows your audience to appreciate the progress you’re making and keeps them excited to see more.

2. Showing Off Improvements

Similar to “Before and After,” you might simply demonstrate a new feature without showing the old version. Examples include:

• Adding recoil to a gun and showing it in action.
• Demonstrating how plant life or water now reacts to character interactions.

This type of content shows your audience you’re actively developing the game and that it hasn’t fallen into “vaporware.”

3. The Making Of…

This form of devlog content quickly shows how a single element of the game was made. Because this is meant more for entertainment and conversion rather than deep technical insight, you often see time-lapse or fast-forward videos under 60 seconds. You can do a voiceover or simply set it to music. Bonus points if you end by showing the completed asset in the game.

Examples include:

• “Here is how I made the running motion for the main character.”
• “Watch how I designed the fauna for the forest animation.”
• “This is how we animate the car movements.”
• “Here is how we created the central building in the town.”

4. User's Choice & Feedback

One way involve people in your development process and get actionable feedback to make a better game is to ask people! Think about asking what they prefer, which one looks better, would you use this feature, etc. Take the picture below. The post on social can be: "Which axe would look better in our game?".

Now that we understand followers want your content, how much is too much? A common fear among developers is that posting too frequently will alienate their audience. Let’s examine how content frequency works in practice.

The team behind Sniper Elite may posts several times a day, but at minimum they post a few times a week. Typically on platforms, producing a good amount of content in a certain time frame helps you get picked up by its algorithm, where taking extend breaks in between content hurts your algorithm reach. For example, on a different platform like LinkedIn, the optimal is 2 posts per day before the platform suppresses your posts.

So let's examine this instance where Sniper Elite post several times a day on X:

They have 5 posts in a similar topic all in the same day. This may seem excessive and a knee jerk reaction might be that they are spamming, but let’s look at their audience engagement. At the time of writing, the game’s account had 24.9k followers, yet one post garnered just 1.8k views.

In a "perfect world" scenario, where all 1.8k views come from followers, only 7.2% of their audience saw the post. This means 92.8% of their followers didn’t see the content. To reach the entire audience, in the "perfect world" they would need to post 14 times. If they only posted once a week, it would take over three months to reach everyone in our perfect world scenario.