Common Social Media Pitfalls you may encounter

[Digital]

Social Media has revolutionized marketing. It gives brands direct access to engage with a diverse audience, but it comes with certain pitfalls. If your game has a frail, half-baked strategy, it'll reflect negatively on your game sooner or later. Here are few common mistakes that games make with their social media strategies.

Failure to set clear goals

A social media strategy should have clear and quantifiable objectives. Before executing anything, a brand must ask themselves the following questions.

1. What message does the game want to promote in social?
2. Who is their target audience?
3. Why would the target audience listen to the game?
4. What action does the game want the viewers to take post engagement?
5. What are the various criteria that can be measured?

Once answers to these questions are defined, a clear and concise action plan must be formalized. By having criteria that can be measured, you can also keep track of your campaigns in social media to measure your success.

Failure to collaborate internally

Success is always a team effort. At times games fail to understand this which leads to the digital media wing and related activities of the game being operated in silos. The idea is for all of your games staff team to work together for a larger share of voice online. Get everyone involved in social communication activities.

Failure to collaborate with other games/communities

Collaboration with competitors is an absolute No-No in the mainline advertising industry. But social media marketing is very different. Games should go bold and fresh in their approach and embrace the concept of collaborative ecosystem. They should reach out to other similar games on social media platforms, or communities much like TGL (@tgl_forums on Twitter, @thegaminglist on Facebook) regularly.

Lack of long-term commitment

It often happens that we begin a new campaign with much enthusiasm but gradually slow down our efforts until the campaign comes to complete halt. Even when it comes to social media marketing (creation and maintenance of blogs, creatives, other content pieces), the same behavior is observed. Games forget that social media marketing is unlikely to yield immediate results. Social media is basically relationship building. Every relationship suffers fatally when one part disappears suddenly. That's why games need to make sure that they have the stamina for long term gains. Stopping a social media engagement suddenly and abruptly is much worse than having no engagement at all.

Lack of online-offline consistency

Customers don't think in terms of PR, marketing, customer service, product development etc. They just see the 'game'. So, if a game communicates with different content on their different social media channels, consumers will get confused. Games must ensure that their messaging is consistent across platforms.

In nutshell, success on social media requires a great amount of strategic thinking, a deep understanding of the game  and a thoughtful player engagement route. A game must take out time to develop the right strategy before going social.

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