This sponsored post is produced by BlogsRelease.
If you’re part of the games industry, you know how incredibly competitive and fast the market is. You can work for months up to the buildup of the big release day and still be frustrated with the lack of hype surrounding your product. The shareable content you create, and the analytics to show for it, are MIA, and and that’s when real frustration can kick in, especially considering what it takes to interest potential investors.
A lack of success can sometimes be attributed to ignoring ‘the dark social ’ — the side of social that isn’t as visible or measurable as Twitter retweets or Facebook likes.
You may already have heard of the 90-9-1 rule that postulates that much of your content interaction is carried out by people outside of your analytical reach. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s quite simple:
- 1: this is you, the product manager and the initial action you take with a piece of content.
- 9: this is the number of people who will engage with your content, by commenting, liking or sharing.
- 90: this is the number of people who won’t comment or share in visible channels, but share your message in other forms.
For example, personal emails between colleagues or friends fly under the statistical radar, as do instant messaging tools. Yet this is where a lot of activity takes place, and at the same time, these forms of valuable interactions make it harder to know where your content is being shared.
Here are the 4 questions to help in navigating the world of the dark social.
- Why?
The key to improving your marketing success is to understand the power of the dark social and reach them in other ways. Treat this large percentage of your interested gamer consumers with as much thought and attention as those who regularly engage with your content. Don’t underestimate the influence of word of mouth either; whether over coffee or afternoon drinks with the tech society, your message can reach thousands of people and you won’t even know it.
- Where?
Of course, gamers spend a lot of their time online. So it’s vital to leverage bloggers, whose livings are made online, and are excellent at rewriting brand content in their own words and influencing consumer choice. Keep in mind the dark social side of blogging: Many bloggers have thousands of followers who don’t actively engaging with their posts, but make up a large percentage of those sharing in the dark social.
- How?
As a person living and breathing the gaming industry, you have to find ways to reach out to these bloggers and get them to write about you. As much as bloggers need fresh content to fill their space, it’s not going to happen by simply waiting and hoping for a blogger to write about a favorite game or consol. It’s going to take deliberate measures from careful and individual connections to wider content distribution provisions that can be used in combination to achieve greatest reach to your dark social consumers.
- When?
The beauty of influencing people in the dark social is that it is a continuous process of content sharing and distribution. It doesn’t need to be just when you have big announcements. Even before release, your product’s development can generate a vast amount of interesting content that can get more people to engage. Over a period of time, you can create a story of your product and get some real buzz going.
Have views on content distribution in the gaming industry? Leave us your comments on success and in-process experiences.
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