Hey, hello everyone. This is Dev Diary # 26. Rummy Games is again here with you, and this time it will be something extraordinary: the marketing department has got their voices. Before that, we, as the quiet fighters of the invisible space front, were communicating with you in order to impartially and objectively convey the difficulties and successes in the game development. But not this time: the marketing department will start talking today! The first one to get in touch is our SMM specialist Tatiana. Tanya, you have the floor. Disclaimer: as an SMM specialist I experience professional deformation, namely, I almost always use in my speech and text a minimum of "officialdom", a maximum of humor, and maybe even provocation. However, I will try to avoid the last point, for obvious reasons :) [h2]About myself [/h2] Hi, my name is Tanya, and there are too many cities that I can call my home, so just generalizing let's say that I come from the south of Russia. Starting from school I used to write essays well and loved literature very much, but for some reason I went to study as a programmer (and it was a very difficult and interesting experience!). Honestly, although I have not worked even a day according to my major, some knowledge from the frontend development and website administration has come in handy in my life and work more than once. I love memes, coffee, Naruto anime, the "King and the Fool" musc band, writing texts at night and building my own totalitarianism in the Tropico game. My relationship with marketing began as a SEO copywriter while still at the institute, then somehow it came to an SMM specialist. From that time on, I began to understand contextual and targeted advertising. For all the time, I managed to collaborate as a broad-based marketer for the hotel business, bar, quiz franchise and personal brand, it is worth mentioning separately the areas of taxi companies, wholesale and training music courses. From my rich freeelance experience, one can gather a beautiful patch of hilarious expressions by customers and perform with them on a stand-up tour around the country. (P.S. from I.M.: “If this diary gets 20 likes on Steam, then the 30th diary will be about funny stories from work). And I also worked for two whole years in the office of an IT organization that worked very closely with the state. By the way, then I made 2 big discoveries for myself: sometimes beautiful and interesting in terms of design sites sold worse than those assembled “according to the template”, which is why I often had to refuse the former. And also people do not like when it is difficult. And this applies to absolutely everything: communication, design, approach etc. And in general, there is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth, as one famous "graphomaniac" liked to say. Despite this seeming diversity, most of my time I work with numbers and hackneyed scary acronyms that tell you about the number of people and their reaction to advertising, as well as about the money spent :) I got to S.O.S. absolutely spontaneously. I helped other friends of mine who had just started their own indie studio. I started looking for information, courses, videos, tried to delve into the topic. So I stumbled upon a broadcast of the "Want to be in gamedev" contest, where Vyacheslav Utochkin who said that anyone who wants to can get experience in gamedev. And for me, some new knowledge and opportunities have always been a priority, so I thought: "Why not?" So, Twitter was given under my responsibility, and I sometimes try to help in other small things. [h2]What were the tasks? [/h2] The studio has discussed running your own Twitter for a long time, but there were no free resources. And I feel my competence in this matter, because I have been using this social network for a long time and I know its features :) But since we decided to focus on the English-speaking audience, I got an “Achilles heel” in the form of a weak level of the language, although I try to overcome it. The initial task was to start an account from 0 and try to "promote" it. Our marketing department thinks I'm doing well. In less than half a year, we managed to gain more than 1,500 subscribers, and the total monthly account reach is over 10,000 impressions, and the numbers only go up. [h2]What are the tools? [/h2] In general, SMM manager has few of them: graphic editors and a delayed posting service. Everything else, whether it is studying competitors, collecting statistics and thinking over means to increase coverage, is done manually. True, when it comes to advertising, it becomes more interesting, but that's a completely different story... [h2]How was it implemented? [/h2] According to the usual formula: interesting content + communication. Before that, I had no experience of promoting a “branded” Twitter account, but I tried to evaluate from the user's side: what interests me, what I like, what I subscribe to? I tried to study the competing studios, but everywhere I fell on the dignity and curse of Twitter at the same time: personal blog and positioning on behalf of the developer / CEO. Or just one copy-paste of links from other sources and the complete absence of any content. Also, a lot of discussions were caused by the question of the target audience of the account, for which audience should the profile be kept: English or Russian? Or combine? For a number of reasons, we decided to focus on foreign countries. Many thanks to the team that helps with the translation of the posts. Hopefully, I will still be able to raise my level soon, and my work on Twitter will take less time. There are a couple more ideas that I would like to implement. Hopefully in the near future I will have a little more productive resources than I do now. :) [h2]What are the final results? [/h2] The coverage is growing, although there are challenges. The basis of the effectiveness of my work is a systematic approach, to attract the attention of not only ordinary Twitter users, but also gamers interested in buying S.O.S., as well as representatives of publishers. However, the intermediate results are good news. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/34771562/3c0259604008aa95b03c3a1648c5fe564fdad18e.png[/img] [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/34771562/c7ca8356f5752fe73e000511557726508208aab4.png[/img] [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/34771562/a31d1d55ec0c66f44808a798c38776546e1929ee.png[/img] [h2]Future plans, edits and P.S. [/h2] In fact, I discovered a lot of new and interesting things for myself in this area and professionally as well. We can immediately say that in terms of the specifics of the work and the algorithms for promoting indie gamedev, this is an absolutely unusual unique path that differs from all other topics and directions :) And I also want to work with other websites that can serve as a source of traffic, to study the principles of promotion within Steam, although I am already more or less familiar with the database, and in general to get more experience in this area.