The even more difficult kind of Networking

For me anyway- I can hit a computer till it talks to another computer. The same strategy doesn’t work so well with people! Social media marketing is a huge topic- libraries of books have been written about it. I don’t presume to know enough about it to give advice. What I can say though, is that you simply cannot underestimate the importance of social media in Kickstarter campaigns, be they for Wargames like The Drowned Earth, or pretty much any other sphere.

They call it crowdfunding for a reason- you need a “Crowd” of followers and fans in order to make it work. In a way, THAT’S the campaign, before the actual kick-starter has even begun. Putting your product on Kickstarter and expecting the crowd to just show up, is a very bad idea.

You need to find ways to engage your audience, and you need to slog away for months before you start to get real traction.

I’m going through this at the moment- I’m putting a lot of work in to my social media campaign, and honestly, getting reasonably low traffic as a result. The immediate results are definitely not proportionate to the effort. It’s easy to get demoralised, but you have to keep at it- you have to be grateful to the people who are already willing to show their support, despite the fact that you don’t have much to show, or a lot to offer right now. You have to look at what you’re posting and ask yourself if it serves your audience, or just yourself. You have to positively engage people in ways which add to their lives.

It’s easy to think that because you’re operating in a “Hobby Sphere” people will automatically get excited and enthusiastic about what you’re doing. Perhaps they will, but this doesn’t always (or even very often) translate in to social media engagement. And this fact should be remembered for two important reasons. First, perhaps your audience is bigger than you think it is- awareness is HUGE, but can’t be easily measured. The second is that in order to properly engage people you need to do MORE than just have a cool product. You need a cool and engaging strategy.

No, I don’t know what that is either, but I’m trying! I’ll link some people below who are true experts on the subject, but i do recommend you look at something like https://hootsuite.com/ to help keep focused and organised.

And I’m always reminding myself that until you’ve “made it”, and perhaps even after that, in Social Media Marketing The immediate results are definitely not proportionate to the effort.

Because it’s not about immediate results- it’s a long term thing.

This is a short entry, mostly because there’s so much written on this topic that my personal experience doesn’t really warrant much of your time. I recommend you check out Sean Gardner or Ann Handley for some real expert advice.