12 May How to Reach Gamers on Social Media
Picture the average video gamer in your mind. How old are they? Are they male or female? Would it surprise you that the average video game player in America is 35 years old and 45% of gamers are female? It certainly surprised me. Also surprising is that there are 155 million gamers in the United States. With this many gamers, there certainly isn’t just one place to reach them.
So where are gamers on social media? Where are they spending their time when they’re not actively gaming?
Social Gaming
Remember FarmVille? If not, lucky you. Games like FarmVille, Candy Crush, and others have long populated the Facebook newsfeeds of millions of users. Whether you cared to see them or not, you were probably well aware of how many pounds of beets your friend Adam harvested yesterday.
Part of the key to these games is that there are a finite amount of lives, resources, or other key components to the game available for free. In order to keep gamers gaming, the game companies created incentives that could be purchased in the app/game itself. This opens up the opportunity for branded items that can be purchased (e.g. brand-name shoes, cars, accessories) or, more likely, background advertisements and product placement within the game.
Common Networks to Reach Gamers on Social Media
This may be obvious for any social strategy, but in order to reach gamers on social, targeting the networks where they spend time is paramount. For the aforementioned games with tie-ins to Facebook, the Zuckerberg-led behemoth is a great network on which to reach gamers. If they’re playing a game that they share on Facebook, odds are they use the network, and many are quite receptive to branded content.
The other big players in social for gamers are YouTube, Twitch and Twitter; the latter often serving as a funnel to drive fellow gamers to the YouTube accounts of well-known players.
Whether it’s directly leveraging these influencers, or simply playing in the channels where gamers reside, being in those spaces is key.
As always, being part of the community, and ensuring your content fits the tone and style that users have grown to expect on a given channel, is a best practice.
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