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In my last post I announced my reasons for the expansion of my work into social gaming. Here are some more thoughts on why the social media marketing mindset works for gaming.

Its still about the desire for social connections

Casual gamers, who make up the majority of the social game space, play for a variety of reasons but foremost among them is social interaction.

The key question is how do you take advantage of these social desires in your social games?

I have heard many people say their product has a viral element and therefore they can depend on their users to spread it for them. Now that doesn’t really doesn’t mean anything. Often times people think of virality as copying viral elements that have worked for other apps. A popular example of this is copying the invite friends design directly from a top app. In reality there are no silver bullets in viral marketing. Ideas that worked for others and can be imitated are now getting less and less effective*.

A better strategy is building in virality in game play. To do that effectively you need to be aware of who someone is, how they think, what they want, and how they talk. Sounds a lot like the social media listening strategy I talked about before doesnt it?

Its all still about listening

You CANNOT create good products in a vacuum.

When I say this to entrepreneurs they say what do you mean you can’t?! Steve Jobs did! I disagree.

Steve Jobs succeeded because of his focus on a simple, clean customer experience. That is the opposite of the feature heavy products many startups generate these days.

Want a simple short cut to your success? Here’s one–talk to people! And people here means lots of different kinds of people not just the folks who look, talk, and sound like you and where better to find them than on social media. Unless you want to spend the time to figure it out the long way–by making products and having them fail and then trying again. Now honestly, do you really want to do that?

Its still about finding users who are the right match

Yes, virality incorporated into game play will help you grow your user base but you still need to find your initial set of users. You could get these initial sets of users by:

–buying them from advertising on ad networks (like RockYou), targeted offers (on Offerpal), or even advertising on Facebook

–leveraging existing install bases from prior games you have created (or those others have created via cross promotion opportunities)

But the and conversion on these users is still much lower compared to those who come to you from viral channels.

By now you may be thinking that a social media marketing campaign targeted at influencers will probably help boost the numbers of some of the traffic that is more likely to convert. And you are right!

What do you think? Do share by commenting below.

*see Andrew Chen’s recent blog post on this to read more on this. If you still want to get started by imitating some out of the box viral loops take a look at this great resource from Kissmetrics http://productplanner.com/

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