Game Developers: Please Take Google+ Seriously

Post on 30-Jun-2015

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When publicising our work, more and more of us turn to social media as our first (and often only) platform for outreach. Facebook and Twitter are the flavours of choice, but being an indie you're also willing to venture out to message boards, blogs, Reddit and god knows what other thing your "demographic" might happen to hang around... There is an elephant in the room... As game developers we often under-appreciate the sheer power Google has over the discoverability of our game. Very few of us take it's social offering, Google+, seriously as a platform. But the truth is that Google+ has more monthly active users than Twitter. A Google+ presence has dramatic repercussions for a brand's appearance on search, and with the right coding and markup, can serve long term improvements in discoverability and how you're represented, as search shifts away from keywords and more into semantic details and objects. This was a quick microtalk for the IGDA Scotland Chapter at their event in Dundee on the 26th of March, 2014.

transcript

Game Developers Please Take Google+ Seriously@Kraig_Walker

Deal With it

We’re All Using Social

It’s Not Without It’s Challenges

• Content has a varying lifespan • Competing with everyone else, including

those with £££• Most of our audience won’t even SEE our

posts• Creating content sucks. lets just make our

game for the next nine months and worry about it later. What could go wrong?

You’ve probably used these…

And Then There’s...

Facebook has the ArmyBut Google as the Hulk

Take Google+ Seriously, and Google Will Take You Seriously

Did you mean Aphelion?

Action Points

Tidy Up

Use Schema.org & Open Graph

Get Rich Snippets!

Sort Out That Wiki Page

If You Have One...

Use Authorship

Add a Link tag to Your Blogs

• For Humans:• <link rel=“author”

href=“http://plus.google.com/+KraigWalker”/>

• For Brands:• <link rel=“publisher” href=“http://plus.google.com/+CocaCola”/>

Brands Look for the “tick” People add the site as a “Contributor”

Don’t Alienate Your Audience

Leverage The Awesome

Many types of Content

Many Types of Content

Use CirclesIt Pays off In The Long Run

Leverage CommunitiesFree Discoverability!*

Lots More. No Time

Try it, you might like it