http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/04/a-comparison-of-social-networks/
Part of our strategy for getting the word out about Overgrowth revolves around various social networks. Pretty much the only way we grow is organically through word of mouth. This is why we take social networking sites very seriously, because we are able to grow without being dependent on (insert giant news site here) to randomly write an article on us.
We have tried a lot of things, and here are the top five sites that have been really good for us. Here’s a skittlr to view all of them at once: Overgrowth Skittlr!
1. Facebook (3750 fans)
Facebook is the king, hands down. It has long since been the largest social network in the world, and pretty much everything about it is designed to be spread virally.
It is perfect for game developers, because it supports a music player, high def videos, photos (a.k.a. concept art and screenshots), and notes (a.k.a. the Wolfire Blog). Therefore, I try to treat our Facebook Page as a valuable standalone site instead of simply a way to redirect people back onto wolfire.com.
Our Facebook Page gets around 350 visitors per day with occasional random spikes boosting it to 1000 - 2000.
2. YouTube (412 subscribers)
I think we all are familiar with YouTube. It is the uncontested king of video sites. It’s 720p HD is ideal for demoing video games. A lot of people treat their video provider as sort of a dumping ground for their videos to embed on their own site. YouTube is actually much more than that.
One thing we’ve noticed is that some of our videos that we put up on YouTube get crazy amounts of traffic even though we’ve never even posted about them. I’ve always wondered how this happens and where these videos are getting so much traffic from. YouTube recently launched a hardcore analytics tool for their videos and now I can answer this question precisely. It turns out that YouTube has a number of ways to promote videos internally. Search, showing up at the end of YouTube videos, showing up on the sidebar of other videos, and other random internal YouTube stuff makes up about 30% of all our video views. Some of our videos have over 30,000 views purely from internal YouTube features.