http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/04/a-comparison-of-social-networks/
3. ModDB (417 watchers)
ModDB is sort of like a collection of Facebook pages but it is just for indie video games and mods. Pretty much the perfect fit for us. While it doesn’t have the insane 100 million users / day that Facebook does, it is a huge site and has a lot of potential to raise awareness about your game.
We tend to get about 100 visits / day on average to our ModDB page, but every week when we update our page with some new news, we get a boost to around ~1000 visitors.
4. Steam (435 members)
Steam is probably the hardest to quantify. We definitely get a lot of people contacting us on Meebo claiming to have found us through our Steam page, but we don’t really get any stats from Steam. Also, our Steam page doesn’t really have any fancy features so it is mostly useful for transferring people over to Facebook and ModDB.
5. Twitter (447 followers)
I really, really wanted to love Twitter. There is so much hype about it and all of my friends seem to twitter non-stop. It is gaining traffic exponentially. Could it be the next Facebook? Well, I gave it a fair shot, but I am sad to report that it is not too useful, albeit very addictive.
How can we measure Twitter’s impact?
Well, it is pretty easy to just look on Google Analytics and see how many referrers we get from Twitter. The answer is about 40 per day. Anyone on Twitter who shares a Wolfire Blog post or links to Overgrowth is counted in that figure. This includes my very own tweets that often link to Wolfire. So how many people are clicking on my tweets and how many are organic from other people spreading the word about us? Well, using a URL shortener like bit.ly, I can tell exactly how many. The answer is that only about 10-30 people click on my links.
I think I will save my criticisms of Twitter for its own blog post, but basically, it is pretty misleading. You will think that you are building up a huge crowd, but the truth is that most of your updates will be seen by virtually no one. 40 hits per day is nothing to sneeze at though, and maybe Twitter will become more useful later on, so I will continue to use it.
So that has been my experience so far with various social networks. What are some other ways we might reach new people?