Unpacking a smart plan for long-tail post-launch marketing

gamedeveloper.com:

At her GDC talk this week, Witch Beam Games community and social media manager Emily Hummel gave practical advice for creating a social plan for a limited-scope game. Hummel works on the social media campaign for Unpacking, the indie darling puzzler where players learn about the main character by unpacking her belongings after her various moves. Notably, the game is a complete, single player experience with no DLC planned, but Hummel laid out all the ways she continues to make content and engage with the title's active community despite that.

She started off my noting that her talk would be particularly useful to small teams and folks working on a game with either no DLC, or expansion content that is very far away. The focus was on long-tail post-launch marketing and community engagement.

Hummel suggested that any social media manager get organized and get started with a calendar. A few suggested items she called out were holidays, sales, anniversaries for your game (and any staff vacations), all of which help to plan ahead for. She suggested finding a posting cadence for all of your channels and sticking to it, even if it starts light, because many algorithms (TikTok in particular, in her shout-out) are designed to reward a constant stream of content, and punish gaps.

Hummel was big on recycling content for posting purposes (and merch!) and noted that really, templates are your best friend. She showed examples of images that were reused from one photoshop file, and noted she actually keeps a spreadsheet with all of her ideas for social assets.

"The first rule is whenever you make something, [be it a] still image, a video, etc. [is to] see if there's a way to use it [again]. Lock typically builds the gaps in the game and