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Message: <blockquote data-quote="talien" data-source="post: 8680215" data-attributes="member: 3285">Publishing in the digital age isn't just about finding customers, it's about navigating the labyrinthine algorithms that determine when and where to show your product.[ATTACH=full]252439[/ATTACH] <a href="https://pixabay.com/illustrations/instagram-like-instagram-comment-4294405/" target="_blank">Picture courtesy of Pixabay.</a><h3>Why This Matters</h3>Social media's popularity and anonymity has resulted in <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/reaching-your-audience.689030/" target="_blank">programmatic algorithms that sort, amplify, and deprecate content</a> without a publisher's input. Because few platforms insist on identification, anonymity has in turn propagated spam bots that pretend to be people. To that end, social media platforms tend to look for three attributes: recency, frequency, and connectivity. Failing to fulfill these attributes risks looking like a spam bot, and therefore your posts may never be seen on social through no fault of your own. Knowing the digital terrain will help you avoid some of these pitfalls so you can reach gamers who want to buy your product.Please Note: There's a fine line between optimizing your social media efforts and gaming the system. Gaming the system can get you booted off the platform; optimization makes you more competitive. Check each platform's rules to figure out what's acceptable and what's going too far.<h3>Connectivity</h3>There's a reason Facebook and YouTube require a minimum number of fans to customize a unique URL. Fundamentally, the fact those unique URLs are not offered immediately is a hint that there is a higher turnover of new accounts. These accounts are often bots, launched just to skirt a platform's rules.Unfortunately, any new user on a platform falls into this category. Or to put it another way, when we first start out we all look like spam bots. This is why it's so important to cultivate fans who like and comment on wherever your brand appears. This will in turn help increase your brand's legitimacy on that platform.<h3>Recency</h3>For all the accounts that are created every minute, there are just as many that fall dormant and never post again. This churn damages the ability to find content for users, so social media platforms make it a point of sharing the most recent content. This biases sites towards news and events.For a game publisher, sharing news is important, but what constitutes news can be broad. Fortunately, a lot of RPG content can be broken into easily shareable chunks: one monster, class, magic item, etc. a day. This satisfies the algorithm by providing a steady drip of content while at the same time driving traffic back to a single product.<h3>Frequency</h3>You can also take the approach of producing multiple, smaller projects. Russ has perfected this on Kickstarter; Phil Reed did the same with PDFs on DriveThruRPG. That said, <a href="https://onebookshelfpublisherservice.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/227866447-Publisher-Conduct-Guidelines" target="_blank">DriveThruRPG has recently updated their guidelines on this topic</a>:There's a reason publishers want to be on the front page, and it's because it drives traffic from customers who might otherwise never see your product. This is why DriveThruRPG's Deal of the Day is so valuable, because being on the front page for 24 hours can be a significant boost to sales.In short, the key to getting your product visible is to post timely, frequently, and have a lot of friends to share it. The algorithm will hopefully notice, but even that's not a guarantee, because social media experts are all vying for the same eyeballs using the same methodology. That's when having a great product matters most.Your Turn: In a sea of social media noise, how do you make your product stand out?</blockquote>

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