In today's post, I share 5 free tools that we use to effectively promote indie games.
BuzzSumo is an awesome platform that allows you to analyze content published about a specific topics or even your competitors. Not only does BuzzSumo allow you to view articles sorted by most shares on social media, but it also allows you to export this information to a spreadsheet that you can use for many things. For example, we like to do this during our competitive analysis phase to build a targeted press list based off of the best earned coverage of direct competitors.
BuzzSumo offers a limited free trial (no credit card required), but to have unlimited searches, you need to opt into a paid tier. Paid tiers start at $39/Mo if you are a team of 2 or less. If your team is any larger, the price goes up to $79/Mo (if you pay yearly) or $99/Mo if you pay monthly. Regardless, it’s an incredible tool that offers a wealth of data.
If you’re not sure how much you would make use of the platform, we highly recommend you at least give the free trial a go as there’s no credit card required to sign up and it gives you a good idea of what you can do with the platform.
LinkClump is a completely free extension for Chrome that allows you to mass copy search result listings. This along with Google and advanced search operators can give you similar results that you would find from BuzzSumo, but you won’t be able to see any social media engagement metrics.
It’s a great alternative, if you want to build a targeted press release without spending any money.
To get the most out of LinkClump, we do the following:
– Search for a direct competitor in Google. Example: intitle:No Man’s Sky
The above search result will only display results that include “No Man’s Sky” in the page title.
– Click on “News” link
Once you click search and see your results page, find the “News” link near the top of the page and click that. For this example, we just want to see results that are news articles that include “No Man’s Sky” in the title.
– (optional) Sort by date
Once you’ve clicked on News, it’s best to sort by date to find more recent articles posted. We typically go back no longer than 3 months (when building a press list is our main priority). We want to do this, so we find the most up-to-date articles written by writers that still work at the publications they originally published content to.
You can also sort by date using custom dates to identify earned coverage for certain events (major updates, new platform releases etc…).
To sort by date, simply click on “Tools” and then “Any time”. After you click on “Any time”, you will see a drop down list of dates you can select (even “custom range”).
After you’ve sorted listings by date, you can use LinkClump to mass copy all of the results. LinkClump will not only copy the URLs, but it will also copy the Page Titles. You can then open a spreadsheet of your choice and past the results in. Once you’ve done this enough times, you should have a nice sized spreadsheet of earned coverage from your competitors. You can then identify specific writers to target and add their information to fill out the press list.
Speaking of finding writers details, you can easily find their email addresses using Voila Norbert. The free trial lets you find up to 50 email addresses. All you do is paste in a first name, last name and domain to the person you’re trying to connect with. Norbert will then run a check and more times than not, the website will be able to find their email address for you within seconds.
Once you’ve exceeded 50 emails, there are paid options, but for building press lists, this can be an incredibly helpful tool and the paid options aren’t that expensive.
Twitch Metrics is an amazing completely free tool that allows you to identify the most popular streamers based off of specific games. By using this tool, you can fill out your list of streamers to approach in one sitting. All you do is search by game and then sort by most popular streamers. You then grab their information and put it into a spreadsheet of your choice.
Many of you probably already know about Hootsuite, but for those of you that don’t, this can be an incredibly useful tool in making social media management much easier (especially for smaller teams that want to be active on multiple social media accounts). The free version of Hootsuite allows you to manage up to 3 social media accounts at once and pre-schedule 30 posts ahead of time.
If you’re having trouble managing your social media accounts during the week, you could spend some time over the weekend to pre-schedule your upcoming week worth of social media posts and be done with it. With that being said, you do want to have notifications on, so you can promptly reply to any comments or questions, so this isn’t a completely set it and forget it operation. Also, don’t forget to queue up some #screenshotsaturday posts for your game!
We hope you find these tools helpful and if you know of any awesome tools that you highly recommend, please don’t hesitate to share them in the comment section. We are always on the lookout for tools that can help optimize the process of promoting games.
This post was originally published on the Level Up Marketing Blog.
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