Your Main Image is CRUCIAL

Think carefully about your lead image – you need to entice and inspire people with it. They might see it on the Collective website, as a thumbnail on a news article, or as a cover image on Facebook… so make sure it’s going to draw people in and give them a great sense of your game. It doesn’t have to be in-game images, or even concept art… just make sure it’s amazing! J

Short Description of the Game

The next most important part of your pitch is the short description of your game. Combine with your lead image, after reading this people should know pretty much everything they need to know to understand your concept – so that they’ll want to read on!

It also helps to provide us with a short summary (ideally less than 30 words) to enable us to effectively promote the project on Square Enix channels, as brevity is key for social updates.

Consistent Branding

Keep branding consistent and coherent. After looking at your pitch, you want users to come away fully understanding what the game is about, but inconsistencies can make the project look unprofessional or messy. Spelling and grammar is really important – we can help with this, as we know this can be a big challenge for non-native English speakers, but let us know as far in advance as possible so this editing process doesn’t take away valuable time from being live.

Help Us Help You

Provide as much content as possible to us in advance, including assets and updates, and we can use that via our own channels to help drive traffic to your pitch. Keep us updated on any media or influencers you talk to – our channels range across: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, G+ and Instagram, plus we may also feature content on the Square Enix blog too.

Targeting Press

What’s your game’s genre? In general there are often good results to be had from targeting specialist media that will focus more on your game’s style/platform. For example, if it’s a sci-fi game, get in touch with WorldofSpaceships.com, while anything PC-based could be of interest for PCGamesN.

Answering Comments

It’s extremely important to answer comments from users often and where possible. Replying regularly will demonstrate that you’re listening and lets users know that their feedback is important to you, in addition to helping build relationships with your target audience over time. Don’t feed the trolls…

Useful Assets

Images
Users are more likely to engage with images shared on social channels, and the more screenshots you have the better. High resolution images will work best as they can be trimmed and resized to suit the optimal dimensions on social channels. JPEG or PNG images in 16:9 size ratio work well and can be easily edited. Be sure to also provide us with the original files so that we can use them on our channels.

Videos
Video files are super effective at increasing awareness on social media channels. A web ready version of your videos or .mp4 format will work best when uploading on Facebook and YouTube. Shorter videos are more effective on Facebook, so it would be useful to split up videos into smaller chunks.

Animated GIFs
Twitter and Google+ both support animated GIFs, which can easily be created from video files and are a great way to show off gameplay or four to six second teasers. Seamlessly looped GIFs work best.

Links

Remember to link to the Collective Project page in every instance. Use a free link shortening tool (such as bitly.com) to create one URL that you can use throughout your updates. This also allows you to track click-throughs and statistics.

Making the Most of Social Media

Twitter

Hashtags
A great way to track what people are saying about your game is by using hashtags (#). Try to use the simplest form of a hashtag, one you think users will use when talking about your game. Once you’ve decided on a campaign hashtag, you need to make people aware of it. One effective method of encouraging conversations about your game is to include the #hashtag in all the images you post.

Images
According to research, pictures uploaded via pic.twitter.com get 94% more retweets than others and links for pictures take up about 26 characters of a tweet. Furthermore, image dimensions can be as low as 440x220px and as high as 1024x512px; they’re vertically centred and can’t be bigger than 3MB.

Optimal Dimensions
Profile Picture: 400x400px
Header image: 1500x500px (max file size of 5MB)
Background image: 1920x1200px (max file size of 2MB)
Timeline image: 1024x512px (max file size of 3MB)

Facebook

Videos
If you want to increase awareness of your project, we find videos are the most effective at generating impressions in people’s timelines. And the shorter the length of the video, the higher average watch time of the clip.

Images
Images encourage engagement on Facebook better than any other post type. If posting up a single picture, we recommended uploading an image sized 1200x1200px, for best results.

Optimal Dimensions
Cover Image: 851x315px
Profile Photo: 180x180px
Shared Image: 1200x1200px (recommended) or 403x504px (optimal min size)

REMEMBER: Tell us when you’re posting on social media so we can share/RT – feel free to mention @SQEXCollective in Tweets too! You can get us on: [email protected], or [email protected].