This year once again we visited Gdańsk to attend Social Media Convent, an annual conference focused entirely on trends and good practises in today’s social media. The event consisted entirely of lectures that, unfortunately, lacked significant content. The speakers seemed to care mostly about their image and being cool than on conveying some quality content that could help us at work. There were some exceptions of course but the overall impression of low quality remained.

The presentation that clearly stood out raised the topic of people 55+ who have been ignoring by the online marketing. Agnieszka Stelmaszczyk and Karolina Liberka from Fenomem presented a research they conducted among people that are 55 or older. It turns out that many of those people use the Internet, including Facebook and other social networks, quite often, against the common belief. At the same time the only commercials they are shown are those of health care, drugs and similar. The whole lecture has given us a push to reconsider the audience we’re currently targeting with our games and the audience that actually are engaged or would be if they knew about the entertainment we provide.

The lecture we had waited most for, ‘A gamer’s profile in social media’ presented by G2A (a company providing a global digital gaming marketplace), turned out to be quite a disappointment. The speakers clearly prepared the presentation for people that are not acquainted whatsoever with gamedev. The only highlight was their fake dating portal based on game preferences invented as a stunt for April Fools’ Day. It gained a lot of engagement from their followers and it serves as a good example of a well-prepared campaign focused on the specific target audience.

The highlight of the whole event was the mobile video – how to create one that’s a ‘thumb-stopper’, meaning a video that will cause a person browsing through hundreds of information in their news feed to stop for more than a millisecond and watch it. The main thing we should consider while creating such a video is the sound, or rather lack thereof. People usually don’t turn the sound on while browsing the news feed so a good practise is to use subtitles or images that don’t need explaining. According to the researches and predictions presented at the convent, the video will continue to gain a lot of engagement from people present in the social media.

In overall, the convent did not really teach us anything new. We wished there had been more new speakers than the previous year since we had a light deja vu feeling. Our conclusion is that to learn more about promoting games through social media is to attend some gamedev conference with a dedicated marketing panel – perhaps we’ll try GDC next time and compare the experience.