Michael Powers of Mplayit gives practical tips to mobile application developers wishing to use social media to promote games and applications. Slides were part of a session presentation at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco March 2101

2. Social Networks:
The New Marketplace
for Mobile Games?
 Michael
Powers
Founder CEO

3. About Us
 Web-Based
Social Discovery
for Mobile Apps

4. The Gold Rush is Over
 Going live on the App Store is not
a marketing strategy.
 You are going to have to take your
marketing into your own hands.

5. The Problem:
Long Tail isn’t long enough
 Physical
limitations to
discovery.
 Screen size, bandwidth, patience.
 Feature phones.
 95% of game sales to Top 20
 iPhone
is better
(but not by much)
 Top 200 is the new Top 20

6. The Problem:
Long Tail isn’t long enough

7. The Opportunity:
Huge Untapped Market

8. The Opportunity:
Cross Platform Demand
iPhone Android BlackBerry
Game Interest 3X 2X
Audience 2X
Register 2X 2X
Revisit 3X 2X
Apps per Visit 2X
Share per App 2X
Download Rate 2X

9. The Target:
Casual Online Gamers
 Mobile Games = Casual Games
 This isn’t news.
 Casual Demographics
 More female than male; 20s/30s/40s.
 Plurality: married women.
 Hassle adverse
 Not going to work hard to get content

10. The Target:
Casual Online Gamers
 They’ve seen the prime time ads:
 Their next phone will be a smartphone

11. The Solution?
Three Ways to Go
 Schmooze
 Cozy up to Apple, Google, et al
 Spend
 Drop ~$50K on Admob
 Sweat
 Goguerrilla to maximize exposure
using web and social marketing.

12. Solution:
Web Discovery
 It’s where the users are
 7
out of 10 casual gamers go on the
web at least once a day
 They’re wasting time already
 Notchecking Facebook ten times a
day to stay productive
 Frictionless discovery
 Highbandwidth, low latency,
no hassle

13. Web Discovery
 Frictionless Discovery
 66% of our traffic is outside Top 50.
 Allows great content to bubble-up.
Android BlackBerry iPhone
Top 10 14% 12% 19%
11 to 50 21% 21% 15%
The Rest 65% 67% 66%

14. Web Discovery
 Playable Discovery
 More than 50% click to play a video
 More than 50% watch the whole thing
Most Played Top Performing
The Sims 3 Photoshop.com
73% 5.1x
T T
iPeePee Finger Physics
69% 3.0x
Pocket God Cooking Mama
60% 2.5x

15. Solution:
Social Discovery
 Peer-to-peer is powerful
 53% of app discovery is via online
buzz or word-of-mouth (AdMob)
 Vectors
 Link
sharing via
Facebook, Twitter, and Email
 Transmitters
 Bloggers
and reviews, Organic, and
In-Game traffic

16. Social Discovery
 What it looks like

17. Social Discovery
 Targeting
the
Casual Demographic
 Mission Accomplished!

18. Step One:
Web Landing Page
 Make it Easy
 Easy to share, cross-promote apps,
 Easy to find, search engine optimized
 Optimize for Desktop and Mobile
 Web means both; and users clicking
social links are increasingly on device
 Measure, Measure, Measure
 Track
the analytics and
Optimize for conversion

19. Step Two:
Embrace Video
 “Playable discovery”
 50%+ of page views play the video,
 2X conversion on average.
 Do It Yourself
 Hire
a firm if you can afford,
otherwise DIY is better than nothing.
 Video Review Sites
 Ifyou can get them to review, and
if the review is good, use it.

20. Step Three:
Learn to love PR
 Hire some PR if you can afford it
 Alot of PR firms now have
budget-minded app launch programs.
 Or, Do It Yourself
 Cheap to release on PR Web et. al.,
Keep it short and sweet.
 Build an SEO Trail
 Each release increases the value of all
the releases that came before it.

21. Step Four:
Chase the Review Blogs
 Make a List
 Dothe work and build a contact list
and work it aggressively.
 Promo Codes
 Nosurprise, but promo codes are the
currency of choice.
 Make Friends
 Personaltouch matters with these
guys; no site is too small.

22. Step Five:
Connect Your Users
 Integrate Social Network APIs
 Implement Facebook Connect,
Twitter, et. al; more the better.
 Use Community Frameworks
 OpenFeint,Score Loop, Playhaven,
and others make the hard stuff easy.
 Make sure you Drive Traffic
 Driveeverything back to your web
landing pages.

23. Questions?
 Michael
Powers
Founder CEO http://mplayit.com