How to Avoid Wishlist Flatlines With Organic Social Media

For many games that are being developed, marketing early is something that is often overlooked, downplayed or simply there is not enough time to do it because development is already hard enough. Yet, for early wishlist growth, marketing early can have a direct correlation to how well you can grow your wishlists before your game’s launch.

The big problem we are addressing is when wishlist growth flatlines and stops altogether. Looking at popular distribution platforms like Steam, there are certain events that can cause organic wishlist spikes without external marketing influencing that growth. The events typically are:

1. Creation of a the Steam page
2. Launch of a demo
3. A Launch Date Announcement
4. Making Steam’s Popular and Upcoming

If you look at many indie games’ Steam wishlists, you’ll notice that outside of those important milestones, many indies suffer from very little wishlists being generated (around 5 a day, if that), as depicted in this chart below:

No External Growth

Whereas a game that has good social presence can generate between 20 to 200 wishlists a day between those important dates, even without a demo that lead to thousands of wishlists a launch. That is depicted in the chart below with one of the games we work with through a strong social approach:

With External Growth

At Glitch we do focus on data-driven marketing automation, and we have a strong focus on using organic social media to drive growth. The focus on the article will be on how to use social media for growth early in games to drive wishlist growth. While there are other alternative methods like game festivals, advertising, and PR, this article will not focus on those strategies and only focus on organic social.

Why You Want Consistent Growth

Before getting into the how, let’s first understand the why. The game that is having consistent growth (even without a demo) gets about an average of 40 wishlists a day. Think about this as a long-term goal plan. Let’s say you launch your steam page without a demo, and 6 months later you plan to release your demo. 6 months is about 182 days. At 40 wishlists a day average:

182 days * 40 daily wishlists = 7,280 wishlists.

That’s almost enough to make Steam’s Popular and Upcoming list, which can give you a significant bump. Now, when you launch your demo, you should get between another 2k to 5k wishlist additions, if not more. Guess what, you have passed the “generally believed” required number to make the Popular and Upcoming list, which should afford you another 5k wishlist additions, if not more. It is “generally believed” because there is no hard number written down for this.

You are now at least at 17k wishlists. Now let’s say you have another 6 months from your demo release. Typically, games with demo releases get higher wishlists than those without. So let’s now say you are on an average 80 wishlists a day for another 183 days.

183 days * 80 daily wishlists = 14,640 wishlist additions.

Add that to your 17k from your previous wishlists, and you are now at 31k wishlists for your launch, at least. This number excludes any paid advertising, game festivals, PR, and other marketing activities. If that sounds exciting to you, let’s dive in how to do this correctly.

Start Your Socials As Soon As You Begin Development

There is no better time to start than yesterday. As soon as you begin developing your game, even if it’s unnamed, start building your socials. We’ve discussed in What Is Marketable and Compelling that many games can start their marketing without a storefront (Steam, Epic, Itch, etc).

The strategy is to use short-form devlogs that we discussed in How To Use Short Form DevLogs in Game Marketing. But to succinctly review, short-form devlogs are development updates designed for consumers. They normally consist of:

• Before and After
• Asking your Audience for their preferences
• Fast forwarding your development process in design programs like Maya

Doing these short-form devlogs has a few benefits in that they:

• Allow you to start building your audience early, and grow it over time
• You can gain feedback from your audience and tell if you are building a marketable game
• Helps you gain an understanding of things your audience cares about early on

Here are examples of several games in development have started their marketing on social early and are growing their audience, often with out a store front launched:

Unnamed Upcoming Game:

Solo Dev Working on A Game Lia

Ideally at this stage, you should be posting to your social media 1 to 3 times a week, and analyzing what your audience likes. As your game progresses, you will start producing different content like showing off your gameplay, character bios, mechanics, and other stuff in the game. Your post frequency will also change. This chart below is a rough guideline for what you should be posting each day.

The numbers are the bare minimum; more is always better when it comes to using social to develop your audience.

Your Goal On Social is Consistency, Not To Go Viral

As we talked with many developers, we find 3 common misconceptions and mistakes about social media to address:

1. The goal of social media is to go viral, and with that, many developers believe virality is hard to achieve, which in turn makes it difficult to address social media as a viable option.
2. Social media is hard to measure in terms of results, especially when looking for direct 1:1 outcomes.
3. Reddit, and maybe TikTok, is the only good social media platform to use as the others don’t result in wishlists, and you are just marketing to other developers.

A lot of bad information is then “parroted” without good explanation or context. All three of these have to be addressed carefully, as they are all false and can mislead a developer.

• Social media is about results produced through consistency. So if you post on TikTok or X, and your post gets 1k views, and on average you notice from those 1k you get 10 wishlists, then you have an idea of what you need to do. So if you post 10 times a month consistently, you know you will get 100 wishlist additions.
• Social media is very hard to track because of missing attributes in stores, especially for mobile and Apple’s tracking issue, but also due to human behavior. A person might see your game on their mobile phone, and then Google it on their desktop and wishlist it there—attribution destroyed. This is what’s known as the Dark Funnel or Dark Social—where direct attribution is lost, and you have to use a Correlation Analysis.
• Every social platform has its own benefits for promoting your game. YouTube does well for mobile shorts, X/Video goes well for images, memes, and medium-length videos, TikTok is great for videos under 15 seconds, and Reddit can be good for conversation. Each platform is part of building your brand, and long term, those brand elements help create wishlist conversions.

You need to spend time figuring out what works best on each through an iterative test and learn process that you can be read about in this article on optimizing your social media strategy.

Newsletters

In addition to starting your socials, this is also a great time to start a newsletter, even if you don’t send anything. Collecting emails does not cost anything, and emails have one of the highest engagement rates of any form of marketing.

Think about it like this: when you launch your game on a platform like Steam, the user gets one email about the game’s launch. If you have their email address, you have complete control over how many times and at what cadence you send those emails.

Furthermore, open rates for games are about 30% on average, therefore it is very likely they will get your message. That 30% is higher and more effective than a form of paid promotion for a fraction of the cost. While it may cost you $10 CPM on ads to maybe reach the user, through email marketing it can cost you less than $0.01 to directly reach a user. Newsletters are good for your game.

Last tip, use double opt-in with newsletter sign-ups. This might sound like a barrier, but it’s a good barrier to have. At Glitch’s emailer, we found with double opt-in, the sign-up success is 80%, so people do opt-in. This double ensures that:

• People are using real email addresses and not fake ones
• They have validated your email outside the spam folder (if it goes to spam), which increases your deliverability
• Helps reduce the amount of bots signing up

How does the email list and newsletters relate to social media? We’ll get to that in the next phase.

Linking Website, Data, Analytics

Now let’s take a pause and do some house cleaning before getting to the next steps. First, we want to link all of the assets together, including your newsletter, in a linking website. We provide a free open-source version on GitHub that you can put together yourself, or you can use a service like LinkTree (pay for analytics).

Most importantly, turn on Analytics for all your social media profiles, and for the linking website. Here is why:

• We want to assess first if the content you are producing is engaging. (This is part of understanding your audience and how to reach them.)
• We want to understand the demographic data of our audience such as location, gender, age range (as much as provided), and other information that will help us.
• We want to look at if they are evaluating your game.

All of these go into the first 3 stages of your game’s marketing funnel:

1. Awareness: How many people does your content reach, which is measured by views and impressions.
2. Interest: Do people like the content you’re creating around your game? If not, you may need to re-assess if your game is marketable. This is good warning sign to address early!!!!
3. Evaluation: Does enough interest carry over into evaluation? Where they use your Linking Website to research your game further, and that turns into wishlists or newsletter sign-ups.

Some simple guidelines if you are doing well are:

• Your follower growth on social media should be 1% to 10% week-over-week growth
• Your engagement rate on your content should be around 2%
• If your content has links, an average CTR (Click Thru Rate) is about 1%
• On your Linking page, if people are interested, they typically click on 3 links on average
• 2% of your total audience reach per week should sign-up to your newsletter

If you are not seeing some of the results, this is a good warning of marketability problems you should address now rather than later. Otherwise, all of the numbers will eventually convert to the bottom line, which is wishlist conversions. So we have knowledge of the entire process people will take to get to that step and perform that action.

Store Fronts and Pinned Posts

Now that we have all of that set up, next move onto our store front, which can happen months, sometimes years later but you should still be growing your audience on social the entire time. Before launching your store front, make sure that you have followed all the best practices for doing so:

• Have a good, compelling video
• Strong visual images of the game
• A compelling and clear description of the game
• And other store front best practices talked about in other articles
• YOU DO NOT NEED A DEMO

When you launch your store front, you can direct your followers to your store front’s page. One important tip is that before you launch your store front page, make sure that you are priming or warming up your social media accounts for a month beforehand. Posting from an account that you have been infrequently posting can fall flat.

And here is the best tip of all: make sure to pin the announcement of your store front to the top of social media. Pinned posts get several times more engagement because it feeds off all the other posts. For example, here is a normal post from one of our clients, where we record all the views, comments, shares, and other engagements:

On average, for this client, a post gets around 3k views. But for the pinned posts, it not only doubles the views and engagement, but it will continually drive traffic to your store front, which then can convert into wishlist sign-ups for your game.

Remember how we turned on all of our data in the previous step? We can now track how people move from the awareness created on social to its conversion on in your store front. A general guideline on how conversions should happen based on the awareness you generate at the top of your funnel from social are in this chart below:

And don't forget your newsletter! With all the people that have been signing up to it, now is the time to direct them to wishlist your game!

With our goal complete, we can now continually have wishlist growth on your game that is powered by your social media presence. As you keep posting and growing your following, the pinned post with the link to your store front will help continue to drive wishlist additions. This strategy can also be used when your game launches to help make sales. But wait, this takes a lot of time to manage, create content for all platforms, and collect data.

Marketing Automation

First, all of this is doable on your own, without any set of tools. This is enough information given to you to execute and be successful as long as you put in the time. But if time is the issue, that is where you want marketing automation to deliver results and take the time. And that's our specialty as a platform with our social scheduler. Marketing automation takes care of things like:

• Formatting and best practices for each social media platform
• Collecting data from all content so it can be analyzed
• Providing data-driven, actionable insights on how to improve your marketing

Once you get marketing automation set up, the majority of time spent on marketing will be producing short snippets of content—typically about 2-3 hours a week—and the rest is posted to your social for you. The pay (or payoff) is that as long as it’s driving continual growth, it will help de-risk your game. If you are curious how much you should spend on marketing vs the return on investment, read this article here on How Much should you spend on game marketing.

Combine With Other Marketing Efforts

As we’ve seen, consistent marketing is not just an optional tactic but a crucial building block for a successful game launch. By starting early, engaging with your audience on social platforms, capturing leads through newsletters, and monitoring analytics, you can maintain steady wishlist growth long before your game is released.

These methods reduce risk by validating player interest early in development and generating reliable data that shows what resonates with your community. Add to that the power of marketing automation—especially if time is your bottleneck—and you have a framework that reliably scales your reach and relevance.

Where this truly becomes powerful is when you combine this tactics with other tactics such as adverting, game festivals, PR, you can create a lot of growth and momentum for your game. Ultimately, each step contributes to a momentum that carries your game to release day with a solid foundation of excited players, ready to experience what you’ve built.