Why Your Game's Social Media Isn't Growing (And How to Fix It)

While sometimes social media is a great way for marketing your game for free, other times it can feel like running endlessly on a hamster wheel as you may feel it’s hard to gain followers and views on your post, especially when you are starting out.

But there are a few things you can do to test your social media and run some experiments for what works best. This article is for people that:

• Have been trying social media
• Failing to gain traction across their social platforms despite consistent efforts
• Are willing to run some tests and experiment with their socials

In this article we are going to cover:

• Shadow banning
• Probation Periods
• Low Quality Game Content
• Content Types
• Incorrect Targeting
• Posting Consistency
• Platform Problems

At Glitch, we do data-driven game marketing, and this article is also a part of a series of articles that looks at marketing like debugging a problem in programming. Marketing, like programming, has certain aspects you can test to help you get to the bottom of a problem. And once you know the problem, you can solve the issue and experience growth for your game.

Setting Expectations & Important KPIs

A common question we always get is “how can I grow my follower count quickly?”. The truth is, this is not a short-term quick fix thing. Social media is a long term strategy. If your following count is growing 1% to 10% a week, you’re actually in good shape.

But follower count is not necessarily your bottom line KPI (Key performance indicator). Key performance indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable metrics that measure how well a business is performing against its goals. When it comes to games marketing and growth, the KPI you want to look at is wishlist additions or installs.

Some of the games we’ve worked with that don’t have substantial followings get 500+ installs in a day. The client below has a weak social media presence but decent installs.

So remember, growing your follower count is great, but it's not the bottom line metric you need to focus on. Think, wishlists or installs.

Shadow Banned

The first thing to check is if your account has been shadow banned. Shadow banning is when a social platform will prevent your posts from being shown to others, but when you post it will appear that everything is normal.

The purpose of shadow banning is not to let spammers or scammers know that they have been banned. This way they do not create another account because they think everything is working fine on their end.

There are different sites for different platforms that you can use to see if you have been shadow banned.

• TikTok: https://shadowbantool.com/en/
• Reddit: https://cable.ayra.ch/reddit/
• X/Twitter: https://hisubway.online/shadowban/
• Instagram: https://grum.co/instagram-shadow-ban-checker/

Google around to search for various shadow ban test sites. If you are shadow banned, you can try to contact support of the social platform; bear in mind that this might take weeks or months to resolve. The easier route might be to create a new account.

New Accounts

Another reason why your posts might not be getting any views is that your account is too new. Often new accounts on social media have an undocumented “probationary” period. In this time period, you might be:

• Limited to posting too much (i.e., once a day)
• Restricted from posting to certain groups
• Posts might not get any views
• Posts might have to be approved first
• Various other limiting factors

If your account is less than 30 days old (differs per platform), you might have to wait until you are able to start gaining traction. But in this probationary period, you can do other things like:

• Comment on other people's content
• Like and share other people's content
• Re-share other people's content
• Follow/Subscribe to other people

Basically, start to have your account build relationships with other people on the platform. It can help jump-start your growth once the probationary period ends.

Incorrect Targeting

One of the issues with content being posted on social sites is that it is not targeted correctly. Different social sites use different methods to target their audience with content.

• Hashtags: Hashtags are used by X/Twitter, Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn, and TikTok for reaching people.
• Relevant Forums: Social platforms like Reddit use posting in the correct forums (subreddits) to correctly target an audience. Same for Discord too, post in the correct channel.
• SEO: YouTube and Facebook Pages rely on SEO methods for targeting their audience. Hashtags are somewhat used on YouTube.

To figure out if your targeting might be the issue, it depends on the platform. For example, with hashtags, you can be using too many or too few. For example, if you are using 4, 5, 6 or more hashtags, your content might be suppressed. Try using 1 or 2. Likewise, if you use no hashtags, try to use 1 or 2. And test different kinds of hashtags to see what works best.

There are sites for testing hashtags such as:

• Best Hashtags
• TagsFinder
• Hashtagify

On Glitch, we also offer a free hashtag performance, see chart below.

For forum-style platforms, test how your content performs in different forums or channels. Make sure that you follow that forum's rules. For SEO, work on finding the best keywords. Test out different variations to eventually understand what works best for your game.

Low Quality Game

This point might be the hardest pill to swallow because developers put their heart and souls into their game, and it’s their baby. Yet this problem is so big that we actually will turn clients down over this as it's not a problem money can fix.

If your content is not getting engagement, it could mean the quality of your game is low, and is something that needs to be improved. For example, below is an image of a brand new BlueSky account for one of our clients.

This account is brand new with only 2 Followers, yet the content received 10 hearts and 1 share. This means that the content and its quality is resonating with users despite having no followers. With engagement like this, follower growth will come with time.

A simple way to test if your game is low quality — and please do this only for testing purposes and remove the content once you have your answer — is to test with another game's content.

Find a game that is in your space that is seemingly producing content that gets a lot of engagement. Not as a reshare, but post a piece of their content on your page. If you a concerned about ethics, you are more than welcome to ask the developer about using their content for a test. If it gets a lot more engagement than your content, then that is a signal that the quality of your game or your content is not up to par. Remember to take the content down.

For us, if prospective clients fail this test, we do not take them unless they address their quality issue. It’s better to know this issue early on if your game is not meeting the standards because it will allow you to make critical decisions on how to improve the quality of your game.

Format Of The Content

Different social sites cater to different formats of content. Images vs video, mobile vs standard view, length of content, and whether the content is following other best practices. For example, a client with an empty YouTube account — so we start creating content. Notice which video types get more views?

For this client, posting short videos under 60 seconds in a mobile view (9:16) gets almost 5 times as many views as regular content. This is where taking a data-driven approach to content can tell you what you need to know. We tested the mobile vs standard view for multiple platforms they have, and you will see in the chart below standard does the best.

But when we just look at YouTube as the platform, the mobile is suddenly outperforming content that has the standard resolution, as seen below with these Youtube only results:

Make sure that the content you are posting resonates with the platform's best practices. If you are a Redditor, imagine going to Reddit and seeing content with a lot of hashtags. You’d probably be confused. You can read this article here on different ways to test your content, but ultimately you want to test:

• Content Type (Devlogs, gameplay, artwork, etc)
• Content Media Format (Mobile vs videos, length, resolution)
• Emotional Tone
• Time of Day when Post
• Call To Action

Inconsistent Posting

Then there is the problem with follower growth and lack of consistent posting. Meaning posting once a month will make it very difficult to grow an engaged follower count. We put together the minimums you should be posting based on your stage.

Remember, these are minimums; going above and beyond them is only helpful to your brand. Part of our testing to see if the consistency is an issue is to do a content sprint. This means that for a period of 7 to 14 days, post at least once or twice a day and see if there is change. Take a look at the chart below from a testing sprint with one client.

We posted once a day for a period of 8 days and notice how progressively the content views start to climb?

This kind of building is what we like to call a compounding effect: where your daily content marketing activities—be it a social media post, a blog update, or an SEO tweak—build upon each other. If you find a similar result where when you post more you progressively get more engagement, then posting frequency is your problem.

Platform Algorithms & Multiple Platforms

Finally, not all platforms will give you the equal amount of exposure and growth for your efforts. For example, right now X/Twitter has been having a major downsizing in its user base (32 million left in 2024) as people go to other platforms and the platform purges bots.

This can make it very difficult to grow new followers on X/Twitter, and you might see your followers fluctuate a lot. For example, these charts from our Social Scheduler shows one of our client’s BlueSky follower growth; notice how steady it is:

Then if you switch over to their X/Twitter account, their follower growth is extremely volatile, going up and down quickly every day and slowly shrinking.

This is why it’s extremely important to try multiple platforms to see which one is going to give you the most because sometimes it might indeed be the platform’s fault.

Test and Run Your Experiments

So to test what the issue might be on why you are posting and not gaining any traction:

• Make sure your account is past the probation period for that platform
• Make sure your account has not been shadow banned
• Create a weeks worth of content in various formats and types
• Post content at different times
• Test with another games content to compare results
• Measure all data and see if their are changes
• Monitor your bottom line KPI of Wishlists and Installs

And remember these two important things:

1. 1% to 10% weekly follower growth is good.
2. The most important numbers to grow is your wishlists and/or installs.

Social media can feel overwhelming at times, but it’s also full of opportunities to connect with players who will truly value your game. The key is to identify potential pitfalls—like shadow bans, targeting issues, or inconsistent posting—and run small, data-driven experiments to find what works best for you. With patience, persistence, and a willingness to adapt, you’ll see real growth and engagement for your game. Keep testing, stay motivated, and watch your efforts pay off.