YouTube vs TikTok - Raising Your Games Profile

How to get exposure for your Indie Game

I've got my demo ready, and now I'd like to get lots of people to play it. So how do you get yourself noticed? Well that is a tricky question ...

"I know, I'll make some short videos of some cool gameplay and then post them on the internet. That going to surely raise my games profile right?"

So I've been making short videos and posting them to both TikTok and YouTube (as shorts). Here I will share some of my results. 

My Video Content

Here's my current TikTok content just before I publish this devlog.

And here's my content on YouTube:

Current Results

As you can see from the above screenshots (when my video picks up any traction at all) I'm getting around 250 views on TikTok and 500 on YouTube  - which I'm thinking it not a lot. Certainly nothings gone viral. 

Although slightly disappointing, I think I am learning from the process. Although I am also confused at certain results too. For example I am posting virtually identical videos to both websites, but sometimes a video will struggle to get any views on one of the websites but not on the other. Diving down into the available analytics (available on both TT and YT) we see that it generally reveals that after the video got shown on users feeds it just didn't get a great CTR (Click Through Rate - basically how many people decided to watch the video after seeing the thumbnail). 

My "Viral" Video

I made this video last week - It's a take on a semi viral video called "Anxiety Dance" on TikTok. I made my own version by using my games main character as the protagonist (and the rest of the cast too :) )

I think YouTube provides the best analytics options. Easily allowing you to see how many times your video has been shown on feeds, and then diving into how many people then watched it. Below we see that the video managed to get 555 views when shown 1300 times in peoples feeds - giving a CTR of 43.5%. Not too shabby but not enough for youtube to want to show it to more people and we see that the Shown In Feed metric flatlines at this point. 

Sadly this is generally where the views end. When YT stops showing a video in feeds then the video can now only be found organically. Organically generally means that the video will only be found by someone searching for such videos on youtube. Here our low CTR is also likely to kill our search ranking. Other more popular videos will be served ahead of ours.

From my research (watching other peoples youtube videos on the subject) I've heard that you want a CTR of above 80% if you want to get a really succesful video. 

My Top Tips

So basically Click Through Rate is king and improving this will directly increase your video viewing numbers. So how do we improve this? Well I haven't got to 80% yet but I have learned a few top tips that have been increasing my CTR. I will list them below as bullet points.

• Keep your short "short" - make your content snappy, get the viewer hooked straight away and don't stray past 11 seconds. If your video is too long, people may swipe away early and not register an actual view. If you can cut it down do so.
• Don't "advertise" too heavily. Make the content interesting\funny to watch, but not necessarily a direct advert for your game. At this stage you are trying to get an audience and teaching the youtube and tiktok that your content matters. Look at what is trending and try and think of a way your game character\environment\gameplay could fit in to make a good short.
• If at first you don't succeed try again. If a video bombs that you think has some potential, don't be afraid to re-use it. Delete your old post and re-mix, shorten get a snappier start.
• When posting your video make sure it looks good on the platform - TikTok especially layers alot of text and icon around when playing videos so make sure your short doesn't clash and look bad.
• Don't forget the hash tags - prepare the description and hashtags you will use in advance and don't rush the posting part. Review each page properly to ensure you've not forgotten anything.

These top tips are really a good reminder for myself more than anything. If you are trying to promote your game then please let me know how it goes and any tips you have.

Thanks for reading.