It May Not Be Much, But.
I tapped into some geek rage the other day, when it was announced that a character from a now-defunct MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online game) called City of Heroes was to be included in an upcoming game.
The reason for the rage is that City of Heroes had been a modestly successful game within it's niche, which was superheroes. The fan base wasn't as large as other online games, but the community was incredibly loyal (almost giving new meaning to the word) and filled with amazing people. It came as a massive surprise to the players when the company that owned it decided to shut it down with very little warning.
The fans of the game pulled together and fought to save it, launching petitions and even making a bid to buy the intellectual property in order to keep it going in some way. There are now several "spiritual successors" in development, most of them being produced by former players and fans.
When it was announced that one of the signature characters from City of Heroes would be used in a new game, people were... not pleased. It is difficult to explain to anyone who is not part of the fan base, but in essence, the fans were offended that they had done so much to try to save the game they loved and now a piece of it is being resurrected in a game that is a totally different style from the one they love and which most fans are unlikely to play. One analogy is to imagine someone taking your favourite toy and after you beg for it's return, it is given to another child.
At any rate, I used to play City of Heroes and I decided to post something about this on my site. I then linked to it on Facebook in the hopes that it would get me a few visitors, and it did.
Now, it isn't a large number by any means, but I had 64 visits after posting it, which for me is pretty amazing. I tend to average 1-2 visits per day, usually fellow WA'ers, so this was like 5 weeks worth of visitors in a day.
I guess this means that I will have to be putting more focus on social media, because it is by far the best result I have had to date. If I could get up in that range regularly, I'd be pretty happy. This is also probably a good example of knowing one's niche and audience.
It's kind of sad seeing the numbers drop again, but I figure if I can do it once...
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Yes, it worked pretty well. I may try boosting a post or two on Facebook. Hopefully it will get some results.
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I actually have a bit of a question now.... looking at my Facebook page, it says "11 people reached, " but Google Analytics said it was viewed 64 times on one day alone, so maybe most of those views were from Google+
Where/how do we find how visitors reach our site? I've heard that you can do that in Analytics, but I've never heard how.
Analytics >> Acquisition >> All Traffic >> Source/Medium
Great! That's awesome, thanks!
So, most of it it from Facebook, as I expected, but some is listed as (direct)/(none) which I guess is from keyword searches?
I don't know the others. There's e-commerce-seo and amazon-seo-service, which I initially took to be some sort of automated thing, but they do say "referral". Then there is also share-buttons-for-free.com.
I don't really know what any of those are, except for the Facebook ones, but that's ok. It's showing me that Facebook is working for me so far.