Following the silent 'launch' in mid-December 2022 - which was necessary to wire up some puzzles that rely upon live URLs – I actually found some time to try and promote wyfio towards the end of the month.
After having already set up the obligatory social media accounts somewhat begrudgingly (#TheMediumIsTheMessage), I started to make posts on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit without having built any sort of following or community just to see what happened.
Facebook must have had the best control of bots, as the analytics were by far the worst for essentially the same content. The post reach was 2 which, without having checked how Facebook aggregates these stats, may have been the combination of my very own desktop and phone. Reddit seemed better on the face of it with the 'posts to nobody' - although when r/wyfio went live and immediately showed 28 online I knew, again, that this was almost certainly 100% bots. And Twitter, with a relatively new analytics feature, was garnering the biggest numbers and seemed to show potential.
My somewhat naïve plan was to post to puzzle groups on Facebook and Reddit, randomly tweet things on Twitter and see whether, by some phenomenological miracle, - in a world awash with data, demands for people's attention, 2 billion+ websites, and 1.69 billion search results for 'puzzle' on Google - people would head to the site and test out their problem-solving skills.
Whilst I found a Facebook puzzle group with ~175k users, the actual engagement on these groups mirrored their content - terrible. So that plan got firmly put on the shelf.
Reddit, awash with niche groups, seemed far more promising and so I searched far and wide to scope out where I might be able to promote wyfio. What I hadn't reckoned with is that Reddit, is also awash with rules. Whilst trying to navigate the rules, I did fall-foul of some auto-moderator bots, but I also found some interesting subreddits and generated a tiny bit of engagement which is where, I think, most of the initial handful of users came from.
In the meantime, I was also trying to get something going on Twitter. Haplessly participating in follow back hashtags and scouring Twitter for anybody that seemed like they might be interested in our content. I quickly realised that Twitter is an insanely noisy place and finding quality content on Twitter, is probably like trying to find ambergris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
So whilst wyfio asks 'will you figure it out?' of the player, it simultaneously asks the same question of me.
While I reappraise my strategy and continue to work on content, I've taken the digital axe to all of the existing social media content barring 1 Reddit post. Presumably, much of this will remain cached and/or archived via other sources for sometime.
il y a lá cendre