Growing Lemmings’ Social Presence

I started by looking at what other games were posting and what actually got engagement, then worked out what we could realistically cover week to week. I used the game’s own primary and secondary colours so the posts looked like Lemmings without needing a logo on them. Over time the content settled into recurring categories: season and version updates, gameplay and traps, throwbacks, hashtag holidays, support.

I wrote it into a set of content guidelines and kept adding to them as new categories stuck. I was the only person doing social, so it all lived in my head. If someone else was going to run these channels one day, they’d need it written down.

The guidelines covered captions too, not just visuals. I put together a checklist for calls to action and used it on every post.

A few of my favourites:

Hashtags were how people found us. In Sprout Social, I compared the tags I used most against the ones that actually drove engagement. They weren’t the same list, so I shifted towards the second.

I also looked at who was following us: women 25 to 34 on Facebook, men the same age on Twitter.

For the first several months, growth was slow and manual. I spent time every day engaging through hashtags like #lemmings, #illustration, #mobilegames, #animals and #pets. It worked, but it took hours I could have spent on the content itself. We got a couple of lifts along the way: a Sony feature in December 2018, an App Store one in January 2019.

The real shift came in August 2019, when we added Facebook, Instagram and Twitter buttons inside the game and paid players coins to tap them. We already had the audience, they just weren’t following us anywhere. All three platforms jumped that month.

By the time I handed the channels over in December 2020, they were at over 50,000 followers across Facebook and Instagram and 20,000 on Twitter, up from nothing two and a half years before.

The follower count is the smaller result. Running three channels alone, next to my other work, convinced Exient to hire a marketing team. They took the channels and the guidelines. It also opened the door to Design, which is where I had wanted to be.