Our email list is getting pretty healthy and we’re getting more twitter followers everyday, but will that translate into sales and backers? It’s hard to say until you actually require people to put their hands in their pockets. So, more is more, but where can we find these new people who will be interested?
I’ve played with Facebook ads before for a previous failed start up so I have some experience with it. My initial disgust with paying for something I should be getting for ‘free’ wore off before when I realised that even though I have several hundred friends on facebook not all of them are really interesting in my projects. They might think they’re cool, but not enough to actually want to pay for them.
Instead we can use the demographics built into facebook to reach out to our ‘perfect potential customers’. So, men, living in the developed world, 18-35, single and interested in VR and simulation games. Putting that into the facebook ad generator gives me about 2m people who might want to give me their email for the raffle. I supposed I could include women as well but if my google analytics figures are reasonably accurate the feelThree is a 97.7% male interest. The prices for 1000 impressions isn’t to outrageous, about £0.24-£1.30, or they let you just pay for ‘clicks’. One of the best things though is the ability to use different pictures and see which is the most effective, plus trying the same advert with some slight variations and seeing which is more effective.
All you need is cash! :p
One of the more important things I can do to promote the project right now though is to create a decent 2 minute video explaining how it works and why it’s so amazing, but that will have to wait until I reinstall my broken Windows 7 installation. Then I’ll have to finally figure out how to properly animate the omnichain since that’s what people will want to see rendered…
I also added some tweet and like buttons to each post, at the top and bottom, just making it a little easier for people to share any posts they like and hopefully spread the word a little easier. I also got rid of the ‘DISCUS’ comment system, since I added it I’ve only had a few comments since you have to sign up to write anything, it looks like people couldn’t be bothered. I reimplemented the old system and added a ‘math-captcha’ so you have to solve an easy math problem to post, that should be enough to ward off the bot-spam my site is now attracting….
I also changed the ‘about’ line on out twitter account to read ‘Oculus Rift’ rather than #oculusrift which has moved us up to position 21 (from about 150) when you search for ‘oculus rift’ in twitter. I’m not 100% sure how they organise the list but I think it’s a combination of ‘oculus rift’ in your name, how many followers you have and where ‘oculus rift’ appears in your desciption, since a few people are higher than us and have less followers… It now reads ‘Oculus Rift Motion Simulator! ‘ and will take Twitter about a week to rejiggle the names. I doubt it will give us a million extra followers but Oculus get quite a lot of followers everyday, about 100, so if they search for them and click follow on us too just below them it’s a simple way to pick up potential customers.
Still no word from the HAXLR8R organisers, although they moved the deadline to the end of the month. My email to our mailing list asking for support was moderately successful, 14 people tweeted their support to @haxlr8r, nothing amazing but it shows we’re trying. 🙂
