How to Write a Call to Action for Your Game’s Social Media Post
Effectively encourage viewers to do what matters most to your game's marketing strategy.
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Imagine this: you’re deep in the development process of your video game and feeling really good about how it’s turning out, so you’ve made the brave decision to show it off to the world on social media. You draft some content ideas and share a handful of them with various websites. The social media gods smile upon you; one of the posts about your game goes viral! People are talking about it, complimenting it, and sharing it on other social media sites you don’t even use! What a success! Right?
Not necessarily. After a moment of hyperventilating, you notice a problem. Despite how popular the content has become, people aren’t subscribing to your social media accounts, adding the game to their Steam wishlist, or doing whatever you need them to do at this stage in development because you did not include a call to action.
What Is a Call to Action?
A call to action (CTA) is text in a piece of marketing designed to encourage specific and immediate action. Without an effective CTA, even your viewers who are interested in your offer may not think or know how to support you and may move on to the next thing, forgetting your post immediately.
Some common examples of CTAs in social media include:
Subscribe now for more
Share with someone you’d play with
Wishlist on Steam today
Three Steps to Writing an Effective CTA for Social Media
1) Select Your Goal
Ultimately, your goal is to convert viewers into buyers, but focusing solely on encouraging sales can neglect many other important types of CTAs and, depending on the social media platform, may not be straightforward. For example, TikTok currently requires non-business users to obtain a certain number of followers before allowing those users to include a link on their profile, making it more difficult for users to find where they can purchase your game.
In that case, encouraging users to subscribe might be more beneficial, and given how unclear the future of TikTok is (and how valuable subscribers even are) that link might be better used to direct viewers to subscribe to your more reliable newsletter and email list, or to a list of links to other ways to follow you. Want viewers to both like and subscribe to your account? That’s fine too!
2) Be Specific, Urgent, and Brief
The most effective CTAs include an action verb to specify what to do (e.g.; subscribe, click, buy) and a unit of time to create a sense of urgency (e.g.; now, immediately, today). Sometimes, CTAs include an additional ticking clock element of risk or incentive to increase the sense of urgency (e.g.; while supplies last, the first 50 orders get a discount). Furthermore, given that space and viewer attention are limited, the most effective CTAs squeeze everything into an incredibly short line of text.
For example, perhaps the most well-known example of a CTA (to those of us above a certain age) is “call now.” It was once used in seemingly every television commercial and radio and magazine ad for decades—and for a good reason. “Call now” clearly and briefly urges the audience to perform a specific action immediately in only two words. While it’s not always possible to be as efficient in only two words, that shouldn’t stop you from trying!
3) Put It in the Right Place
Where you put your CTA is just as important as what you put in it. It will also vary wildly based on the platform, type of social media post, and the restrictions you face. In general, make sure the CTA is the first thing people see or hear at the precise moment you expect to have their full attention.
For example, if you’re writing a long update about the progress of your in-development game on Steam, you might want to put the CTA near the top where it’s most visible, ideally as a clickable button to make it stand out. However, if you’re writing trailer narration that introduces the game to new players, you’ll want to hook them with the details of the game before giving them the CTA at the end of the video—and put another CTA at the top of the YouTube description, of course. You might even want to put the CTA in the middle of your content if you think viewers are less likely to go all the way through to the end. I
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