Chaosium on Social Media 2017 - connecting with the tribe

By Michael O'Brien

Since August 2015 the new team at Chaosium has striven to reconnect with our tribe all around the world—rebuilding and restoring communications with our existing customers and fans, and reaching out to new ones. With the release of new products for Call of Cthulhu, RuneQuest, and HeroQuest Glorantha, and returning to Chaosium's roots with our first board game for two decades, it's been great to see our audience continue to grow. Our fans are our lifeblood after all, and this is reflected in Chaosium's social media presence. In this time:

• our Facebook following has grown 1486% to 29,266 followers
• our Twitter following has grown 670% to 8767
• our Google+ following has grown 624% to 3622 followers

In 2017, we also revived the Chaosium Instagram page (after I noticed my 13 y.o. son's Instagram page had more followers, and my son mainly posts photos of his soccer boots). Chaosium Instagram now has 1170 followers (hey, almost three times more than Leo's football boots!). And we've started a Chaosium Youtube channel, and most recently a Chaosium Pinterest page. Plus, for the business-orientated, we also now have 182 followers on LinkedIn (which was, of course, started by a Chaosium alumni).

Numbers also continue to grow at the Cult of Chaos organised play program - up 900% to over 2000 - and at our forums at BRP Central. Our new product release model, which sees the PDF come out first and the print version several months later, means we can run "tribal edit" threads on our forums, enabling fans to pick out any last typos or corrections before we go to press. This makes our finished works all the better and we highly value this contribution.

One of our aims for 2018 - aside from building on these numbers further! - is ramping up our engagement with media: what we do ourselves, and we can what we do to help, facilitate, support or publicise others who play or enthuse about Chaosium games—podcasters, Youtube channels, blogs, Twitch, gaming media and so on. My colleague Lillian, who joined our team as director of marketing and media in June 2017, is taking the lead here, so if you have something cool we should know about, do get in touch!