Thanks for this advice!
We have done exactly that with our project Till Dawn, we posted on the forum and also posted the releases on our twitter account. There were lots of visitors all day, but as we decided to have a minimum price of $1.00 the visits decreased totally. That's because we are no longer listed in the list (https://itch.io/games/free/input-htc-vive) even if we have a demo (which is always one version behind). We were very high in that list and it's very sad that we are no longer in there.
Furthermore there should be something to post to the whole itch.io community through the forum. As we understood you should only post once there for a new start and the rest should be done on the devlog.