Promoting your game using Twitter

Twitter is the next platform in this series on using organic growth to promote your game.

Twitter launched in 2006, It’s best described as a micro-blogging site and a social network. It’s well known for it’s 140 character limit on tweets, as Twitter posts are called.

Twitter has around 192 million daily users, of which roughly two thirds are men. Twitter also appeals more to the older user, with 63% of users being aged 35 to 65.

As with Facebook, Twitter does operate a paid for ads service. But I have never used it and won’t be covering it in a later blog, or this one either.

Strategy

I cannot stress how important it is to have a strategy with social media posting. You need to have clearly defined and measurable goals. As well as a plan as to get to achieve the results you want. Failure to do so will drastically reduce your chances of success.

I know I said all of this in the last post as well, but I think it is really important, and may very well write an entire blog post dedicated to the subject at a later date.

Twitter is quite fast paced compared to Facebook, your average tweet has a lifespan of about 20 minutes and the number of views drops off considerably after this point. Expect most of your interactions during this period.

Using one or two relevant hashtags on your tweets is another good way to draw attention to your posts and increase interactions. Using too many hashtags will have a negative effect on your post.

I’ve found that making short videos or gif’s of your game works quite well on Twitter. But this isn’t a hard and fast rule, always experiment with content types to find the one that works best.

Things to not do..

The only real thing not to do on twitter outside of the obvious things like not spamming posts and over-using hashtags is to not fall into the “GameDev” trap. Game developers, especially indie developers have a large presence on Twitter. There are lots of hashtags like #indiedev and #screenshotsaturday which draw large audiences. It’s probably an incredibly small chance that these are your target audience for your game so although it’s easy (and welcoming tbh) to get drawn in, any effort spent here would be better used elsewhere.

Outro

This post is slightly shorter than the last because I felt like I was just repeating myself in places, but if you hadn’t already, please read the previous post about Organic Facebook Growth as a lot of the information in that post can be applied to Twitter also.

I hope you enjoyed the post and now feel more knowledgeable about Twitter. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them on the Dev with Dave forum.