Difficulties Finding Word Game Players on Twitter
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I’m reading the book The Tao of Twitter by Mark Schaefer, which is a good book if you’re new to Twitter. The tao has three elements: targeted followers, meaningful content, and authentic helpfulness. People new to Twitter should start by looking for targeted followers.
Since my goal right now is to have people try LetterMiner, word game players are the targeted followers I need. I need to find word game players, engage in conversations with them, and retweet any interesting tweets. This strategy sounds logical in theory but is proving more difficult to put into practice.
I started with a search for the hashtag #wordgame. I was flooded with tweets similar to the following:
I'm earning #mPLUSRewards in #WordSearch with a twist. #WordGame #wordfind #indiedev #indiegame.
When I clicked on these people’s profile links, their tweets consisted exclusively of “I’m earning #mPlusRewards” tweets for various mobile apps and games. I’m sure the mPlusRewards people would love me to retweet these tweets, but I’m not going to do that. How do you engage in a conversation with someone who only has borderline spam tweets?
After filtering the spam tweets, I’m left with people promoting their own word games and tweets from people engaged in Twitter arguments. The people in the arguments accuse the other side of playing word games. These are not people that are going to download and play LetterMiner.
A search of the hashtag #wordgames produced similar results. Searching for #wordgamefan, #wordgameplayer, #wordgamelove, and #wordgamelover produced very few tweets.
I moved from a hashtag search to a profile search for phrases like word game fan, word game player, and word game lover. I found some profiles that indicated the people liked playing word games and made a list to see what these people tweet about. They tweet about everything but word games: dog pictures, work, random things happening in their day. I’ve looked for a week or two for something worth retweeting, but have found nothing.
I’m having some success attracting indie game developers as followers. How do I attract word game players?