Learning Twitter
Table of Contents
I’ve reached a point in LetterMiner’s development where I need to let people know the game exists. To help with this, I set up two Twitter accounts, @CheckSimGames and @LetterMinerGame. Figuring out how to use Twitter to spread the word on LetterMiner is going to be a learning experience. I’m documenting the start of my learning experience here.
Nobody is downloading LetterMiner. Here’s the strange part. Years ago I wrote a single-level prototype of LetterMiner and put it up for download on a software development site I have. I didn’t do anything to promote it, but it would get 5-7 downloads a month. I changed the link to the LetterMiner game on that site to point to the Check Sim Games site, figuring I would get the 5-7 downloads a month here. But nothing changed. I was getting no downloads here, but still getting 5-7 downloads a month of the old version on my other site. What was going on?
It turns out a Google search for LetterMiner has the old version as the first search result. I had to remove everything from the old LetterMiner page and add a button to take people to the new LetterMiner page on this site.
Having a website and writing a blog was not enough to let people know LetterMiner exists. I was going to have to enter the world of social media. What social media network should I use?
I eliminated LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest quickly. LinkedIn is geared towards people trying to get ahead in their careers. Instagram and Pinterest focus on pictures, and pictures of word games aren’t all that interesting.
I considered Facebook, but I saw some social media marketing videos that said Facebook is set up to get you to buy ads. I don’t have money for ads so I’m using Twitter.
Getting a profile picture and header picture to fit right is difficult. If you have text in the image that you want people to read, it’s hard to avoid cutting off part of the text. I gave up trying to get a header picture to look right. I figure a plain header is better than one with the text cut off.
Finding interesting conversations and tweets is difficult. From the research I’ve done on using Twitter, you should spend more time listening than promoting. You should retweet more often than you tweet about yourself and what you’re promoting. You should find Twitter conversations people are having and take part.
These shoulds are good in theory but hard to apply in practice. Finding tweets worth retweeting is an arduous task. Most tweets I find are from people selling something and people tweeting about random stuff that occurs in their daily lives. And people tweet a ton so there’s a lot of bad tweets to sift through. Finding good conversations is hard because all you can initially read is the initial tweet. Take the challenge of finding a good tweet and add the challenge of finding a good conversation around that tweet. I have a lot of work ahead of me.