As you probably (hopefully) know by now, I released my first game Polymer about two weeks ago. In it’s first day, it broke into the top 200 paid apps, the top 100 games, the top 25 strategy games, and the top 25 puzzle games (all referring to the U.S. app store). It has also gotten a bunch of really good press.

Originally, this was going to be a post about general marketing techniques, but I found myself getting deeper and deeper into Twitter tips. So I decided to focus just on that. In a future post, I’ll explain what I did for my press release, pitch, and media relations. By the way, I need to shout out a huge thanks to my wife Dana, who has worked in the PR industry and has given me invaluable help and tips throughout this whole process. A lot of these ideas originally came from her expertise.

I honestly believe that Twitter was one of the biggest parts of Polymer’s launch day success. I want to clarify a few things because there seem to be a lot of people who just don’t understand how to use it effectively. Or why they should use it at all. In this post, I’m going to talk about a bunch of random tips for using Twitter. All of these tips are really applicable to Twitter in general, so even if you’re not promoting a game, it’ll still hopefully be useful. I can in no way guarantee that anything I suggest here will work for you. I am just going to describe the way I use Twitter and hopefully you can use find some benefit in that! Without further ado:

Develop a Good Reputation

This is by far the most important aspect of your role on Twitter. Far too often, I see people make a new Twitter account a week before their game’s release, suddenly trying to earn followers and respect. IT’S NOT GONNA WORK. Developing a solid following on Twitter can take years! “No, that’s not true,” you say. “All I have to do is follow 50,000 people and some of them are bound to follow me back! #teamFollowBack LOL” DON’T DO THIS. It makes you look desperate, and it makes people think (rightfully so) that you really don’t care about who you are following. You are broadcasting the fact that all you want is followers of your own. You are clearly completely uninterested in the community.

Another thing I see people do all the time is spam other people who have influence on Twitter. I’ll look at their timeline and see something like this:

“@notch Hey man check out my game! www.stupidUglyGame.com”

“@helvetica Hey man check out my game! www.stupidUglyGame.com”

“@MattRix Hey man check out my game! www.stupidUglyGame.com”

“@NissaCam Hey there, check out my game! www.stupidUglyGame.com”

“@Imangi Hey guys check out my game! www.stupidUglyGame.com”

DON’T DO THIS. It also makes you look desperate and like you don’t care at all about anyone but yourself.

It’s actually pretty easy to develop a good reputation on Twitter. Think of Twitter as a metaphorical room. A massive room with millions of people. If you’re in a room full of people, would you walk up to everyone you saw and say “Hi look at my work” over and over? Well maybe you would but people wouldn’t like you very much. All you have to do is hang out at the virtual party, be yourself, and get to know people. That’s it. Even if you feel like you have nothing interesting to say, it doesn’t matter. Just get to know people, be a nice person, and join in on conversations and you will gain a good reputation eventually. I’m much more likely to follow someone with 25 followers who joins in conversation, is helpful, friendly, and funny than someone who has 1,000’s of followers who never converses with anyone (or is a dick).

Getting Advice

Twitter is incredibly amazing for iterative design. For example, frequently in Polymer’s development, I’d be working on developing a new menu or game mode, I’d tweet a screenshot, and immediately get a ton of good feedback about it. After about 20 minutes of back and forth, I’d generally end up with something way better than where I started.

However, you need to be careful too. While advice on Twitter can be extremely helpful, it can also confuse the hell out of you. I find myself being easily swayed by opinions, so whoever responds to my inquiries first generally convinces me that their opinion on my design is correct. A few times I did this and later realized I made a snap judgement without really thinking. Try to take a step back sometimes, take it all in, and think about how all the opinions add up, then finally decide if it fits with your overall vision.

Followers/Following

I mentioned above that you shouldn’t randomly follow 50,000 people. What you should do is follow people you are interested in and/or people who participate in good conversation. Don’t follow every single person in the world because you want them to follow you back. Also keep in mind that when you’re following 1,000’s and 1,000’s of people, it’s very very hard to stay up to date on what they’re all doing (unless of course you use lists, but then what’s the point of following the people who aren’t on those lists?). Plus, it’s all about quality, not quantity. In my opinion, it’s much better to have 100 dedicated followers than 10,000 #teamFollowBack followers.

Getting Followed Back

First of all, don’t be offended if someone doesn’t follow you back. It’s usually not personal. Be patient and if you’re involved enough, eventually people might reciprocate.

And on that note, don’t directly ask for follows. It’s tacky. If you ask someone for a follow, it sort of diminishes the value of it, and it potentially annoys the person you’re trying to impress. There are many people who I have really wanted to follow me, but have never asked. It’s always an amazing bonus when after a random conversation, I get a follow from said person. Of course, share your Twitter handle in as many situations as possible, especially when sharing content, but directly tweeting people like “@monkeyman Hey Monkey Man, can you follow me please?” is just tacky. (I don’t know if @monkeyman is a real person, just made it up for the example. Feel free to follow him if so).

Help Others Out

Make sure you return the favor that people are doing for you by retweeting and spreading the word about their games! Don’t spam your feed by retweeting everything, but make sure you take the time to give your followers a look and spread the word about people and games that look interesting, especially if they’re just getting started.

Be Active and Responsive

Unless you are already pretty well known through other means, you probably won’t get many people interested in your tweets if you’re not active. I try to tweet at least a couple times a day (even though it usually ends up being more like a couple thousand a day). If you don’t say anything for weeks at a time, people probably won’t follow you.

Even more important than being active is being responsive. There’s not much that annoys me more than someone who doesn’t respond to twitter mentions. Obviously, I’m not talking about people who have thousands and thousands of real followers (@C418 and @Notch, for example). There’s no way they could respond to everyone. I’m also not talking about responding to every tweet. You don’t necessarily have to say “Thank you” every time someone compliments your work (although it can’t hurt!). You also don’t have to respond right away, or every time. What annoys me is when people just simply don’t respond over long periods of time, ever. There have been people I’ve asked multiple questions (not in a spammy way, just in a conversational way) over the span of a few months and didn’t get a response to a single one, even though they are otherwise relatively active.

Press

Get to know press on Twitter. And don’t do this five days before your game’s release. Get to know them NOW. Talk to them like real people (most of them are real people, after all). Again, imagine you’re back in that room with a huge group of people, some of whom write for important gaming sites. Will they take you seriously if you’ve never met them before and you just walk up to them and open with, “Hey can you write about my game? It’s fun, addictive, and totally unique!” No, they probably won’t. On the other hand, if you’ve already been talking to them about random stuff for awhile, eventually your game may come up in conversation. Or even better, if your game is in your bio, they may search it out on their own. Which brings me to my next point.

Secrecy

Don’t be so damn secretive. I know a lot of people will probably disagree with me but you’d be amazed at how much interest you can garner by sharing your game design process through Twitter. I’m not saying that you should divulge all the important details. Of course not. But post random things throughout your process. Talk about difficulties. Ask for help. Post screenshots and videos. It’s clearly working for Mojang with Minecraft, Wolfire with Overgrowth, and so many others. People are interested in this stuff, and it gives users a feeling of involvement in the game design process. Plus, it can help your fellow developers.

Another thing, mention your game in your damn bio! It’s amazing how many times I’ve looked at someone’s bio, interested in seeing what games they have made, and all it says is something like “iOS game developer”. Obviously, if you have a pretty established following, this doesn’t matter much. But if you’re just starting out, it should be very clear what your game is and how people can find it. People have short attention spans, so if they’re actively looking for your game, it should be as easy as possible to find it.

Plan out major announcements

Throughout Polymer’s development, I was used to tweeting pretty much anything whenever I felt like it, which I think is really great for garnering interest. However, when you’re dealing with major announcements, they should be planned out a bit more.

Try to tweet announcements at times when the most people are going to see it. I tend to push important tweets out late morning/early afternoon. I feel like that’s the time when I get the most retweets and responses.

Format the tweet in an interesting way. Here are a couple things that bug me about major announcement tweets:

• Try not to include “Please RT”. Instead, tweet before the announcement tweet (or after I guess) saying “I’d appreciate a RT on the next tweet.” This shows that you’d appreciate it, but it doesn’t sound as desperate, and it doesn’t clutter the important tweet with unimportant text.

• Don’t include a bunch of hashtags. Maybe I’m in the minority, but I find most hashtags to be an eyesore. I’d much rather see “Here’s a trailer for my new game Super Fat Man [LINK]” than “Here’s a trailer for my new game Super Fat Man [LINK] #indieGaming #gamedev #YOLO” or whatever. To me, it’s just clutter. Focus your message and keep it at that.

• Get to the heart of your message in as few words as possible, and be specific. I’m much less interested in a tweet like “My first game releases today. I’d love it if you checked it out! [LINK]” than a tweet like “Super Fat Man is now live on the app store. Swipe to eat burgers and tap to bake cakes! [LINK]” Keep in mind that a big benefit of getting retweeted is that people who don’t know you yet can find out about you! Try capture their attention.

Don’t be too trigger happy

It’s extremely easy to be overly trigger happy on Twitter. A week ago, I decided I wanted to end the sale and raise Polymer’s price to $1.99. So in a matter of minutes I just decided that it’s time and tweeted “Polymer’s sale ends tomorrow! Get it now before the price rises.” Furthermore, I updated the app store description and the Facebook page to say the same thing! Immediately, I got a ton of feedback from people who thought it was too early and that it would really harm my rankings. Plus, so many people told me how important it was to get as many users as possible this early on. Shit. The problem is, once a major announcement like that is out, it seems weird and quite unprofessional to take it back. But since most people said it was a bad idea to end the sale this early, I retracted. It ended up being okay, but it obviously would have been better if I had thought about it a little more, and maybe asked for advice before deciding.

Focus on launch day

This is not really just a Twitter tip. This is true in pretty much all aspects of a game’s launch. Build buzz and focus everything on the launch day. This is especially important in a low-attention-span world like the app store. If you tweet a ton of interesting stuff a week before your game’s out, I might have already moved on to a different game by the time it’s actually released. So try to save your most interesting stuff for launch day. For Polymer, I focused on April 26th so that on the day, multiple reviews came out, the official trailer was released, and Polymer’s website was announced. Try to get as many impulse buys as possible on launch day!

Follow Me

The true key to success on Twitter is to follow me: @wtrebella.

Okay maybe that’s not true, but I promise I’ll respond to you, and if you have any questions about anything, I’d be glad to answer.