Free publicity your game (twitter experiment)

[Game Producer]

This is seriously "in construction", but in case anyone who (1) uses twitter and (2) wants publicity for their game, try making a tweet and include link to http://gamestweet.net/ in it.

I've set up a site that pulls all tweets with link to that site.

The basic idea is to test and see if Twitter could be used to promote games. Basically it's pretty simple way to get Tweets visible, and while people are tweeting to gamestweet... then other people will find the site... and these who find the site will see people's tweets... and check those tweets and buy your games and everybody is happy.

It's an experiment thing, but nothing to lose here... I just gotta find out if Twitter can actually be used in some way to help get sales.

So try it out.

[mrkwang]

Posted 1, but not appears yet?

[Game Producer]

It updates every 10 minutes (at the moment) and caches result, so you gotta wait a bit... now it's there I see, Mr. I'd-rather-use-tag

[Indiepath]

Yes - tags please

[PoV]

I realize the lack of url makes it impossible to know about the site, but the requirement makes any posts that much more spammy.

To contrast, if it was a general aggregator that followed certain tags and provided an RSS feed, then you could see it integrated in to various sites a "breaking news" tweet feed. I realize that makes any sort of biz dev related to it impossible, but the twitter concept isn't really about money right now.

[Game Producer]

tags won't most likely come (at least nowhere near future), since the idea is to promote both the games and the site in twitter. We'll see how it goes.

(you can use #games tag or whatnot in case you want to make it appear in normal twitter searches, I have no problem with that. case closed )

but the requirement makes any posts that much more spammy.

how come? (not suggesting you'd be wrong, just curious how having link instead of tag is more spammy)

(I realize that this can be spammed, and I have some thoughts about handling it (ranging from banning users, to letting people to rank stuff, to allow registered votes only and so on), but at this point I wanna test the concept and see if it could bring traffic to developers.

[PoV]

Originally Posted by Game Producer

how come? (not suggesting you'd be wrong, just curious how having link instead of tag is more spammy)

The main reason is that the #tags have already become the twitter classification standard. Tweets you want to relate to a subject get a list of #subject tags. "New iPhone game release "Fun Game" - http://www.fungame.com - #iphone #iphonegame", that sort of thing. The system works and has been adopted by the twitter community at large. We even used a #LD14 tag last ludumdare to capture our tweets during the last compo. With tags, there's no confusion of intent.

URLs in twitter posts are a request for action. I give you a brief description or tease, and a link. "This is a very cool physics demo running on the PS3 - http://blah.blah/blah1, http://blah.blah/blah2". If your tweet-prefix-pitch interests me, I will click all URLs you post. No disrespect, but I would be annoyed if a set of links included an aggregator and not something topical.

Twitter is too short form a medium for embedding advertising. Anything advertised IS the subject of the tweet.

[Game Producer]

I see what you mean, thanks.