Twitter is a pretty popular social media website where you can promote your game or your company. There are a ton of indie developers with personal accounts or accounts with their company and brand lurking around on twitter, posting about their games and their lives. This is yet another social media platform, albeit an important one, that can help you further both your game and presence in the indie developer community.
Hashtags
Collecting #indieselfie shots at #insomnia60 #i60 here with best at insomnia @AniodeGames #NaturesZombieApocolypse #indiegame pic.twitter.com/EvUEczniSK
— Asobi.tech 😸😸🏰 (@asobitech) April 17, 2017
Twitter, like many sites, uses hashtags to group posts together. Hashtags can be searched for, and become a sort of community that revolves around the different topics. There are a lot of different hashtags for indie developers to take advantage of to help promote their game. Twitter also has a large number of ‘bot’ accounts — accounts that exist for the sole purpose of retweeting specific hashtags out to people who are following the bot, and are interested in that hashtag and its topics. This is an automatic process and can come in handy when it comes to getting your game noticed.
Here are some different hashtags you can use when promoting your game:
- #IndieDev or #GameDev
- Both of these tags are usable interchangeably, or often together, to tag posts that include game links, screenshots, gifs, or even just information about work in progress games. Sometimes this hashtag will be used in posts with tutorials, or with instructions on how to use different engines or aspects of game development.
- #IndieGame
- Similar to the previous hashtags, this is used just to promote indie games.
- #IndieSelfie
- This is a hashtag that is used when indie developers get together at a place. If you are at a convention or some sort of meetup and you find some indie developers, you might want to take a picture of yourself with them, and use this hashtag.
Fun or time sensitive hashtags
Greetings from Stella. #gamedevpet pic.twitter.com/ETQoj1BfCl
— eeve (@somepx) March 27, 2018
Some hashtags are indie developer related, but are more fun orientated or for personal life events. These are still worth tweeting out too, as there are small groups of people who enjoy indie games or are game devs themselves that look at it. There are even hashtags that are used on specific days and in fact, even specific hours to promote an active community — a community that reads and replies to these tweets during the time period.
- #ScreenShotSaturday
- This hashtag is used on Saturday to show off a picture (or gif) of your game. You can also share a picture of your code, or, literally anything game related. There are a lot of people who use #screenshotsaturday and who retweet beautiful looking things tagged with it
- #IndieDevHour
- Indie Dev Hour happens every Wednesday at 7PM GMT. This is a full hour where developers share what they are working on, ask about each other’s work, receive feedback, and generally communicate. This hashtag has formed a sizeable community around it! If you participate in a few Indie Dev Hour’s over the course of a month you will begin to understand and become a part of this community of developers. They are very kind and excellent for providing feedback.
- #gamedevpet
- This is one of the more purely for fun hashtags used. It is to show off the pets that developers have. It is a newer hashtag with a smaller community, but it is a fun place to show off pictures of your pet and to promote your twitter.
Sometimes, you will have the opportunity to use other hashtags that have formed a community around it. If you are going to an event or convention, chances are the event has a hashtag associated with it. You can tweet about being at an event with this hashtag to help gain more followers your way. People who are going to the aforementioned event usually want to connect with other people, and check out what fun and exciting things are occurring during the event. Even people who are not there, but are interested in whatever event you are attending, would be interested in checking out other people (and pictures) of the event. Similarly, this also happens with game jams. Most game jams also have their own hashtag, so tagging posts related with that jam’s hashtag can help you be more active in that jam and help get more eyes on your jam entry.
Remember, make your post look good
Update #3: Clouds added! It's actually only one layer (Fake 3D) thx to shader! #LD38 #Unity3D #gamedev #indiegame #ScreenshotSaturday #LDJAM pic.twitter.com/uDx0HdWjLJ
— Chinafreak (@chinafreak) April 22, 2017
When you use hashtags, consider posting a gif that is related. Gifs are a really flashy way to make your tweets stand out. Stylish or interesting looking gifs will catch people’s scrolling eyes and hopefully get you a retweet. Pictures are also a good way to go — however… they aren’t quite as good as gifs as they are motionless and don’t grab the viewer’s attention as much
You should definitely check out the hashtags that people you are following use, and see if any of them relate to you. Don’t forget to be consistent with posting on twitter — set alarms for hashtags that occur on specific days and take the time to see what other people are tweeting about. It does take some time to build a presence, but once you get started and get some followers, it becomes easier from there.
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